Twelve Years a Slave: A True Story
Copyright
William Collins
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This edition published in Great Britain in 2014
Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Silvia Crompton asserts her moral rights as author of the Life & Times section
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from
Collins English Dictionary
Solomon Northup asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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Source ISBN: 9780007580422
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007580439
Version: 2015-05-18
History of Collins
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly “Victorian” in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
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HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Life & Times
12 Years a Slave is a tale of deception, violence and callous disregard for the human rights we now take for granted. It is a true story, and over a century and a half after it was published it still has the power to shock and shame. But perhaps the greatest tragedy of Solomon Northup’s memoir is that his experiences were not unique. He was simply one of the fortunate few who survived to tell the tale.
Until 1841 Solomon Northup could barely have imagined he might ever become the property of another man. He was a self-made success, a celebrated violinist, a homeowner and a family man – but a lapse in judgement, a misplaced trust, turned his American dream into a living nightmare. For twelve long years Solomon Northup was a slave in his own land.
The Last Years of the Slave Trade
When we think of slavery in the United States we tend to picture the barbarous trafficking of Africans across the Atlantic, but by Solomon Northup’s time this was no longer the case. In 1808, the year of Northup’s birth, the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves came into force. It was not until the end of the Civil War in 1865 that slavery within the United States was definitively abolished – and along with it the appalling physical, mental and sexual abuse endured at the hands of cruel masters – but the Act at least put an end to the forced transportation of Africans. It had been a long time coming: by 1808, the transatlantic slave trade had been in operation for almost 200 years, bringing an estimated 11 million Africans to the United States. Slaves may still have been seen as possessions to be bought and exploited by their masters, but it was becoming increasingly hard to deny that they too were Americans.
The War of Independence, or Revolutionary War (1775–83), played a decisive role in turning the tide against slavery. Perhaps inspired by their own newfound freedom from colonial subjugation, many American landowners freed their slaves, many of whom had fought alongside their masters against the British. Often this emancipation was granted in masters’ wills – as was the case with Solomon’s father, Mintus. Born into slavery in the United States, he ultimately found a sympathetic master in Captain Henry Northup of New York. In 1798, as stipulated in the captain’s will, Mintus became a freedman. In gratitude he took his former master’s family name.
A Country Divided
Solomon Northup was born in the relatively enlightened state of New York, which had abolished slavery in 1799, and he grew up as a free black American. His father had by this time built up a successful farming business and was able to provide an education, and music lessons, for his sons; Solomon, who in this memoir describes playing the violin as ‘the ruling passion of my youth’, ultimately became a professional musician. Mintus was even registered to vote.
Life was quite different in the Southern states, where lucrative sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations maintained a high demand for slaves throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Even the nation’s capital, Washington DC, retained its thriving slave trade until 1862. And it was to Washington DC that Solomon Northup was lured in 1841 on the pretext of a well-paid fiddling contract. Northup knew the dangers of travelling into slave territory but he took the precaution of carrying his official identity papers with him. Thanks in large part to his privileged New York upbringing, he felt secure enough in his status as a free man to make the brief trip without even telling his wife, Anne, where he was going. He had not counted on the duplicitousness of his money-grabbing employers, who drugged him, stole his papers and sold him to a slave-catcher.
As late as 1850 new laws were being passed that made escape from slave states to free states almost impossible. If a black man in a free state was discovered to be a fugitive slave – or, as in the case of Solomon Northup, was simply suspected of being a fugitive slave – any person preventing his return to servitude was liable for a hefty fine. Slaves had no right to trial by jury and were not allowed to testify against whites. Northup came up against this unjust system himself when, even after the great success and widespread publicity of his tell-all memoir, he tried to sue those responsible for selling him into slavery and saw them all acquitted.
Literary Sensations
12 Years a Slave, published in 1853 – the year of Solomon Northup’s rescue – was not the first exposé written by a former slave. In 1825 fugitive slave William Grimes had published his story in order to raise the money to buy his way out of servitude, while perhaps the most famous slave memoir of them all, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, had appeared in 1845. But the timing of Northup’s revelations meant that his book became a crucial document for abolitionists in the last decade of American slavery.
One year earlier, in 1852, a white abolitionist author named Harriet Beecher Stowe had published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that exposed the harsh truth of life as a slave in the Southern states. It became an instant bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and prompted further debate about slavery – so much so that it is anecdotally credited with instigating the Civil War of 1861–5. Northup’s first-hand account corroborated much of what Beecher Stowe had written in her novel, and was reviewed and written about in major newspapers including the New York Times. Over the next few years, as political divisions between North and South became ever more violent, Northup became a figurehead of the abolitionist movement and travelled around the free states and Canada giving lectures.
