Solomon Northup

Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave (1853) was among the most widely read slave narratives; its popularity as an antislavery tale was second only to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. His story was made all the more remarkable for the fact that Northup, a citizen of Saratoga, New York, was freeborn. Northup was an educated man earning a productive living as carpenter, inventor, and musician. He had a wife and three children. But in 1841, Northup was abducted by tricksters who then turned him over to the ruthless slave trader James H. Burch in Washington, D.C. As the title of his memoir indicates, Northup spent a dozen years toiling on cotton plantations in the Louisiana bayous for various masters. In 1853, Northup met a Canadian carpenter named Samuel Bass to whom he confided his story of...