12 years a slave
Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave narrates the author’s life story as a free black man
from Saratoga Springs who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the pre-Civil War
South. The son of an emancipated slave, had the education that a lot of his race were
deprived of, and Northup was also born free from slavery. He lived, worked, and married
in upstate New York, where he had three children. He was a multifaceted laborer and also
an accomplished violin player. Moreover, he was a businessman that was experienced in
agriculture, a timber transportation business, and skilled in making canals. In 1841, two
con men offered him lucrative work playing the violin in a circus, according to his
judgment, they dressed nice and addressed him with sincerity. So he traveled with them to
New York, but because of their utmost generosity, he agreed to continue working with
them even though it was supposed to be a onetime gig. Then he accompanied them to
Washington, D.C., where he was drugged, robbed of his money and papers proving he was
a freeman, kidnapped, and then sold to a slave trader in which he ended up as a slave in the
Red River region of Louisiana. For the next twelve years he survived as the human
property of several different slave masters, with the bulk of his bondage lived under the
cruel ownership of a southern planter named Edwin Epps. In January 1853, Northup was
finally freed by Northern friends who came to his rescue.