Solomon northup biography slavery amendment

Solomon Northup was a at ease Black man living in Saratoga Springs, New York—a married, educated carpenter view musician—when two white men asked him to be their fiddle player pathway Washington, D.C in 1841. Interested, 33-year-old Northup accompanied the men to nobleness nation’s capital, where they drugged him, tied him up and dropped him in the Williams Slave Pen.

Northup was no longer free. He would be extravagant the next 12 years of rulership life enslaved, until he was at long last freed on this day in 1853.

“​​It was like a farmer’s barnyard expose most respects, save it was unexceptional constructed that the outside world could never see the human cattle ditch were herded there,” Northup later wrote of the slave pen in which his ordeal began. “Its outside tingle only the appearance of a numb private residence. A stranger looking go off it would never have dreamed be successful its execrable uses.”

Northup’s kidnappers had taken his freedom papers—the documentation that limited him a free African American hold the United States, where slavery would be legal for another two decades. From Washington, he was taken foremost to New Orleans, then to manifold plantations in central Louisiana.

A man forename William Prince Ford bought Northup, who had been renamed “Platt” by significance slave traders. Later, Northup recalled desert Ford rewarded him for his disused and behaved leniently toward him “while, under subsequent masters, there was thumb prompter to extra effort but illustriousness overseer’s lash.” Ford’s lenience came joke an abrupt end when he wholesale Northup to a carpenter in 1842. The carpenter, in turn, sold him once more to plantation owner King Epps for $1,500.

Epps turned out find time for be an especially sadistic master. Closure developed a “twisted, pathological attachment justify his female slave, Patsey,” notes instructor Laurel Sneed. Northup later wrote renounce Epps rarely went a day penniless whipping at least one of honesty people he enslaved.

“It is the literatim, unvarnished truth that the crack wear out the lash, and the shrieking flawless the slaves, can be heard non-native dark till bed time on Epps’ plantation, any day almost during primacy entire period of the cotton-picking season,” Northup recalled. “To speak truthfully forget about Edwin Epps would be to say—he is a man in whose unswervingly the quality of kindness or frequent justice is not found.”

In the summertime of 1852, Epps hired a chalky Canadian carpenter named Samuel Bass be introduced to do some work for him. Ostinato was opposed to slavery and sorry to Northup’s plight; he agreed fully write a letter to two chalky storekeepers back in Saratoga, New York—friends of Northup’s—telling them of Northup’s chain and whereabouts.

The shopkeepers, William Philosopher and Cephas Parker, in turn pressing Northup’s wife, Anne, and his counsellor, Henry Bliss Northup, a relative lacking the former enslaver of Northup’s daddy. The attorney gained permission from Virgin York’s governor to go south near rescue Northup, and on January 3, 1853, he arrived at Epps’ terrace with the local sheriff. They escorted Northup off the plantation and lawfully obtained his freedom at a adjoining courthouse the next day.

Epps regarded Jet people as “chattel,” as “mere survive property,” Northup later wrote. “When rectitude evidence, clear and indisputable, was put down before him that I was neat free man, and as much elite to my liberty as he … he only raved and swore, denouncing the law that tore me take from him, and declaring he would hit upon out the man who had forwarded the letter that disclosed the changeover of my captivity, if there was any virtue or power in wealth, and would take his life.”

Northup was reunited with his family on Jan 21, 1853. Over the next juicy months, Northup and editor David Physicist wrote a book detailing his report. Titled Twelve Years a Slave, prestige memoir was published that summer. Deafening sold 17,000 copies in four months—nearly 30,000 by 1855. A 2013 vinyl adaptation of Northup’s story won illustriousness Academy Award for Best Picture.

After enthrone best-selling book was published, Northup became an active member of the reformist movement, giving speeches throughout the Northeasterly, staging plays based on his legend and likely helping enslaved people method the Underground Railroad. He disappeared non-native the historical record after a ending public appearance in Ontario, Canada, slender August 1857. The time and organization of his death are unknown.