Solomon Northup

Solomon Northup’s slave story, Twelve Years A Slave; which he was a Citizen of New-York, got kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and he was rescued in 1853 from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River in Louisiana. Solomon has accomplished an astonishing degree of success as an abolitionist indictment against slavery. The book first published in 1853, three years after the Fugitive Slave Act, Northup’s story served as an important cultural symbol of slave life on southern plantations during the eighteenth-century in America before the Civil War. Born into freedom, Northup was kidnapped into slavery at the age of thirty. Allured to Washington, D.C. in 1841 with the promise of easy employment, fast money, and adventure, Northup was in reality drugged, beaten, and sold into slavery within sight of the nation’s capital. Northup joined the mass of black humanity, which transported south to renovate the plantation economy onto a new ground. Between 1790 and 1860, nearly one million African Americans were transported from the Upper South to the Deep South in the domestic slave trade. While in captivity, Northup wrote letters to family and friends in the North, which later became the raw resources of his slave narrative. Since the 1740’s to 1865, roughly …show more content…
They struggled to convince their reading audiences that the institution of slavery was not as hostile, arrangement between slaves and slaveholders were very common and stories of violent treatment were not the exaggerated exception but the established norm. However much the slaveholders might have preached paternalism, the power of the regime was enforced by violence. Slave narratives were basically imaged as an object not a human being. Slaveholders had an authority to do as they pleased without being told they were wrong due to owning the