Solomon Northup was born in Minerva, New York on July 10, 1807. He grew up in Minerva and later moved to Saratoga Spring in New York where an unfortunate event occurred and he got kidnapped to Washington D.C. Prior to that, he was a farmer and a musician while raising a family. He was an American Abolitionists who wrote his own book called "Twelve Years a Slave” which was published in 1853, which was three years after the Fugitive slave act was passed on September 18, 1850, by Congress. Which stated that Southerner slave owners were allowed to capture their runaway slaves. His memoir held a huge importance to the symbol of cultural slavery and allowed readers to understand how he went from being a free man to a slave, on a southern plantation in his thirties.
Just like Solomon his father too was a freedman who was previously a slave in his earlier life. Until the family, he was enslaved to let him go free. Which was the Northup Family, his master was Henry Northup who also happens to be the great-grandson of Stephen Northup manumitted Solomon's father who was Mintus Northup and he adopted the name after his slave owner. His Father married his mother who was a “free woman of color” Which basically meant that she was a
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He had send his family and friends letters that later on became the materials for his slave narrative which was authentic and as he declared would “present a full and truthful statement of all the principal events in the history of my life, and…portray the institution of slavery as I have seen and known it”(1). His first hand-counters set him apart from all the other slave narrative because if ex-slaves wrote about their experience it would be a lot harder for them to regain everything they were feeling and it wouldn’t be the same. Twelve years later Northup was reused later on by several of his colleagues and published his book right