12 Years A Slave Thesis

Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave, tells the author’s life story as a free black man from his hometown of Saratoga Springs in New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. 12 Years a Slave serves as a never ending statement for human slavery. Northup goes into details about the abusement he encountered, and those he were forced to deal with. Northup himself was degraded and made to suffer through the awful torments, and inhumanly robbed of physical, emotional, and spiritual abundance. His religion is made hypocrisy. In the book, Northup emphasizes the violence and agonizing torture that slaves were put through. He also emphasizes the fact that the slave owner’s authority was only maintained by tormenting the enslaved black

Slaves would get beaten with whips, shackles, paddles, all the weapons that tore the flesh. As a newly enslaved man, Northup mentioned in the book that he was stripped of his clothing and nailed to the floor and blow after blow onto his naked body after awakening in a slave pen; his enslavers only paused to ask him if he accepted his new status . “As soon as these formidable whips appeared, I was seized by both of them, and roughly divested of my clothing. My feet, as has been stated, were fastened to the floor[...]. With the paddle, Burch commenced beating me. Blow after blow was inflicted on my naked body. When his unrelenting arm grew tired, he stopped and asked if I still insisted I was a free man. I did insist upon it and then blows were renewed, faster and more energetically, if possible, than

Most slave owners used the Bible and the scriptures in the Bible as a way of punishment and reinforcement. Edwin Epps, who is the owner of the cotton plantation and Northup last and longest master, quotes Luke 12:47 to his slaves: “And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. “ He then shuts his Bible and says, “That’s scripture.” Epps takes this verse in the Bible very literally and whips the slaves that picked very little cotton each day. When Epps had a good harvest, he would say its “righteous living”. Any time the crops would die, he would claim it's a “biblical plague” brought upon him by his slaves. For Epps, Christianity was the solution for most problems as well as a threat. He believed that scriptures from the Bible supported the association of slavery and he is more than happy and willing to share the knowledge of what the passages says to justify his holding of human property. Slave owners used religion as a way to acquire power and oppress people as a benefit for only themselves. Christian history, past or present, sometimes is a sobering reminder of our tendency to manipulate the scriptures in pursuit of our own personal benefits. Religion as we know it is a powerful force. It depends on who decides to manipulate it, in whatever form it may be, whether it's good or