Solomon Northup disappeared from the public arena as suddenly as he had been thrust into it; there is little evidence of his whereabouts after 1857. He is not recorded in the census of 1860 and it is unlikely he lived to see the end of slavery in 1865. His memoir might likewise have vanished after it went out of print had historian Sue Eakin not happened upon the book in a bargain store in 1936 and recognised from her childhood a number of the families and plantations Northup mentions. After extensive research by Eakin and others, 12 Years a Slave was reissued in the 1960s and went on to become a bestseller once more. We may never know the end of Solomon Northup’s life story, but there is little doubt that his written legacy inspired his country’s greatest revolution, saving countless other black Americans from the same unspeakable fate.
Dedication
To Harriet Beecher Stowe:
Whose name, throughout the World, is identified with the Great Reform: This narrative, affording another Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is respectfully dedicated
Epigraph
“It is a singular coincidence, that Solomon Northup was carried to a plantation in the red river country—that same region where the scene of Uncle Tom’s captivity was laid—and his account of the plantation, and the mode of life there, and some incidents which he describes, form a striking parallel to that history.”
—Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Such dupes are men to custom, and so prone
To reverence what is ancient, and can plead
A course of long observance for its use,
That even servitude, the worst of ills,
Because delivered down from sire to son
Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing!
But is it fit, or can it bear the shock
Of rational discussion, that a man
Compounded and made up like other men
Of elements tumultuous, in whom lust
And folly in as ample measure meet
As in the bosom of the slave he rules,
Should be a despot absolute, and boast
Himself the only freeman of his land?
—Cowper
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
History of Collins
Life & Times
Dedication
Epigraph
Editor’s Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases
About the Publisher
EDITOR’S PREFACE
When the editor commenced the preparation of the following narrative, he did not suppose it would reach the size of this volume. In order, however, to present all the facts which have been communicated to him, it has seemed necessary to extend it to its present length.
Many of the statements contained in the following pages are corroborated by abundant evidence—others rest entirely upon Solomon’s assertion. That he has adhered strictly to the truth, the editor, at least, who has had an opportunity of detecting any contradiction or discrepancy in his statements, is well satisfied. He has invariably repeated the same story without deviating in the slightest particular, and has also carefully perused the manuscript, dictating an alteration wherever the most trivial inaccuracy has appeared.
It was Solomon’s fortune, during his captivity, to be owned by several masters. The treatment he received while at the ‘Pine Woods’ shows that among slaveholders there are men of humanity as well as of cruelty. Some of them are spoken of with emotions of gratitude—others in a spirit of bitterness. It is believed that the following account of his experience on Bayou Boeuf presents a correct picture of slavery, in all its lights and shadows, as it now exists in that locality. Unbiased, as he conceives, by any prepossessions or prejudices, the only object of the editor has been to give a faithful history of Solomon Northup’s life, as he received it from his lips.
In the accomplishment of that object, he trusts he has succeeded, notwithstanding the numerous faults of style and expression it may be found to contain.
David Wilson, Whitehall, New York, May 1853
CHAPTER 1
Having been born a freeman, and for more than thirty years enjoyed the blessings of liberty in a free state—and having at the end of that time been kidnapped and sold into slavery, where I remained, until happily rescued in the month of January, 1853, after a bondage of twelve years—it has been suggested that an account of my life and fortunes would not be uninteresting to the public.
Since my return to liberty, I have not failed to perceive the increasing interest throughout the northern states, in regard to the subject of slavery. Works of fiction, professing to portray its features in their more pleasing as well as more repugnant aspects, have been circulated to an extent unprecedented, and, as I understand, have created a fruitful topic of comment and discussion.
I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation—only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person. My object is, to give a candid and truthful statement of facts: to repeat the story of my life, without exaggeration, leaving it for others to determine, whether even the pages of fiction present a picture of more cruel wrong or a severer bondage.
As far back as I have been able to ascertain, my ancestors on the paternal side were slaves in Rhode Island. They belonged to a family by the name of Northup, one of whom, removing to the state of New York, settled at Hoosic, in Rensselaer county. He brought with him Mintus Northup, my father. On the death of this gentleman, which must have occurred some fifty years ago, my father became free, having been emancipated by a direction in his will.
Henry B. Northup, Esq., of Sandy Hill, a distinguished counselor at law, and the man to whom, under Providence, I am indebted for my present liberty, and my return to the society of my wife and children, is a relative of the family in which my forefathers were thus held to service, and from which they took the name I bear. To this fact may be attributed the persevering interest he has taken in my behalf.
