Whilst I’ve formatted this post as I do my reviews, this isn’t quite a review, more an information post.

Publisher: N/A
Pages: N/A
Type: Non-Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: N/A (Collins is 978-0-007-58042-2)
First Published: 1853
Date Reviewed: 27th February 2018
Rating: 5/5

Twelve Years A Slave is Solomon Northup’s account of his time as a slave in Southern states America, the Bayou Boeuf to be exact. It was used by the abolition movement though not necessarily written for it¹; like so many others, Northup was forced into slavery and his story has a specific background – he was one of a number of Northern states freemen who were kidnapped and sold into bondage.

Every sentence in this book has been thought through. Debate has surrounded who exactly wrote this book – whilst unarguably Northup’s account, there are a few possibilities due to the presence (most definitely in the preface) of an ‘editor’, one David Wilson. There’s the possibility Wilson took Northup’s story and wrote it up, which seems most likely, reading around the subject [see end note]; the possibility it is completely Northup’s work; the possibility that it’s a bit of both. These possibilities are apparent upon reading the preface and then subsequent work and situating the book in its political and social context; in the same way the work of other former slaves – such as Olaudah Equiano who wrote 60 years prior to Northup – seeks to reassure the reader that there are good white people out there, including some masters, so too does Northup.

The book is as harrowing as you’d expect though a lot may well have been left out; you get a report of horrors but there were surely more details. Included also are the good days, the few days of leisure in which Northup expresses the normality of his fellow slaves, demonstrating further how inhumane slavery is, how everyone is the same.

Northup drops out of history ten years after this publication – we know that he was often a speaker at abolition events but the records then start to become ambiguous. Someone saw him at someone’s house once – that sort of thing. History believes he was kidnapped back into slavery or simply died of natural causes. You can’t but hope it was the latter possibility and that it happened in due course rather than soon after Northup was freed. The first doesn’t bare thinking about.

As Northup himself did, so too did the book fall into obscurity². It’s quite possible that, with slavery abolished, Northup’s book was deemed to have served its purpose and was dually forgotten. It was rediscovered in the 1960s.

Certainly you have to be prepared to read between the lines on occasion and this is one of those few books that would be difficult to read out of context. It’s an incredibly important book.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the authorship, David Fiske’s article on the book is an interesting read. It says that Wilson was not an abolitionist – which would suggest a less political motive on that man’s part, and goes further into general reasoning and the way the book was written.

Footnotes

¹ Lieblich (2015) says the book “…achieved a remarkable degree of success as an abolitionist indictment against slavery […] In the wake of newspaper reports of his rescue from slavery, Henry Northup (a white attorney and lifelong friend from New York whose family had once owned Solomon’s father), Solomon Northup, and David Wilson collaborated and published his story within the first few months of his return to the North. Henry Northup gave Wilson an incentive to publish the book as quickly as possible in the wake of news reports of Solomon’s rescue. The attorney rightfully figured that information from the book would quickly reach readers who could, and who eventually did, identify the kidnappers.”
² More information can be found on Wikipedia.

Online References

Lieblich, Mollie (2015), The Cultural Significance of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, US History Scene, accessed 1st March 2018.

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