By the middle of the 19th century, slavery had created a fevered pitch in the politics of the United States, as abolitionists and slavery proponents fought a war of words and actual wars in Kansas and Nebraska. While the South postured for secession, abolitionists, both white and black, created a stronger movement in the Northeast in places like Boston. Ultimately the issue would have to be settled via civil war.
Solomon Northup was born a free black man. When he was about 30 years old, he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841, while in Washington, DC., within sight of the Capitol. Stripped of his papers, his name, his family, and all that he knew, he was sent to Lousiana and sold. He was finally rescued 12 years later. Published soon after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Northup’s narrative is a harrowing first-hand account of the institution of slavery.
This edition of Twelve Years A Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup is specially formatted with a Table of Contents and pictures of famous abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and more.