Sometime after my father’s liberation, he removed to the town of Minerva, Essex county, N.Y., where I was born, in the month of July, 1808. How long he remained in the latter place I have not the means of definitely ascertaining. From thence he removed to Granville, Washington county, near a place known as Slyborough, where, for some years, he labored on the farm of Clark Northup, also a relative of his old master; from thence he removed to the Alden farm, at Moss Street, a short distance north of the village of Sandy Hill; and from thence to the farm now owned by Russel Pratt, situated on the road leading from Fort Edward to Argyle, where he continued to reside until his death, which took place on the twenty-second day of November, 1829. He left a widow and two children—myself, and Joseph, an elder brother. The latter is still living in the county of Oswego, near the city of that name; my mother died during the period of my captivity.
Though born a slave, and laboring under the disadvantages to which my unfortunate race is subjected, my father was a man respected for his industry and integrity, as many now living, who well remember him, are ready to testify. His whole life was passed in the peaceful pursuits of agriculture, never seeking employment in those more menial positions, which seem to be especially allotted to the children of Africa. Besides giving us an education surpassing that ordinarily bestowed upon children in our condition, he acquired, by his diligence and economy, a sufficient property qualification to entitle him to the right of suffrage. He was accustomed to speak to us of his early life; and although at all times cherishing the warmest emotions of kindness, and even of affection towards the family, in whose house he had been a bondsman, he nevertheless comprehended the system of slavery, and dwelt with sorrow on the degradation of his race. He endeavored to imbue our minds with sentiments of morality, and to teach us to place our trust and confidence in Him who regards the humblest as well as the highest of his creatures. How often since that time has the recollection of his paternal counsels occurred to me, while lying in a slave hut in the distant and sickly regions of Louisiana, smarting with the undeserved wounds which an inhuman master had inflicted, and longing only for the grave which had covered him, to shield me also from the lash of the oppressor. In the churchyard at Sandy Hill, a humble stone marks the spot where he reposes, after having worthily performed the duties appertaining to the lowly sphere wherein God had appointed him to walk.
Up to this period I had been principally engaged with my father in the labors of the farm. The leisure hours allowed me were generally either employed over my books, or playing on the violin—an amusement which was the ruling passion of my youth. It has also been the source of consolation since, affording pleasure to the simple beings with whom my lot was cast, and beguiling my own thoughts, for many hours, from the painful contemplation of my fate.
On Christmas day, 1829, I was married to Anne Hampton, a colored girl then living in the vicinity of our residence. The ceremony was performed at Fort Edward, by Timothy Eddy, Esq., a magistrate of that town, and still a prominent citizen of the place. She had resided a long time at Sandy Hill, with Mr. Baird, proprietor of the Eagle Tavern, and also in the family of Rev. Alexander Proudfit, of Salem. This gentleman for many years had presided over the Presbyterian society at the latter place, and was widely distinguished for his learning and piety. Anne still holds in grateful remembrance the exceeding kindness and the excellent counsels of that good man. She is not able to determine the exact line of her descent, but the blood of three races mingles in her veins. It is difficult to tell whether the red, white, or black predominate. The union of them all, however, in her origin, has given her a singular but pleasing expression, such as is rarely to be seen. Though somewhat resembling, yet she cannot properly be styled a quadroon, a class to which, I have omitted to mention, my mother belonged.
I had just now passed the period of my minority, having reached the age of twenty-one years in the month of July previous. Deprived of the advice and assistance of my father, with a wife dependent upon me for support, I resolved to enter upon a life of industry; and notwithstanding the obstacle of color, and the consciousness of my lowly state, indulged in pleasant dreams of a good time coming, when the possession of some humble habitation, with a few surrounding acres, should reward my labors, and bring me the means of happiness and comfort.
From the time of my marriage to this day the love I have borne my wife has been sincere and unabated; and only those who have felt the glowing tenderness a father cherishes for his offspring, can appreciate my affection for the beloved children which have since been born to us. This much I deem appropriate and necessary to say, in order that those who read these pages, may comprehend the poignancy of those sufferings I have been doomed to bear.
Immediately upon our marriage we commenced housekeeping, in the old yellow building then standing at the southern extremity of Fort Edward village, and which has since been transformed into a modern mansion, and lately occupied by Captain Lathrop. It is known as the Fort House. In this building the courts were sometime held after the organization of the county. It was also occupied by Burgoyne in 1777, being situated near the old Fort on the left bank of the Hudson.
During the winter I was employed with others repairing the Champlain Canal, on that section over which William Van Nortwick was superintendent. David McEachron had the immediate charge of the men in whose company I labored. By the time the canal opened in the spring, I was enabled, from the savings of my wages, to purchase a pair of horses, and other things necessarily required in the business of navigation.
Having hired several efficient hands to assist me, I entered into contracts for the transportation of large rafts of timber from Lake Champlain to Troy. Dyer Beckwith and a Mr. Bartemy, of Whitehall, accompanied me on several trips. During the season I became perfectly familiar with the art and mysteries of rafting a knowledge which afterwards enabled me to render profitable service to a worthy master, and to astonish the simple-witted lumbermen on the banks of the Bayou Boeuf.