Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup is a free Black man living in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he works as a carpenter and plays the violin. In 1841 two men offer him paid musical work in Washington, D.C. Instead they drug and kidnap him, and he wakes in chains, then is sold into slavery in Louisiana.

He spends twelve years in bondage on plantations along the Red River. His first owner is comparatively decent. The second, the cotton planter Edwin Epps, is cruel, and Northup must survive under him with no way to prove who he is.

Published in 1853, this is a memoir told to the lawyer David Wilson, who edited it. Northup gives a detailed, unsparing account of daily life under slavery: the slave pens of Washington and New Orleans, the work of cotton and sugar cane, and the violence that enforced it. Patsey, who suffers Epps's abuse, is among those he describes.

He writes with a carpenter's attention to specifics and a free man's awareness of what has been taken from him. The book appeared after Uncle Tom's Cabin and sold around 30,000 copies at first. A 2013 film adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Rescue depends on a Canadian carpenter, who helps Northup get word to friends in New York. Whether that message can reach them and bring his release hangs over the later chapters.