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    The Twelve Years a Slave Companion (Includes Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index)
    The Twelve Years a Slave Companion (Includes Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index)
    The Twelve Years a Slave Companion (Includes Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index)
    Ebook69 pages7 hours

    The Twelve Years a Slave Companion (Includes Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index)

    By Solomon Northup

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    About this ebook

    Twelve Years a Slave is the true story of a free man sold into slavery and kept in bondage for twelve years; though it is sometimes overlooked, it remains one of the most important true accounts of slavery ever written. This book is a companion to the influencial work.

    This book contains a chapter by chapter analysis of the book, a summary of the plot, and a guide to major characters and themes. It does not contain the actual book.

    We all need refreshers every now and then. Whether you are a student trying to cram for that big final, or someone just trying to understand a book more, BookCaps can help. We are a small, but growing company, and are adding titles every month.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookCaps
    Release dateMar 29, 2013
    ISBN9781301127979
    The Twelve Years a Slave Companion (Includes Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index)
    Author

    Solomon Northup

    Solomon Northup was a renowned fiddle player who was kidnapped and enslaved for twelve years before he was rescued by an official agent from the state of New York.

    Read more from Solomon Northup

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      Book preview

      The Twelve Years a Slave Companion (Includes Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index) - Solomon Northup

      Solomon Northup’s

      Twelve Years a Slave

      Includes Study Guide, Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index

      By BookCaps Study Guides/Golgotha Press

      © 2011 by Golgotha Press, Inc.

      Published at SmashWords

      Historical Context

      The memoir Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup was published by Derby and Miller in Auburn, New York in 1853. It tells the story of a free black man, Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Northup told the story to lawyer and New York legislator David Wilson, who claimed that it was accurate and unembellished. The memoir was published a year after Northup was freed from captivity.

      Solomon Northup was born in 1808, in the small town of Minerva, New York. Solomon’s father Mintus had been a slave belonging to a Rhode Island family with the surname of Northup. When they moved to upstate New York, Mintus went with them but was given his freedom in a state where pressure to entirely abolish slavery had been applied since Revolutionary times. Little is known about Solomon’s mother, who he does not refer to by name in the memoir. Later affidavits included in the appendix of the memoir maintain that she was a colored (or mulatto) woman who was three-quarters white and had never been a slave. She died while Solomon was in captivity.

      Solomon, when he was old enough, worked with his father on his plot of land and also as a raftsman on the various waterways in the area. When he was twenty-one, he married Anne Hampton, a woman of mixed ancestry and in time they had three children. Solomon became known locally as an excellent fiddle-player and his talent inadvertently led to his downfall. Two con men from New York City promised him work as a fiddler, and he willingly went with them, only to have them sell him into slavery in Washington, D.C. which did not come under the umbrella of the Free States.

      Once Solomon was in captivity, there was little he could do. As a black man, it was his word against his white captors. He was not the only case of this type; hundreds of black people were sold into slavery although they were free. Anyone living in an area close to the slave states or anyone who ventured into those states was at peril. It was a lucrative business for the unscrupulous – and it drove many slaves in the decades before Emancipation to flee north of the Free States into Canada, where they were entirely safe.

      In 1840, the State of New York placed a statute on the books making human trafficking of free blacks illegal. It gave agents the power to go to slave states and force them to free any blacks they could prove were free men or women. Solomon was eventually able to make contact with people in his hometown and wheels were put in motion to return him to New York. It would take many long years go do so, and the tyrannical nature of slavery in the South made it almost impossible for kidnapped slaves to return to their homes. Solomon Northup’s story was a triumph of his day; for every free black who escaped bondage, there were probably hundreds who did not.

      Plot Overview

      Although not plotted in the sense of a novel, Twelve Years a Slave is organized in the following manner: The narrative begins with Solomon Northup’s family background, his early life and recent work history, and how he was enticed to go on the road with two men representing a circus company. The main part of the book is about Solomon’s sojourn into slavery, a man who was born a free black in upstate New York and had never known anything but the freedom allowed a free American. He spent almost a dozen years in Louisiana, far from everything familiar, and learned what it was like, simply due to the color of his skin, to be enslaved. The narrative concludes with his stroke of luck in finding a wandering Canadian who abhorred the institution of slavery and was not afraid to help Solomon.

      Solomon was lured away from Saratoga Springs, New York by two men who

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