Northup, a free Black musician and farmer from New York, tells how he was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841, drugged and kidnapped, and sold into slavery in Louisiana, where he endured twelve years on cotton and sugar plantations before friends secured his rescue in 1853. The narrative gives a detailed first-hand account of slave markets, plantation labor, and the daily cruelty of the system from the perspective of the enslaved. Published the same year he regained his freedom, it sold some 30,000 copies and is now regarded as one of the most authentic and important slave narratives in American literature.
Author: Solomon Northup (as told to and edited by David Wilson) · Original publisher: Derby & Miller (Auburn, NY), 1853
