Twelve Years A Slave
About the Author: Solomon Northup (born July 10, 1807 or 1808) was an American abolitionist and the primary author of the memoir Twelve Years a Slave. A free-born African American from New York, he was the son of a freed slave and a free woman of color. A farmer and a professional violinist, Northup had been a landowner in Hebron, New York. In 1841, he was offered a traveling musician's job and went to Washington, D.C. (where slavery was legal); there he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold as a slave. He was shipped to New Orleans, purchased by a planter, and held as a slave for 12 years in the Red River region of Louisiana, mostly in Avoyelles Parish. He remained a slave until he met a Canadian working on his plantation who helped get word to New York, where state law provided aid to free New York citizens who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery.(Wikipedia)
Solomon Northup
Review: This is no fiction, no exaggeration.
12 Years A Slave A True Story by Solomon Northrup
A heart-wrenching story of pain and affiction,cursed inhumanely upon men in the name of slavery.
Solomon Northup, a farmer and a professional violinist was manipulated to go far away from home and family and then being drugged was sold to the butchery of slave traders. There he spent 12 years of his life under the lashing of 'formidable whips', and reprimendation of several masters who bought and sold him just as a commodity. The oppressive silence of dungeon took away his spirit of freeman and casted him in 'excruciating agony'. This is the memoir of that hell fire that he bore along with the others. There is the tearstained story of Eliza who was separated from her son Randall and her daughter Emily. The description of Eliza's lamentation and tormentuous crying when she was separated from her son and then from her daughter ripped our heart apart. Her madness, pitious begging for her kids make everyone wails at her plea for mercy.
"Mercy, mercy, master!"she cried, falling on her knees. "Please, master, buy Emily. I can never work any of she is taken from me: I will die." But the trader, deaf at her agonising imploring, treated
her most cruelly threatening her to flog to death.
The bitter life or no life at all that Solomon Northup uphelds in memoir is a pamphlet against the inhumanity and vulnerability of slave trading. Most painfully he pronounced, "I could not comprehend the justice of that law, or that religion, which upholds or recognises the principle of Slavery."
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