Twelve Years a Slave, a chronicle of the amazing ordeal of a free African-American kidnapped in the north, and impressed into slavery in Louisiana, is one of the most compelling and detailed slave narratives in existence. 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.
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Born in 1808, Solomon Northup lived the life of a free man and educated tradesman in New York. 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.
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