Solomon Northup's 12 Years A Slave
“Like a herd of cattle, placed on a ship. Upon my back, I felt their whip! Ripping into my flesh, excruciating pain. Forced across the big water on a trip.” Solomon Northup must have had millions of thoughts and poems as such, mentioned above. Born as a New York State-free African-American man, Northup was kidnapped in Washington D.C., in 1841 and sold into slavery. Northup worked on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before his release. The first scholarly edition of Northup's journal, “12 Years a Slave”, co-edited in 1968 by Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon, cautiously retraced and validated the account and accomplished it to be accurate. It recounts the author’s life narrative as a free black man from the North who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the pre-Civil War South.
In 1841, Solomon Northup a free African-American man, worked as a violinist lived with his wife and two children in Saratoga Springs, New York. Solomon's marriage to Anne, his employment as a rafts man, a farmer, and a fiddle-player, and his seizure is shown in the first two chapters of the paperback.
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Promised one dollar for each day's services and three dollars for every show that he played,
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Burch, who brutally whips him for protesting that he is a free man. While in the slave pen, he makes the association of several other slaves, including Eliza, whose sad account he relates in detail. She was kept enslaved as a mistress by his master for nine years. She confesses to Northup in the slave pen: “I have done dishonorable things to survive … God forgive me”. Eliza knew she was eventually her master’s “property” to do with as he contented and so rather than resist his rape; she chose to surrender to his demands in the hope of an improved life for herself and her children. But when her master fell sick, she and her two children were sold to local slave traders by the master’s
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