Twelve Years a Slave - Literature review Example

Solomon Northup’s “Twelve Years A Slave” This essay on the autobiographical work “Twelve Years A Slave” summarizes how the experiences of Solomon Northup were both characteristic and distinctive in the context of the slave regime in Louisiana in the period prior to the Civil War. Northup’s narrative account of how he survived kidnapping and slavery is both brutally truthful yet cheery and entertaining. His smart, optimistic attitude to life as a free citizen who valued freedom and his hopeful personal disposition make his story an inspiration on how to overcome misfortune and fight for justice. Northup’s account begins with the story of his father, a slave freed upon the death of his master. Solomon was born in 1808 and grew up a free citizen. In December 1829, shortly after his father’s death, Solomon married Anne Hampton. He worked at several trades to support his family that by 1841 included two daughters and a son living in Saratoga Springs, New York. In March 1841, while on his usual routine of job-hunting, he was kidnapped and became a victim of America’s slave trade. Solomon was drugged, sold and ended up in various farms in Louisiana, working as a slave named Platt. Most of his story is a detailed account of the twelve years of slavery he suffered until his liberation in 1853. The book, though filled with heart-rending dramatic detail, ends happily, though not perfectly, because the slave trader James H. Burch who bought and sold Solomon and tortured him into submission and slavery was not sentenced in court for the simple reason that Solomon’s testimony as a black man was not admissible in court at the time. Northup’s first person account painted a characteristic picture of the slave regime in Louisiana in the years 1841 to 1853 before the Civil War. In the book, the reader learns of the characteristic reasons why slavery, that so-called peculiar institution, was a profitable and vital business in the southern United States. The reader also learns in greater detail the characteristic experiences that slaves went through, how they were bought and sold, how they were treated by their white masters, and of their many joys and sorrows, fears and hopes. Northup also showed that while most masters were cruel, there were some who treated their slaves well, with respect. Lastly, Solomon showed that while the harsh realities of slavery may destroy the will power and dignity of most men and women who go through it, some of them such as Solomon kept their wits and could be enriched by the experience of suffering and despair. The economy of America’s southern states, like Louisiana in the years before the Civil War, was greatly dependent on agriculture. The description of Northup (56) of the Bayou Boeuf plantation area around Red River where he lived and worked gives the reader a clearer idea of what the Louisiana economy was like. He wrote of mills and large cotton and sugar plantations lining the shore more than fifty miles in length. In the account of his stay at the farm of the Fords, Northup tastily described the luscious fruits found in the plantations of orange and pomegranate, peaches and plums, fruit-bearing trees “indigenous to the rich, warm soil of Avoyelles” (44, 64). Northup painted the southern part of America, irrigated by rivers teeming with life, as the food basket of a young, emerging nation. Northup’s narrative added several significant details about the southern agricultural economy. Aside from cotton, sugar and fruits, the rich jungles of the south were also the source of huge quantities of lumber from the bay and sycamore, oak and cypress trees along the borders of the Red River. Even the moss hanging from the trees, according to Northup, is “sent north, and there used for manufacturing purposes” (67). All these agricultural produce are either consumed or exported to the northern states. Aside from the work of planting and caring for crops, transporting and storing these would need carpentry work. This was a reason why Northup, a skilled construction worker in his New York days, was a slave valuable to have in the plantations. Through details like these, Northup painted a clear picture that helps answer the intriguing question why slave labor was vital to the south. However, this picture is not complete and leads to another key issue that explains why Northup’s story is a characteristic description of the slave regime in the south: why were black slaves needed when there were whites to do the work? Surely, given the number of white men entering the labor force each year in an era when population growth rates were not as much of a problem as it is now, plantation owners would have found enough white workers willing to do backbreaking work if only they looked hard enough? The answer goes to a deeper social wound having to do with the class structure of southern society before the Civil War, when blacks were seen as inferior members of the human race. Blacks were seen as inferior to the whites, who were considered part of the higher ruling class and who were therefore not “fit” to perform menial backbreaking tasks such as clearing the fields, planting