Twelve Years a Slave: A True Story - Solomon Northup

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Thanks in large part to his privileged New York upbringing, he felt secure enough in his status as a free man to make the brief trip without even telling his wife, Anne, where he was going. He had not counted on the duplicitousness of his money-grabbing employers, who drugged him, stole his papers and sold him to a slave-catcher.

      As late as 1850 new laws were being passed that made escape from slave states to free states almost impossible. If a black man in a free state was discovered to be a fugitive slave – or, as in the case of Solomon Northup, was simply suspected of being a fugitive slave – any person preventing his return to servitude was liable for a hefty fine. Slaves had no right to trial by jury and were not allowed to testify against whites. Northup came up against this unjust system himself when, even after the great success and widespread publicity of his tell-all memoir, he tried to sue those responsible for selling him into slavery and saw them all acquitted.

      Literary Sensations

      12 Years a Slave, published in 1853 – the year of Solomon Northup’s rescue – was not the first exposé written by a former slave. In 1825 fugitive slave William Grimes had published his story in order to raise the money to buy his way out of servitude, while perhaps the most famous slave memoir of them all, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, had appeared in 1845. But the timing of Northup’s revelations meant that his book became a crucial document for abolitionists in the last decade of American slavery.

      One year earlier, in 1852, a white abolitionist author named Harriet Beecher Stowe had published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that exposed the harsh truth of life as a slave in the Southern states. It became an instant bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and prompted further debate about slavery – so much so that it is anecdotally credited with instigating the Civil War of 1861–5. Northup’s first-hand account corroborated much of what Beecher Stowe had written in her novel, and was reviewed and written about in major newspapers including the New York Times. Over the next few years, as political divisions between North and South became ever more violent, Northup became a figurehead of the abolitionist movement and travelled around the free states and Canada giving lectures.

      Solomon Northup disappeared from the public arena as suddenly as he had been thrust into it; there is little evidence of his whereabouts after 1857. He is not recorded in the census of 1860 and it is unlikely he lived to see the end of slavery in 1865. His memoir might likewise have vanished after it went out of print had historian Sue Eakin not happened upon the book in a bargain store in 1936 and recognised from her childhood a number of the families and plantations Northup mentions. After extensive research by Eakin and others, 12 Years a Slave was reissued in the 1960s and went on to become a bestseller once more. We may never know the end of Solomon Northup’s life story, but there is little doubt that his written legacy inspired his country’s greatest revolution, saving countless other black Americans from the same unspeakable fate.

       Dedication

       To Harriet Beecher Stowe:

      Whose name, throughout the World, is identified with the Great Reform: This narrative, affording another Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is respectfully dedicated

       Epigraph

       “It is a singular coincidence, that Solomon Northup was carried to a plantation in the red river country—that same region where the scene of Uncle Tom’s captivity was laid—and his account of the plantation, and the mode of life there, and some incidents which he describes, form a striking parallel to that history.”

      —Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

       Such dupes are men to custom, and so prone

       To reverence what is ancient, and can plead

       A course of long observance for its use,

       That even servitude, the worst of ills,

       Because delivered down from sire to son

       Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing!

       But is it fit, or can it bear the shock

       Of rational discussion, that a man

       Compounded and made up like other men

       Of elements tumultuous, in whom lust

       And folly in as ample measure meet

       As in the bosom of the slave he rules,

       Should be a despot absolute, and boast

       Himself the only freeman of his land?

      —Cowper

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter

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