his plantation, the amount of violence Northup details becomes more frequent, and he describes the fear that all slaves faced at the beginning of the new work day “Then the fears and labours of another day begin; and until its close there is no such thing as rest. He fears he will be caught lagging through the day; he fears to approach the gin house with his basket-load of cotton at night; he fears, when he lies down, that he will oversleep himself in the morning. (Northup, pg.171). Solomon Northup captures the relentless emotional and physical toll that slaves faced every day at the hands of their masters and the hired help. Documenting not only the fear that the slaves faced but also the violence of both physical and sexual abuse, the most ghastly account was towards a slave women he was imprisoned with named Patsey. She was a slave who had the misfortune of …show more content…
Not only their but also the stories of all the other slaves that were not able to tell their story themselves, about the suffering that the faced day in and day out at the hands of their oppressors. It also said to the nation that they should be ashamed of how they were treating these people, demanded that they do something about the injustice that black people faced and to remember this as a part of history. As Frederick Douglass warned in an 1884 speech, “It is not well to forget the past. The past is…the mirror in which we may discern the dim outlines of the future and by which we make them more symmetrical.”(Blight, pg. 9). In regards to the abolitionist movement, Solomon Northup’s slave narrative was particularly important because it revealed the inhumane treatment, such as the brutal beatings done by masters and overseers, the sexual use of slave women and the merciless separation of families, and in his personal case the abuse of the Fugitive Slave