Solomon Northup, the author of “Twelve Years a Slave,” a memoir detailing how he was kidnapped into slavery to toil on Louisiana’s sugar and cotton plantations, was freed on Jan. 4, 1853.
Northup was born on July 10 in 1807 or 1808 in present-day Minerva, New York, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. His father, Mintus, was born into slavery but was freed after his enslaver, Capt. Henry Northup, died.
This allowed Northup and his older brother, Joseph, to grow up as free people of color. As a youth, Northup helped out on his father’s farm and later started playing the fiddle.
He married Anne Hampton, and they would later have three children. Northup and his family set up a farm in Kingsbury, New York before relocating to Saratoga Springs, New York in 1834.
Becoming renowned for his fiddle skills, Northup was invited to perform with two men who said they were circus performers in March 1841. The men persuaded Northup to travel with them to Washington, D.C., where he was subsequently drugged, kidnapped and beaten. The men sold him to a slave trader named James Birch, who put him on a ship set for New Orleans — one of the largest centers of the U.S. slave trade at the time.
Northup was then sold in June 1841, under the name Platt Hamilton, to a man named William Prince Ford, who soon sent him to John M. Tibaut to repay a debt. Northup detailed Tibaut’s cruelty in his memoir, recounting in one episode that Tibaut tried to whip Northup but lost the ensuing fight, prompting Tibaut to enlist the help of local overseers to lynch Northup. Ford’s overseer, Anderson Chafin, later found out and rescued Northup. After another attempt by Tibaut to punish Northup, he ran away to Ford, who forced Tibaut to sell him to Edwin Epps in April 1843.
Northup remained at Epps’ Avoyelles Parish plantation for the next decade, where he witnessed Epps’ vile and barbaric behavior toward those he enslaved; Northup made several failed plans to escape in this time. In June 1852, Northup enlisted the help of Samuel Bass, a Canadian abolitionist carpenter who visited Epps’ plantation.
Through Bass, Northup sent a letter to his wife back in New York, who then sought out Henry B. Northup, the grandnephew of Capt. Henry Northup — who had freed Northup’s father — and a close friend of Solomon and his family. Henry B. Northup marshaled support in New York state, traveled down to Louisiana, hired a local attorney and facilitated Solomon Northup’s release on Jan. 4, 1853.
Northup traveled back home to New York and was reunited with his family. Soon after, he co-authored his memoir, “Twelve Years a Slave,” alongside lawyer and writer David Wilson.
Northup’s life and memoir were the inspiration for an episode of PBS’s American Playhouse anthology series in 1984, along with the critically acclaimed 2013 film “12 Years a Slave.”
Some evidence suggests Northup worked on the Underground Railroad helping other slaves escape to freedom in his final years. His exact cause and date of his death remain unknown.