Solomon Northup - Memoir

Memoir

Solomon Northup published an account of his experiences, Twelve Years a Slave (1853). The book was written in three months with the help of David Wilson, a local writer and Union College graduate. Published when the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a bestseller, Northup's book sold 30,000 copies within three years.

Included in the genre of slave narratives, the scholar Sam Worley says that the book does not fit the standard expectations of the genre and was overlooked for many years, in part because Northup was assisted in the writing by a white man, David Wright. Worley discounted concerns that Wright was pursuing his own interests and wrote of it: "'Twelve Years' is convincingly Northup's tale and no one else's because of its amazing attention to empirical detail and unwillingness to reduce the complexity of Northup's experience to a stark moral allegory."

The book has been issued as an electronic version with supporting material at the web site of the University of North Carolina's Documenting the American South. Out of copyright, it is also available free for reading and download at Project Gutenberg and Google Books websites.

Northup's full and descriptive account has been used by numerous historians researching slavery. His description of the Yellow House, in view of the Capitol, has helped researchers document the history of slavery in the District of Columbia. For example, in his book Black Men Built the Capitol, Jesse Holland notes his use of Northup's narrative. The scholar Kenneth M. Stampp referred to Northup's memoir in his book on slavery, The Peculiar Institution (1962).