Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (Docsouth Books) - Softcover

Northup, Solomon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807869430 ISBN 13: 9780807869437

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011

Synopsis

After living as a free man for the first thirty-three years of his life, Solomon Northup was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, leaving behind a wife and three children in New York. Sold to a Louisiana plantation owner who was also a Baptist preacher, Northup proceeded to serve several masters, some who were brutally cruel and others whose humanity he praised. After years of bondage, he met an outspoken abolitionist from Canada who notified Northup's family of his whereabouts, and he was subsequently rescued by an official agent of the state of New York. Twelve Years a Slave is his account of this unusual series of events. Northup describes life on cotton and sugar cane plantations in meticulous detail. One slave narrative scholar calls his narrative "one of the most detailed and realistic portraits of slave life." He also leavens his account with wry humor and cultural commentary, making many parts of the narrative read more like travel writing than abolitionist literature. Twelve Years a Slave presents the remarkable story of a free man thrown into a hostile and foreign world, who survived by his courage and cunning.

A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings classic works from the digital library of Documenting the American South back into print. DocSouth Books uses the latest digital technologies to make these works available in paperback and e-book formats. Selected and edited by Bryan Giemza, Director of the Southern Historical Collection, each book contains a short summary and is otherwise unaltered from the original publication. DocSouth Books provide affordable and easily accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.

About this title

About the Author

Solomon Northup was a renowned fiddle player who was kidnapped and enslaved for twelve years before he was rescued by an official agent from the state of New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Twelve Years a Slave, a chronicle of the amazing ordeal of a free African-American kidnapped from Washington, D.C., and impressed into slavery in Louisiana, is one of the most compelling and detailed slave narratives in existence. Although a best-selling book in its time, Solomon Northup’s narrative has existed in the shadow of more academically prominent and popularly celebrated narratives like The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). Nonetheless, Northup’s account of his kidnapping and enslavement is a masterpiece of historical detail, and the narrative has been noted for its easily researched and widely corroborated elements. The text and story were virtually unchallenged by Southern apologists or partisans of the era. Northup resists the urge to laud himself as an exemplary character or focus solely his own experience, giving contemporary readers a remarkable account of the lives of the slave community as a whole. As an educated man, torn from freedom and plunged into slavery, he brings into horrible and tantalizingly exact clarity the life and labor of slaves in the antebellum American South, the complex economic choices and ironic moral concessions of slaveholding, and the calamitous effect of slavery on the foundations of civilization. 

 

Born in 1808 to an unnamed mother and Mintus Northup, a former slave who was freed on the death of his master, Solomon Northup lived the life of a free man and educated tradesman in New York. Beginning with his childhood, he was early acquainted with voting and civic life through his father, and he developed a strong sense of his own liberty and dignity. Like his father, he maintained a cordial relationship with the white family that had previously held his own family in bondage, an association that would help secure his freedom. Northup and his wife, Anne Hampton Northup, were engaged in a quintessentially American quest for social and economic advancement when he was enticed away from the safety of Saratoga Springs, New York, with the promise of work and kidnapped into slavery in 1841. Upon his escape in 1853, Northup resolved to tell his story, first to the New York Times and later in a book through his editor, David Wilson. Although his sensational story showed great commercial promise, Northup insisted in its first pages that his primary aim was to “give a candid and truthful statement of facts:  to repeat the story of my life, without exaggeration, leaving it for others to determine, whether even the pages of fiction present a picture of more cruel wrong or a severer bondage.”

             

Northup’s life before slavery was notable because of his industriousness. He worked on the repairs of the Champlain Canal, navigated rafts of supplies from Lake Champlain to Troy, New York, engaged in woodcutting, purchased property, farmed for profit, and worked in railroad construction. In addition, he plied his trade as a violinist during the tourist season. It was in pursuit of work that Northup found himself drugged, kidnapped, and enslaved, and for twelve years he labored in the grinding agricultural netherworld of Southern bondage. After returning to his family, Northup not only published his narrative but also pressed his legal case against his abductors. With the help of Thaddeus St. John, a New York county judge who had witnessed Northup traveling in the company of his abductors, and Henry B. Northup, of the family who had formerly enslaved the African-American Northups, Solomon Northup was able to seek redress in the courts.  His abductors, Alexander Merrill and Joseph Russell, were captured and faced trial in 1854. By 1856, the case had meandered through the New York legal system to the state supreme court and the court of appeals, only to be remanded for action in the lower courts.  Ultimately, the delays and technicalities of trial exhausted the interest of the state, which did not retry the abductors. 

