Solomon Northup’s ‘Twelve Years a Slave’ came to an end when he regained his long-awaited freedom on this day in 1853

Solomon Northup was a free black man living in Saratoga Springs, New York – a married, educated carpenter and musician – when two white men asked him to be their fiddler in Washington, DC, in 1841. Interested, 33-year-old Northup accompanied the men to the nation’s capital, where they drugged him, tied him up and jailed him Williams slave pen.

Northup was no longer free. He would spend the next twelve years of his life as a slave until he was finally freed on this day in 1853.

“It resembled a farmer’s barnyard in most respects, only it was so constructed that the outside world could never see the human cattle that were herded there,” later Northup wrote of the slave pen in which his ordeal began. “The outside only had the appearance of a quiet private home. A stranger looking at it would never have dreamed of its hideous uses.

Northup’s kidnappers had stolen his freedom papers– the documentation that marked him as a free African American in the United States, where slavery would be legal for another twenty years. From Washington he was taken first to New Orleans and then to several plantations in central Louisiana.

A man named William Prince Ford purchased Northup, which was renamed “Platt” by the slavers. Later, Northup remembered that Ford rewarded him for his work and behaved leniently towards him, “while under later masters there was no occasion for extra exertion except the whip of the overseer.” Ford’s lenience came to an abrupt end when he sold Northup to a carpenter in 1842. The carpenter in turn sold it again to plantation owner Edwin Epps for $1,500.

Epps turned out to be a particularly sadistic master. He developed a ‘twisted, pathological attachment to his slave Patsey’ notes educator Laurier Sneed. North top wrote later that Epps rarely went a day without beating at least one of the people he enslaved.

“It is the literal, unvarnished truth that the crack of the whip and the screams of the slaves can be heard from dark until bedtime on the Epps plantation, every day, almost throughout the cotton picking season,” Northup recalled. “To speak honestly of Edwin Epps would be to say, he is a man in whose heart the quality of kindness or justice is not found.”

In the summer of 1852, Epps hired a white Canadian carpenter named Samuel Bass to do some work for him. Bass opposed slavery and sympathized with Northup’s plight; he agreed to write a letter to two white shopkeepers in Saratoga, New York – friends of Northup – telling them about Northup’s slavery and where he was located.

12 YEARS A SLAVE – Official Trailer (HD)

The store owners, William Perry and Cephas Parker, in turn told Northup’s wife, Anne, and his attorney: Henry Bliss Northupa relative of Northup’s father’s former slave trader. The lawyer received permission from the governor of New York to go south and rescue Northup, and on January 3, 1853, he arrived at the Epps home with the local sheriff. They escorted Northup from the plantation and legally obtained his freedom the next day at a local courthouse.

Epps viewed black people as “property,” as “mere living property,” Northup later wrote. “When presented with clear and indisputable evidence that I was a free man, and as entitled to my liberty as he was…he merely raged and swore, denouncing the law that from him, and declared that he would find it. the man who had forwarded the letter revealing the place of my captivity, if there was any virtue or power in money, and would take his life.

Northup was reunited with his family on January 21, 1853. In the following months, Northup and editor David Wilson wrote a book detailing his story. Titled Twelve years a slavethe memoir was published that summer. It sold 17,000 copies in four months, almost 30,000 in 1855. Film adaptation from 2013 of Northup’s story won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

After his best-selling book was published, Northup became an active member of the abolitionist movement, giving speeches throughout the Northeast, staging plays based on his story and likely helping enslaved people on the Underground Railroad. He disappeared from the historical record after a final public appearance in Ontario, Canada, in August 1857. The time and circumstances of his death are unknown.