88 pages • 2 hours read
Solomon NorthupTwelve Years a Slave
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1853A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Introduction-Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
In his introduction to Twelve Years a Slave, American historian Ira Berlin contextualizes the historic significance of the memoir. Berlin explains that Northup’s memoir is unique among slave narratives is its exacting precision, from the living conditions in the slave cabins to the exhaustion of laboring in the fields to the brutality of the beatings he received. These details allowed Northup to debunk prevalent arguments Southern apologists made at the time, including the argument that free life in the North was no better than enslavement in the Deep South.
Northup’s account was distinct from previously published nonfictional slave narratives such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave because it featured specific, verifiable evidence, including precise place names and dates. Furthermore, the memoir featured complex socioeconomic criticisms of slavery as a capitalist institution, exploring not only the cruelty of slave masters, but also the ways in which they justified their practices as part of a broader system. Thus, the bestselling text was an invaluable tool for abolitionists.
Editor’s Preface Summary
The original 1853 editor’s preface was written by David Wilson, a white lawyer, writer, and editor who worked with Northup to compose Twelve Years a Slave. Wilson affirms that he took painstaking notes from Northup’s testimony and that all details in the book are truthful and verifiable. He asserts his integrity with the statement that he is “unbiased” and “the only object of the editor has been to give a faithful history of Solomon Northup’s life” (1).
Chapter 1 Summary
Solomon Northup introduces himself as a freeborn man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. He declares that the objective of his memoir is to “give a candid and truthful statement of facts: to repeat the story of my life, without exaggeration” and let the reader draw their own conclusions about the efficacy of slavery in the Deep South (5).
Northup also details his family history and life as a free man. His father, Mintus Northup, was emancipated when his master died. Mintus then moved to upstate New York, where Solomon Northup was born in 1808. Because Mintus was emancipated, Northup was born a free man. Mintus served as his son’s educator and mentor, teaching him to read, write, and play the violin (a skill that proved both a blessing and a curse to Northup). They worked and lived alongside one another until Mintus’s death in 1829.
Northup married an accomplished cook named Anne Hampton, and they established a home in Saratoga Springs, New York. There, Northup labors in various industries, earning money on the side from his violin playing. They have three children—Elizabeth, Margaret, and Alonzo—whom they love and cherish greatly. He explains that prior to his capture, his life was nothing extraordinary; he was simply trying to provide and care for his family in any way he could.
Chapter 2 Summary
In March of 1841, Anne and the children leave Saratoga Springs for an annual short-term position she serves at Sherrill’s Coffee House 20 miles away. Northup meets two men, Brown and Hamilton, who introduce themselves as circus promoters seeking musical talent. They offer him a brief performing job with high wages touring from Saratoga Springs to Washington, DC. Northup accepts the job without telling his wife, believing that the job is so brief he will return home before her. Northup is not suspicious of these two White men and feels impressed by their charm and kindness. He trusts them completely and implicitly.
Once in the slave territory of Washington, DC, Brown and Hamilton insist on treating Northup to a celebratory dinner. Shortly after dinner, Northup becomes violently ill (noting that he feels sick but not at all drunk, suggesting that his wine has been drugged). When he wakes, he is chained up in a cellar prison. He suspects that Brown and Hamilton have sold him to a slave pen.
Chapter 3 Summary
When a slave dealer named James H. Burch enters the cell, Northup protests that he is a free man from New York and demands that he be returned home. In response, Burch brutally whips and paddles, insisting that Northup is a slave. He threatens to kill Northup if he speaks of being a free man. Northup bitterly reflects that the slave pen where he’s being held is within sight of the Capitol building. He ironically muses, “The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave’s chains, almost commingled” (23).
Northup meets others who are being held captive in the slave pen, including an intelligent man named Clemens Ray who explains that they are about to be shipped south, where they will be sold in a slave market. Northup also meets a woman named Eliza Berry, who has a young daughter named Emily and a young son named Randall. Eliza explains that her former slave master adopted her as his mistress. Eliza gave birth to her biracial daughter, Emily, as a result. Her master promised she and her children would be freed after his death. Instead, his daughter and son-in-law—who always resented Eliza—sold both her and her children to Burch.
Chapter 4 Summary
In the dark of night, Burch’s captives are moved to a steamboat on the Potomac River. The boat takes them to another pen in Richmond, Virginia. There, Northup meets a man named Robert. Like himself, Robert is a free man who has been illegally kidnapped and sold into slavery.
The next day, Northup is taken to a New Orleans-bound brig along with 40 other captives. Clemens Ray is taken back to DC. Twelve years later, Northup sees Ray in DC and learns he has also obtained his freedom.
