Solomon Northups 12 Years a Slave narrates the au Essays - Film

Solomon Northup's 12 Years a Slave narrates the author's life story as a free black man from the North who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the pre-Civil War South. The son of a liberated slave, Northup was born free. He lived, worked, and married in upstate New York, where his family lived . He was a complex hand and also a skilled violin player. In 1841, two con men offered him lucrative work playing fiddle in a circus, so he traveled with them to Washington, D.C., where he was drugged, kidnapped, and subsequently sold as a slave into the Red River region of Louisiana. For the next twelve years he survived as the human property of several different slave masters, with the majority of his slavery lived under the harsh possession of a southern planter named Edwin Epps. In January 1853, Northup was finally freed by Northern friends who came to his rescue. He returned home to his family in New York and there, with the hel p of editor David Wilson, wrote his account in 12 Years a Slave . 12 Years a Slave serves as a time less indictment of the practice of human slavery. Northup's detailing the abuses he suffered and those he was forced to wreak provides a warning to all generations of the moral costs that slavery takes from everyone involved. The slave himself or herself is degraded, made to suffer awful ordeals , and maliciously robbed of physical, emotional, and spiritual resources . Still, the slave is not the only one who suffers. By participating in slavery, the master is morally degraded and emotionally numb . His religion is made hypocrisy. His family heritage is robbed of basic human elegances like love, justice, and honor . In this respect, Northup's 12 Years a Slave is notable for giving human faces to the evil that was once common practice, and for sounding a constant warning of the awful consequences of slavery. 12 Years a Slave is a testimony to the power of the human spirit and the lasting willpower of courage . Solomon Northup is betrayed , abducted , mistreated , removed from family, deprived of self , and beaten into a long, weary, unjustified submission. Yet he is never shattered . Even in his worst days of sorrow lived under the meanness of Edwin Epps, he never gives up hope that one day he will be free. He never loses faith in his friends, constantly assured that if he can only get word to the North then they will indeed come to his rescue. And they do. In the end, Solomon Northup's heartbreaking voyage lifts because in his testimony is sign that faith and hope can endureand win . The three most important aspects of 12 Years a Slave: 12 Years a Slave presents a startlingly accurate and verifiable account of the common slave experience in the United States in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) South. From start to finis h, basic facts about the time, the places, the people, and the practices of the day are incorporated, sometimes in excessive detail, into Northup's story. He speaks with authority on all subjects of his enslavement, naming names and pointing out markers along the way. In doing so, he dares doubters to undermine his story, knowing that public records and common knowledge would defend it. For example, when Northup accuses a wicked slave trader of keeping him captive in Washington, D.C ., he not only names that slave owners , he names the slaver's coconspirator , identifies exactly where the slave pen is hidden, and describes the physical structure of the slave pen in detail. The result? During the trial that took place after Northup had been freed, that slave trader couldn't deny having kept Northup as his captive in that now-exposed slave pen. Additionally, the accuracy of and factual detail in 12 Years a Slave have kept this book renowned as a dependa ble historical reference on slavery for more than 150 years since it first debuted. CITATION McQ13 \l 1033 (McQueen) Works Cited BIBLIOGRAPHY 12 Years a Slave. Dir. Steve McQueen. 2013. 28 11 2016.