A vital segment of Solomon Northup’s amazing and sometimes tragic life is stunningly portrayed in Steve McQueen’s celebrated film, 12 Years a Slave. But there is far more to his story than the dozen years he suffered -- and survived -- in bondage.
Northup, born free in upstate New York, was a working-class tradesman, musician, and family man in his thirty-fourth year when kidnapped into slavery in 1841. He spent the next twelve years toiling under inhumane conditions on cotton and sugar plantations in central Louisiana. After regaining his freedom and reuniting with his family in 1853, he became a popular speaker on the antislavery lecture circuit, enlightening audiences in New York, New England, and even Canada about the evils of the “peculiar institution.” His 1853 autobiography of the years he spent in bondage, also entitled Twelve Years a Slave, carried his story to an even broader audience. It was second only to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative as a nonfiction bestseller about slavery in its own time. Sources suggest that he became active in assisting runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. These post-slavery careers are relatively well known to Northup biographers and historians of American slavery and abolition.