Solomon Northup is the author of Twelve Years a Slave (1853), his memoir of his being kidnapped as a free black man in the North and sold into slavery in the South.
Most of his early biography is told in the work, but the essential facts of his life are thus: Northup was born in 1808 in Essex County, New York. His father was a black man who had once been enslaved, and his mother was a mixed-race woman. Northup married Anne Hampton and had three children, and the family lived in upstate New York, where Northup worked in a wide range of trades, from music to the transportation of timber. In Saratoga Springs, Northup accepted employment playing the fiddle from two respectable-seeming men,...
