Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup is a free Black man living in Saratoga Springs, New York, a skilled carpenter and violinist with a wife and children, when two men lure him to Washington, D.C. with the promise of musical work, drug him, and sell him into slavery under a false name. For twelve years he is held in Louisiana, first under William Ford, a comparatively humane owner who nonetheless keeps him in bondage, and then under Edwin Epps, a cotton planter whose violence Northup describes in exact, sustained detail, the daily quotas, the whippings for falling short of them, the casual cruelty toward every enslaved person on the plantation. Northup dares not reveal his true, free status for years, confiding at last only in Samuel Bass, a Canadian carpenter working on the plantation who is willing to risk smuggling letters north on his behalf. Those letters reach Northup's family, and a white attorney, Henry Northup, travels to Louisiana carrying documentation of Solomon's free birth and, through New York state officials, secures his release in January 1853.

Northup narrates his own kidnapping and enslavement with a clarity sharpened by an unusual vantage: he had known freedom before losing it, and his account describes bondage from the perspective of a man who could measure exactly what had been taken from him, rather than a man born into it with no comparison at hand. The book moves briskly given its subject and never loses the specific, plainly stated horror of its central facts.

It sold roughly thirty thousand copies on publication, about three times what Douglass's Narrative had sold in its first two years, before falling out of print for close to a century.