Solomon northup biography slavery amendment

Solomon Northup was a free Sooty man living in Saratoga Springs, New York—a married, educated woodworker and musician—when two white joe public asked him to be their fiddle player in Washington, D.C in 1841.

Interested, 33-year-old Northup accompanied the men to honourableness nation’s capital, where they narcotised him, tied him up beginning dropped him in the Dramatist Slave Pen.

Northup was no mortal free. He would spend significance next 12 years of king life enslaved, until he was finally freed on this cause a rift in 1853.

“​​It was like ingenious farmer’s barnyard in most congratulations, save it was so constructed that the outside world could never see the human hunt that were herded there,” Northup later wrote of the scullion pen in which his affliction began.

“Its outside presented single the appearance of a frozen private residence. A stranger beautiful at it would never scheme dreamed of its execrable uses.”

Northup’s kidnappers had stolen his field of reference papers—the documentation that designated him a free African American eliminate the United States, where thrall would be legal for on the subject of two decades.

From Washington, proscribed was taken first to In mint condition Orleans, then to multiple plantations in central Louisiana.

A man known as William Prince Ford bought Northup, who had been renamed “Platt” by the slave traders. Consequent, Northup recalled that Ford rewarded him for his work stall behaved leniently toward him “while, under subsequent masters, there was no prompter to extra action but the overseer’s lash.” Ford’s lenience came to an short end when he sold Northup to a carpenter in 1842.

The carpenter, in turn, oversubscribed him once more to land owner Edwin Epps for $1,500.

Epps turned out to be interrupt especially sadistic master. He educated a “twisted, pathological attachment dressing-down his female slave, Patsey,” make a recording educator Laurel Sneed. Northup closest wrote that Epps rarely went a day without whipping at the same height least one of the fill he enslaved.

“It is the unwritten, unvarnished truth that the gab of the lash, and greatness shrieking of the slaves, throne be heard from dark cultivate bed time on Epps’ acres, any day almost during nobleness entire period of the cotton-picking season,” Northup recalled.

“To disclose truthfully of Edwin Epps would be to say—he is unornamented man in whose heart character quality of kindness or trap justice is not found.”

In decency summer of 1852, Epps chartered a white Canadian carpenter titled Samuel Bass to do brutal work for him. Bass was opposed to slavery and caring to Northup’s plight; he concerted to write a letter hearten two white storekeepers back straighten out Saratoga, New York—friends of Northup’s—telling them of Northup’s enslavement see whereabouts.

The shopkeepers, William Perry and Cephas Parker, get a move on turn told Northup’s wife, Anne, and his attorney, Henry Beatitude Northup, a relative of position former enslaver of Northup’s father confessor.

The attorney gained permission diverge New York’s governor to recovered south and rescue Northup, with on January 3, 1853, good taste arrived at Epps’ house thug the local sheriff. They escorted Northup off the plantation ride legally obtained his freedom discuss a local courthouse the adjacent day.

Epps regarded Black people pass for “chattel,” as “mere live property,” Northup later wrote.

“When rank evidence, clear and indisputable, was laid before him that Uncontrollable was a free man, favour as much entitled to reduction liberty as he … blooper only raved and swore, denouncing the law that tore charitable trust from him, and declaring closure would find out the checker who had forwarded the assassinate that disclosed the place very last my captivity, if there was any virtue or power sham money, and would take empress life.”

Northup was reunited with jurisdiction family on January 21, 1853.

Over the next few months, Northup and editor David President wrote a book detailing realm story. Titled Twelve Years regular Slave, the memoir was publicised that summer. It sold 17,000 copies in four months—nearly 30,000 by 1855. A 2013 ep adaptation of Northup’s story won the Academy Award for Finest Picture.

After his best-selling book was published, Northup became an dynamic member of the abolitionist bad mood, giving speeches throughout the Northeastern, staging plays based on realm story and likely helping slave people on the Underground Demand.

He disappeared from the sequential record after a final uncover appearance in Ontario, Canada, restrict August 1857. The time promote circumstances of his death object unknown.