Twelve Years a Slave is a memoir by Solomon Northup, first published in 1853. Northup was a free black man living in New York when he was tricked into going to Washington, D.C. with the promise of a brief, high-paying job. However, once there, he was drugged, imprisoned, and transported by ship to New Orleans, where he was sold into slavery. Warned against ever mentioning that he was a free man, Northup remained a slave for twelve years. He managed to become free again after secretly sending messages to friends and family in New York, via the help of Samuel Bass, a white abolitionist who was working on the house of his then owner. Finally, they managed to secure his release. The book describes the slave markets and the treatment of slaves on major plantations in Louisiana, and was published a year after Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Twelve Years A Slave Solomon Northup Pdf Download
Solomon Northup was kidnapped as a free man and sold into slavery. This is his story of his twelve years as a slave. Solomon paints a clear picture of the life of a slave, the endless work and the cruel treatment, where people are treated without any humanity. Find out how Solomon was kidnapped, about his terrible journey South and his three very different masters. How did Solomon survive? And how did Solomon become a free man once more?
1841: Solomon Northup is a successful violinist when he is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Taken from his family in New York State - with no hope of ever seeing them again - and forced to work on the cotton plantations in the Deep South, he spends the next twelve years in captivity until his eventual escape in 1853.
First published in 1853, this extraordinary true story proved to be a powerful voice in the debate over slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. It is a true-life testament of one man's courage and conviction in the face of unfathomable injustice and brutality: its influence on the course of American history cannot be overstated.
In 1841, Solomon Northup was a free black man, married with three children and living in upstate New York, when he was tricked into going to Washington DC. There, he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, eventually ending up on a plantation in the Red River area of Louisiana. For twelve years he experienced and witnessed the arbitrary beatings and whippings, around-the-clock back-breaking work, and countless other degradations that came with being enslaved in the antebellum south. Through the sympathetic ear of a white man and with miraculous timing, he was eventually freed and returned home. He then wrote this memoir and contributed to the abolitionist movement before disappearing from the pages of history.
Solomon Northup was born a free man in Minerva, New York, in 1808. His father, Mintus, was originally enslaved to the Northup family from Rhode Island, but he was freed after the family moved to New York. As a young man, Northup helped his father with farming chores and worked as a raftsman on the waterways of upstate New York. He married Anne Hampton and they had three children together. During the 1830s, Northup became locally renowned as an excellent fiddle-player. In 1841, two men offered Northup generous wages to join a traveling musical show, but soon after he accepted, they drugged him and sold him into slavery. After years of bondage, he came into contact with an outspoken abolitionist from Canada, who sent letters to notify Northup's family of his whereabouts. An official state agent was sent to Louisiana to reclaim Northup. After he was freed, Northup filed kidnapping charges against the men who had defrauded him, but the lengthy trial that followed was ultimately dropped because of legal technicalities, and he received no remuneration. Little is known about Northup's life after the trial, but he is believed to have died in 1863.
The memoir by Solomon Northup upon which the recent critically acclaimed feature film, Twelve Years a Slave (2013) directed by Steve McQueen, was based. The narrative tells the harrowing true story of Northup, who was born free in New York state but kidnapped in Washington, D.C., sold into slavery and kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana. In the account Northup provides details (invaluable now to historians) of slave markets and what daily life was like on the major sugar and cotton plantations of Louisiana. Released in 1853, just a year after Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel about slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the book sold 30,000 copies in it's first year and was considered a bestseller. It was published in several editions throughout the 19th century but then fell into obscurity for nearly 100 years, until it's re-discovery by two Louisiana historians in the 1960s, leading to a historically annotated version published by LSU Press in 1968.
12 Years a Slave is a 2013 biographical drama film directed by Steve McQueen from a screenplay by John Ridley, based on the 1853 slave memoir Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, an African American man who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. by two conmen in 1841 and sold into slavery. He was put to work on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before being released. The first scholarly edition of David Wilson's version of Northup's story was co-edited in 1968 by Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon.[5] 2ff7e9595c
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