Chapter 5 Summary
The brig docks in Norfolk, Virginia. There, Northup meets Arthur, another free man who has been kidnapped. Together, Northup, Robert, and Arthur plot to overthrow the ship. They are unable to carry out their plan, however, after a smallpox epidemic spreads through the ship. Robert becomes sick and dies.
Northup confides his situation to a White sailor on the brig named John Manning. Manning agrees to help Northup deliver a letter to his friends in New York. Though the letter reaches Northup’s friends, they do not know where the ship has taken him and are thus unable to help.
In New Orleans, Arthur is rescued by White friends. The rest of the captives are delivered to a slave trader named Theophilus Freeman. Freeman calls Northup by the name of “Platt” and insists this is his real name. Northup is horrified by the strange, nightmare reality that has replaced the free life he knew only days before.
Introduction-Chapter 5 Analysis
Twelve Years a Slave opens with an epigraph excerpted from “The Task,” a 1785 blank verse in six books by British poet William Cowper. “The Task” repeatedly attacks several subjects Cowper finds reprehensible, including the frivolity of fashion, the hypocrisy of the clergy, and the evils of slavery. By opening his book with a quote from a lauded, canonically established White poet, Solomon Northup elevates his own slave narrative, framing it alongside a figure his educated White readers will understand. Northup pointedly highlights Cowper’s reflections on the ways a father passes down his “reverence” of servitude to his son. Thus, Northup establishes his book’s interest in investigating the normalization and social enforcement of slavery (specifically, the ways slavery is passed on from generation to generation not only as an economic way of life but as a “revere[d]” tradition).
The front matter of Twelve Years a Slave situates the book within its historic dialogue as not just a slave narrative but a verifiable testimony that strengthened the abolitionist movement. Northup’s memoir affirms the movement by immediately establishing its commitment to factual accounts and details, making it clear that none of the cruelty or mistreatment he describes has been heightened for dramatic effect. He writes, “I can speak of Slavery only so far as it came under my own observation […] 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” (5). On one level, this opening statement frames his memoir as a factual historic document and a collection of verifiable evidence (which can be used to bolster the abolitionist movement). On another level, Northup’s reference to “the pages of fiction” gestures toward the critics of his memoir who contested the veracity of certain details, comparing them to incidentally similar plot points in a fictional slave narrative, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In anticipation of these critiques, Northup offers a dedication to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harriet Beecher Stowe, wherein he proclaims that any commonalities between the two books are a coincidence.
Northup also anticipates the anti-abolitionist argument that free Black citizens in the North have a harder life than slaves in the Deep South (with the presumption that slaves are “provided for” by their masters—given shelter and food—whereas free citizens must struggle to survive). Northup contests this myth by detailing his own day-to-day life as a free Black man in New York, including the work he and his wife perform, their love for their children, and other minutia of daily existence (such as shopping in a store that serves White and Black people alike). As Northup proclaims at the end of Chapter 1, his experiences as a free man consist of “the common hopes, loves, and labors of an obscure colored man, making his humble progress in the world” (11). He thus suggests that his experience as a free man is one of both happiness and common struggle, and that it is ridiculous to compare these ordinary difficulties with the horrors of slavery.
Northup further develops his illustrative contrasts—pointing out the absurdities of anti-abolitionist arguments—with his descriptions of the slave pen in DC. In Chapter 2, Northup points out the situational irony of his capture and imprisonment in “the Capital of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man’s inalienable right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness!” (31). In a moment of verbal irony, Northup also reveals that the illegal slave pen where he is being held is within sight of the Capitol building. Thus, Northup suggests that the US government—supposedly so committed to “LIBERTY”—has turned a blind eye to the unjust dealings happening right in front of it. Through these reflections, Northup begins his socioeconomic deconstructions of slavery, a network through which Southerners profit (and Northerners—who also profit—pretend not to see).
The abuse Northup experiences in the slave pen also illustrates the sinister social conditioning slaves are subjected to, further developing Northup’s examinations of slavery as a social system. Burch attempts to wear down Northup’s self-worth and identity, beating him and insisting that he is not a free man. When Northup refuses to identify himself as a slave, Burch beats him even more severely, even threatening to kill Northup for speaking of his freedom. For men such as Burch, such treatment is a necessary part of conditioning humans for sale (similar to the breaking of a horse). Burch’s beatings and verbal abuses—including his insistence that Northup is a slave—dehumanize Northup, making Northup internalize an image of himself as a commodity rather than an autonomous human being.
Finally, Northup’s first chapters work to challenge the anti-abolitionist myth that slaves are content and passive in their roles. He counters this myth by showing his many attempts to resist control, including the attempted rebellion with Robert and Arthur on the ship to New Orleans.
