This object was one of more than 75 original artifacts on display in the special exhibition, Purchased Lives: The American Slave Trade from 1808 to 1865. Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped, sold into slavery and deprived of liberty for twelve years wrote one of the most popular slave narratives. Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. The narrative, much of its detail substantiated by the historical record, provides an exceptional window on the world of the slave trade and illuminates the efforts of one man to navigate his way back to freedom. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at Title: Twelve Years a Slave Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation near the Red River in Louisiana. He might well have died a slave, except for another set of bizarre. Published in 1853, just one year after Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, it sold more than thirty thousand copies in three years. For the next twelve years Northup lived as a chattel slave under several masters. Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, now celebrated as an Academy Award–winning film, is one of the best-documented slave narratives from the antebellum period. After being sold from Freeman's slave pen to planter William Ford, Northup spent twelve years illegally enslaved on central Louisiana sugar and cotton plantations.

Renaming Northup 'Platt Hamilton,' Birch created a fictitious backstory for Platt before shipping him south via the brig Orleans to his partner Theophilus Freeman in New Orleans. In 1841 Solomon Northup, a free black New Yorker, was kidnapped in Washington, DC, and sold to slave trader James Birch.

Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup