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Twelve Years A Slave By Solomon Northup

1431 Words6 Pages

Madalynn Ratchford
Twelve Years a Slave
The memoir Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup was an interesting one. This story takes place in the south during mid 18th century. Northup was the main character in this story. Northup was a free man. Then who was later sold into slavery for twelve years. The reason he was a slave was that he didn’t have the papers to prove that he was free. This book is written by Northup’s testimony of his challenges and hardships of being a slave.
Northup was a skilled violinist and carpenter. One day he was approached by two men that were in the circus and they were looking for a musician. They asked Northup if he would be interested in joining them and he would get a high paid wage. Then Northup agrees to join …show more content…

One problem would be that slaves that had children couldn’t protect them. Also, the woman didn’t have enough food to produce milk for infants so more infant mortality rates when up. The reason that they didn’t get as much food as men were because their work wasn’t as laborsome. Another huge problem was when a woman and the children got split up such as men bought the children, not the mom it was hard.
The strength of this story was the author pulled on the heartstrings and made the reader feel for the slaves. The author does an excellent job of writing a story that most haven’t heard before. Throughout history, most books and memoir that are written are based on an experience of a slave that was born into slavery. However, this memoir is different in the aspect that Solomon was free then turned into a slave. Most readers would agree that a free man, would have a harder time to adjust to being a slave, than a person that was born into slavery.
The weakness was the language in the memoir was hard to follow at times since it was written years ago. When a book or memoir is written a long time ago it would be hard to understand what they meant because most don’t talk like that now. Another one was that there wasn’t much dialogue. The editors had some spelling errors that should be fixed. Lastly, reading some pages were confusing at …show more content…

Reading this memoir helps people have a better understanding of how unjustly the slaves were treated. However, just because slavery isn’t as transparent as it once was before doesn’t mean it isn’t there anymore. In today society, slavery has been still continuing, such as young people are being trafficked all around the world. Learning about the history is crucial because it shouldn’t be repeated. There are many people that have lost their lives and are forever gone without their story being told. Reading this memoir hopefully makes the world is more in tune with this issue, understanding why slavery is

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