and harvesting cotton and sugar, and loading these to the ships. This hard work was for the blacks, and Northup gives the reader some insights on the prevailing social attitudes based on his experiences. Much have been written about the savage brutalities slaves went through in the past, and Northup’s account was no exception. From the time Burch tortured him to renounce his claim as being a free man and to subjugate his will to accept his fate as a kidnapped slave, to the harsh treatments he suffered under several owners who dealt with him like a piece of property, and even in the final court trial when it came down to his word against the word of a white man, one could clearly understand how slavery could be accepted in a country like America that was intended by its founders just a few decades before to be a land of the free. Slavery thrived in the south not only out of economic necessity but because the ruling class allowed it, driven not only by wealth and greed but by a deeper and more selfish idea of racial supremacy and the inequality of humans. Northup’s narrations of his fight with Tibeats (49), his being forced by Epps to work when seriously sick (77), and being commanded to flog the slave Patsey (110), one discerns from his insights (80 and 111-112) that the harsh treatment of slaves was rooted in inhuman discrimination: that blacks were unruly, uncultured and not fit to live like humans, and that the only way to make them behave and be useful is to treat them like animals because their white masters thought they are nothing more than that. Such thoughts these days would raise a howl in America, but not in many developing countries as it was in antebellum Louisiana or other southern states of the time. Slavery is indeed a peculiar institution, because the harsh life of poverty that lead men and women to desperately embrace it make it the last glimmer of hope that rarely delivers the wealth and freedom it promises. It is true, however, that while most white masters are inhuman and cruel, some treated their slaves kindly and with respect. Northup identified two masters who were a joy to work and be with, the Fords and Mistress McCoy. Solomon called Mr. William Ford the “Good Samaritan of the Great Pine Woods” (63) and Mistress McCoy he described (122) as the “beauty and the glory of Bayou Boeuf” and an “angel of kindness”. Aside from these good masters, Northup encountered two other kind-hearted white non-Americans in his twelve years of slavery. The first was John Manning, an English sailor who failed in his attempt to help Solomon gain his freedom (73-74). The other was Bass, a carpenter from Canada, whose efforts eventually led to Solomon’s liberation from slavery. These experiences were also characteristic of the slave regime since, while slavery was an entrenched institution, not all whites were in favor of it. They, perhaps the silent majority, were willing to do whatever it took, even at great risk to their lives and social position, to free from bondage one unjustly enslaved as Solomon. In a combination of luck and persistence, Solomon met and befriended them and earned their trust for them to do something about it. Herein lies the distinctiveness of Northup’s narrative that, while characteristic of Louisiana’s slave regime, showed several aspects that made it different from other accounts. First, of course, is the fact that Northup was a free citizen kidnapped into slavery. His account, therefore, was not that of a slave who earned his freedom by some deed, but that of a free man enslaved and who then fought to regain his freedom. While making the most of the situation, he did everything in his power to survive and thrive in Louisiana. Unlike Eliza and Patsey, he never gave up his struggle to regain freedom. His attitude made a big difference. He had connections, he knew what could be done, and he exploited every opportunity to use them. Neither was Solomon discouraged by failure. When nothing came out of Manning’s first attempt, he never gave up. Northup’s being a free citizen in America gave him the courage to stick to the principle of his convictions: the freedom earned by his father was passed on to him and he was determined to preserve it and pass it on to his children, no matter what the cost. Perhaps, he thought, if someone relatively accomplished and strong like him could be kidnapped into slavery, then he had the duty to ensure that the same would not befall his family. Thus, in a somewhat bizarre combination of luck, a smart personality and a strong determination, Solomon Northup persevered in his efforts to regain his freedom. He knew how to pull the strings of his social network, how to go against the convention of living a life of enslaved submission, and he also knew enough not to lose hope in the kindness of others. Thus, Solomon Northup succeeded and lived to tell his story because, while he admitted that he was just a “nigger who knew my place, I felt as strongly as if I had been a white man” (131). He was born free and would fight to remain free until the end of his life, whatever the cost. Works Cited Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008. Read More