Twelve Years a Slave

In 1841, Solomon Northup was a free black man, married with three children and living in upstate New York, when he was tricked into going to Washington DC. There, he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, eventually ending up on a plantation in the Red River area of Louisiana. For twelve years he experienced and witnessed the arbitrary beatings and whippings, around-the-clock back-breaking work, and countless other degradations that came with being enslaved in the antebellum south. Through the sympathetic ear of a white man and with miraculous timing, he was eventually freed and returned home. He then wrote this memoir and contributed to the abolitionist movement before disappearing from the pages of history. Like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Twelve Years a Slave stands in stark contrast to the era's bucolic propaganda that the enslaved in the south were well treated, well provided for, and made "part of the family." As a first-hand account, it exposes slavery for what it is: barbaric, dehumanizing, and evil. A harrowing, unflinching first-person account of twelve years in bondage-and the extraordinary will that carried one man home. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)