

His mother was a free woman of color, which meant that her sons, Solomon and his older brother Joseph, were born free according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem. Solomon Northup was born in the town of Minerva in Essex County, New York on J or July 10, 1808. The latter won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, at the 86th Academy Awards. Northup's memoir was adapted and produced as the 1984 television film Solomon Northup's Odyssey and the 2013 feature film 12 Years a Slave. The details of his death have never been documented. He largely disappeared from the historical record after 1857, although a letter later reported him alive in early 1863 some commentators thought he had been kidnapped again, but historians believe it unlikely, as he would have been considered too old to bring a good price. He lectured on behalf of the abolitionist movement, giving more than two dozen speeches throughout the Northeast about his experiences, to build momentum against slavery. In his first year of freedom, Northup wrote and published a memoir, Twelve Years a Slave (1853). Those who had kidnapped and enslaved Northup received no punishment. Later, in New York State, his northern kidnappers were located and charged, but the case was tied up in court for two years because of jurisdictional challenges and finally dropped when Washington, D.C. Birch, was arrested and tried, but acquitted because District of Columbia law at the time prohibited Northup as a black man from testifying against white people. The slave trader in Washington, D.C., James H. His family and friends enlisted the aid of the Governor of New York, Washington Hunt, and Northup regained his freedom on January 3, 1853. He remained a slave until he met Samuel Bass, a Canadian working on his plantation who helped get word to New York, where state law provided aid to free New York citizens who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. He was shipped to New Orleans, purchased by a planter, and held as a slave for 12 years in the Red River region of Louisiana, mostly in Avoyelles Parish. (where slavery was legal) there he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold as a slave. In 1841, he was offered a traveling musician's job and went to Washington, D.C.

A farmer and a professional violinist, Northup had been a landowner in Washington County, New York.


A free-born African American from New York, he was the son of a freed slave and a free woman of color. 1864) was an American abolitionist and the primary author of the memoir Twelve Years a Slave.
