Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup (born 1807 or 1808) was a free-born African American from New York, he was the son of a freed slave and a free woman of color. A farmer and a professional violinist, Northup had been a landowner in Washington County, New York. In 1841, he was offered a traveling musician's job and went to Washington, D.C. (where slavery was legal); there he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold as a slave. He was shipped to New Orleans, purchased by a planter, and held as a slave for 12...
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Solomon Northup (born 1807 or 1808) was a free-born African American from New York, he was the son of a freed slave and a free woman of color. A farmer and a professional violinist, Northup had been a landowner in Washington County, New York. In 1841, he was offered a traveling musician's job and went to Washington, D.C. (where slavery was legal); there he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold as a slave. He was shipped to New Orleans, purchased by a planter, and held as a slave for 12 years in the Red River region of Louisiana. He remained a slave until he met Samuel Bass, a Canadian working on his plantation who helped get word to New York, where state law provided aid to free New York citizens who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. His family and friends enlisted the aid of the Governor of New York, Washington Hunt, and Northup regained his freedom on January 3, 1853.

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. 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. It was released in 1853, just a year after Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel about slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin.