17/11/2025
Kidnapped, Sold, and Freed After 12 Years
In 1841, Solomon Northup was a free Black man living in New York. He was born free around 1807–1808 in Minerva, New York, the son of a formerly enslaved father and a free mother. He worked as a farmer, laborer, and highly skilled violinist, and lived with his wife Anne and their children in Saratoga Springs. One day, two men approached him with an offer: travel with them as a musician in a circus troupe, for good pay, in Washington, D.C. Trusting them, Solomon went — and walked straight into a trap. In Washington, he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery. When he woke up in chains in a slave pen, he was told to forget his name and his freedom. From then on, he was sold south to Louisiana as a slave named Platt.
For the next 12 years, Solomon lived the brutal life of an enslaved man on cotton and sugar plantations in Louisiana. He was whipped, worked from dawn to dark, and forced to hide his literacy and true identity to survive. All the while, he never stopped fighting internally to hold onto who he really was — a free citizen of New York who had been illegally sold. Finally, on a plantation along the Red River, he met a Canadian carpenter and abolitionist named Samuel Bass. Risking his own safety, Bass agreed to help. He smuggled letters north to Solomon’s friends and family in New York, confirming that he was alive and detailing where he was held. Those friends, along with New York officials, moved to act. In January 1853, a New York attorney arrived in Louisiana with legal proof of Solomon’s free status. Facing the law, the enslaver had to release him. After 12 years in bo***ge, Solomon Northup was legally freed and reunited with his family.
Later that same year, Solomon told his story in a memoir titled Twelve Years a Slave (1853), accompanied by the engraved portrait you see above — showing him in the clothes he wore on the plantation. The book became one of the most important firsthand accounts of American slavery, used by abolitionists to expose the reality of kidnapping and the slave system. More than 150 years later, his story reached new generations through the film 12 Years a Slave (2013). Today, statues, plaques, and school curricula remember Solomon Northup not just as a victim, but as a witness and survivor whose stolen years helped change how the world understands slavery.