           

For all of his misfortune and his resulting celebrity, Solomon Northup’s end remains a mystery. He returned to his family, who settled in Glen Falls, New York, purchased property, and lived in the area until his death. His wife and family sold their property and moved from the town. The circumstances and date of his death are unknown, but the city of Saratoga Springs still commemorates his life and narrative with an annual “Solomon Northup Day.”

 

Commentary on Northup’s penchant for detail punctuates any evaluation of his narrative, and well it should.  His descriptions of nineteenth-century cotton production and sugar manufacturing are amazingly detailed historical gifts to scholars of the antebellum era, and they provide revealing texture to the brutal and onerous labor involved on Southern plantations. Given recent questions about the veracity of portions of Olaudah (Olaudiah) Equiano’s famous narrative, Northup’s exactness and well-supported facts about people and places in his narrative have new contemporary importance. Northup also notes variations in the personalities, characters, attributes, and fortunes of the slaves and slaveholders and even finds space for irony and faint humor amid the considerable pain of slave life. Northup also possesses an egalitarian gaze, and where other escaped slaves have been faulted for selective or manipulative recollection in their narratives, Northup is circumspect.

     

While scholars have faulted Frederick Douglass for his one-dimensional and largely physical representations of women (in near-nakedness and under torture or sexual abuse) and the primacy of his own struggle, Northup labors over the details of life in the slave community and gives personality and depth to the varied men and women who were enslaved and abused.  He recounts the deceptive appearance of ease and satisfaction Southern slaves and slaveholders presented when traveling North, but he reveals both their true yearnings for liberty and his own early exhortations to them to escape. He also follows the life of the slave Eliza from her treacherous sale, to the loss of her children, to her end as a mere shadow of her once lively and elegant womanhood.

     

Remarkably, Northup relates what is likely a new version of the story of American slavery for even contemporary readers—a world of plantation life where the backbreaking work is done exclusively by African-American women. Northup writes compellingly of the labor of slave women who are not only caretakers and cooks and cotton hands but also horse-riders and lumberjacks. He describes the exceptional physical strength of Patsey with a remarkably liberated eye, marking no impediment of gender and describing her intellect and acquisition of horsemanship and teamster-talent with ease. At the same time, he takes pains to describe her additional burden as a woman who is the object and victim of her master’s lascivious designs and her mistress’ infernal jealousy.

    

Northup’s narrative is no less an account of the physical horror beyond the bloodstained gate of Southern slavery than others in the genre. The shrieks of pain so familiar to readers of slave narratives are in the air of Northup’s plantations, resonating for miles, as they do in so many narrative accounts. But his report of the physical abuse native to slavery is raised to superlative form by his analysis of the psychological, sexual, economic, and personally capricious horrors that accompanied the crack and pain of the lash.  Northup distinguishes the lash itself as not just the tool of forcing labor or of venting vicious anger, but also the tool of caprice or a recreational device for slaveholders’ drunken gamesmanship.

     

Few, if any, slave narratives relate uplifting and celebratory stories of slaveholders and overseers, but central to Twelve Years a Slave is a careful and nuanced analysis of the slaveholders of the South, Louisiana in particular, that could stand alone as a significant text. The slave civilization Northup describes is a crumbling ruin of the Western world, its rulers fallen creatures largely bereft of virtue. Yet, Northup is evenhanded and scrupulous in his attempt to relate slaveholding culture. He records the ironies and complexities of slaveholding, the notable qualities of those preserved by Christian faith in a modicum of civilization, like William Ford, and the acts of those who are uncommon angels, like Mary McCoy. Little of Southern gentility or the region’s historic pretension to being the inheritor of the classical republics exists in Northup’s narrative. The slaveholders of Northup’s South are largely distinguished by their coarseness and ignorance. Northup sees the plight of slaves and the fault of slaveholders through educated eyes, and he presents the world of antebellum Louisiana with the judicious equanimity of a man of virtues (although not untouched by th...

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0807869430
• ISBN 13: 9780807869437
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 228