12 Years A Slave

by Solomon Northup

Overview

Twelve Years a Slave (1853) is a memoir and slave narrative by Solomon Northup, as told to and edited by David Wilson. Northup, a black man who was born free in New York, details his kidnapping in Washington, D.C. and subsequent sale into slavery. After having been kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana by various masters, Northup was able to write to friends and family in New York, who were in turn able to secure his release. Northup's account provides extensive details on the slave markets in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans and describes at length cotton and sugar cultivation on major plantations in Louisiana.

The work was published by Derby & Miller of Auburn, New York, soon after Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling novel about slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), to which it lent factual support. Northup's book, dedicated to Stowe, sold 30,000 copies, making it a bestseller in its own right.[

After being published in several editions in the 19th century, the book fell into obscurity for nearly 100 years, until it was re-discovered on separate occasions by two Louisiana historians, Sue Eakin (Louisiana State University at Alexandria) and Joseph Logsdon (University of New Orleans). In the early 1960s, they researched and retraced Solomon Northup's journey and co-edited a historically annotated version that was published by LSU Press in 1968.

The memoir has been adapted and produced as the 1984 PBS television movie Solomon Northup's Odyssey and the 2013 Academy Award-winning film 12 Years a Slave.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940186109341
Publisher:	Trafalgar Square
Publication date:	04/08/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	784 KB

About the Author

After regaining his freedom, Solomon Northup rejoined his wife and children. By 1855, he was living with his daughter Margaret Stanton and her family in Queensbury, Warren County, New York. He again was working as a carpenter. He became active in the abolitionist movement and lectured on slavery on nearly two dozen occasions throughout the northeastern United States in the years before the American Civil War. In the summer of 1857, it was widely reported that a hostile Canadian crowd had prevented him from speaking at an engagement in Streetsville, Ontario.

The location and circumstances of his death are unknown. Rumors ran rife. In 1858, a local newspaper reported, "It is said that Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped, sold as a slave, and afterwards recovered and restored to freedom has been again decoyed South, and is again a slave." Shortly thereafter, even his benefactor Henry B. Northup is said to have believed he had been kidnapped from Canada while drunk. These kidnap rumors persisted. Years later, in The Bench and Bar of Saratoga County (1879), E. R. Mann mistakenly wrote that the Saratoga County kidnapping case against Merrill and Russell had been dismissed because Northup had disappeared. Mann speculated, "What his fate was is unknown to the public, but the desperate kidnappers no doubt knew." Sometime in the summer of 1857, Northup had been in Canada, preparing to give a lecture.

In 1909, John Henry Northup, Henry's nephew, wrote: "The last I heard of him, Sol was lecturing in Boston to help sell his book. All at once, he disappeared. We believe that he was kidnapped and taken away or killed." According to John R. Smith letters written in the 1930s, his father Rev. John L. Smith, a Methodist minister in Vermont, had been visited by Northup. He and former slave Tabbs Gross worked with Rev. Smith in the early 1860s, during the American Civil War, aiding fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. Northup was described as visiting Rev. Smith after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and hence after January 1863.
No contemporary evidence documents Northup after 1857. He was not recorded with his family in the 1860 US Census. The New York state census of 1865 records his wife Anne Northup (but not Northup) living with their daughter and son-in-law, Margaret and Philip Stanton, in nearby Moreau in Saratoga County.In 1875 Anne Anne Northup was living in Kingsbury/Sandy Hill in Washington County.