88 pages • 2 hours read
Solomon NorthupTwelve Years a Slave
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1853A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Humans as Commodities
Twelve Years a Slave investigates the legal and rhetorical systems through which White southerners represent Black men, women, and children as products that can be sold, purchased, and owned. As Northup reveals, the success of this rhetoric largely depends on Black captives’ submission to it. Thus, slave traders such as Burch and Freeman cruelly condition their captives to internalize their identity as human commodities whose well-being and worth depends on their service to White people.
In the DC slave pen, Burch attempts to wear down Northup’s self-worth and identity, beating him and insisting that he is a slave and not a free man. When Northup refuses to identify himself as a slave, Burch beats him even more severely and threatens to kill him for speaking of his freedom. Likewise, Freeman attempts to strip Northup of his identity by changing his name to Platt and insisting that Platt is his real given name. For men such as Burch and Freeman who make a living from buying and selling Black captives, these dehumanizing methods of treatment are a necessary part of their process, similar to the breaking of a horse. Northup emphasizes this point by repeatedly comparing his treatment in the slave market to that of a horse:
He would make us hold up our heads, walk briskly back and forth, while customers would feel of our hands and arms and bodies, turn us about, ask what we could do, make us open our mouths and show our teeth, precisely as a jockey examines a horse which he is about to barter for or purchase (48).
Northup also shows how Southern law enforces the treatment (and perception) of Black humans as commodities. White patrol men ride around plantations, catching runaway slaves and imprisoning them so they can be held until their masters pay a fine for their return. When slave owners face financial difficulties, they often lease their slaves out until they can make up for their losses. It is telling that in order to prevent Northup’s murder by Tibeats, William Ford’s overseer must appeal to a law regarding this “debt” and leasing of humans: “Ford holds a mortgage on Platt of four hundred dollars. If you hang him he loses his debt. Until that is canceled you have no right to take his life. […] There is a law for the slave as well as for the white man” (74). In other words, Northup sees that his life is only protected on the basis of its material value to Ford.
Truth and the Performance of Truthfulness
Solomon Northup takes great care to present his words not merely as truth, but as a truthful performance that will be accepted and appraised as “truth” by his White reading audiences. Even within this rhetorical tailoring to White audiences, however, Northup acknowledges the fact that he is pandering and that such pandering is necessary for White readers to believe him. Northup also offers several illustrative examples of truth-telling complexities: situations wherein he is forced to lie or stretch his own definitions of truth in order to survive, thus appeasing the White men who control every element of his environment.
Northup begins his memoir with an affirmation of its truthfulness and objectivity, making it clear that none of the cruelty or mistreatment he details has been heightened for dramatic effect. He writes, “My object is, to give a candid and truthful statement of facts: to repeat the story of my life, without exaggeration […]” (5). Northup supports the nonfictional, documentary ethos of his memoir by painstakingly providing specific dates, place names, and other verifiable details that distinguish his book from previously published slave narratives.
With his aim of providing “a candid and truthful statement of facts” thus established, Northup addresses the fallacies slavery apologists would often present in response to abolitionist arguments. Specifically, he denounces the grotesque—but then very common—misconception that life for free Black Americans was more difficult than life in slavery. Northup dismisses these misconceptions as “fictions,” stating:
Men may write fictions portraying lowly life as it is, or as it is not—may expatriate with owlish gravity upon the bliss of ignorance—discourse flippantly from arm chairs of the pleasures of slave life; but let them toil with him in the field—sleep with him in the cabin—feed with him on husks, let them behold him scourged, hunted, trampled on, and they will come back with another story in their mouths (135).
Despite his commitment to truthful documentation, Northup also recognizes the necessity of using pathos to stir his White readers, emphasizing the details he knows they will empathize with: his love for his family, Eliza’s separation from her family, and the sexual humiliation Patsey experiences at Epps’s hands. Within the memoir’s most emotionally charged moments, Northup calls for his White readers to assume responsibility for the lies that have been spread about slavery:
They are deceived who flatter themselves that the ignorant and debased slave has no conception of the magnitude of his wrongs. They are deceived who imagine that he arises from his knees, with back lacerated and bleeding, cherishing only a spirit of meekness and forgiveness. A day may come—it will come, if his prayer is heard—a terrible day of vengeance, when the master in his turn will cry in vain for mercy (165).
Here, the word “deceived” illustrates not only the lie implicit in notions of “meek” slaves and passive “forgiving” natures, but the conscious self-deception White people practice among themselves by spreading these lies.
Furthermore, Twelve Years a Slave exposes a Black man’s complicated sense of truth in a world governed by White laws and White lies—a world that demands he perform “truth” by way of lying and vice versa. This complicated reality is perhaps best exemplified when Northup must lie to Epps to prevent a severe beating for attempting to send a letter home through a White laborer, Armsby. When Armsby reveals Northup’s intentions to Epps, Northup defends himself by claiming, “There is no truth in it. […] That Armsby is a lying, drunken fellow, they say, and nobody believes him anyway. […] He wants to make you believe we’re all going to run away, and then he thinks you’ll hire an overseer to watch us” (154). Although Northup is lying in this moment, covering up an attempt to escape, every detail is technically true and strategically pitched to Epps’s fears and anxieties around Armsby. Thus, Northup illuminates the kind of “lying” and white-tailored “truth”-telling that is essential both to his survival and to the narrative framing of his White-marketed memoir.
Hope, Survival, and Resistance
Solomon Northup staunchly counters the anti-abolitionist myth of Black Americans’ happiness in slavery. He seizes every opportunity to demonstrate the strength, indignation, and anger felt by himself and his peers in captivity and to detail their plans of rebellion and escape. On the ship transporting Black captives to New Orleans, Northup collaborates with two men, hoping to overthrow the crew and gain control before they can be taken to the slave market. Onboard this same ship, he attempts to send a letter home to his family via a sympathetic crew member (and ultimately succeeds, though his family is unable to locate him based on his letter alone). Thereafter, Northup tries several times to communicate with his family, risking his life in the process (as per his betrayal by Armsby).
Northup explains the many challenges between him and his freedom, reflecting:
There was not a day throughout the ten years I belonged to Epps that I did not consult with myself upon the prospect of escape. I laid many plans, which at the time I considered excellent ones, but one after the other they were all abandoned. No man who has never been placed in such a situation, can comprehend the thousand obstacles thrown in the way of the flying slave. Every white man’s hand is raised against him—the patrollers are watching for him—the hounds are ready to follow on his track, and the nature of the country is such as renders it impossible to pass through it with any safety (159).
Throughout his memoir, Northup relishes the small pleasures available to him to keep his spirits up and retain his hope for freedom. He delightedly describes the feast and neighborly merriment experienced by slaves at Christmastime and how they anticipated those few days of rest all year. He takes pride in developing an ingenious lumber transportation system for William Ford, his “kind, noble, candid, Christian” master (57). Northup emphasizes, however, that far from signs of his contented happiness, these small moments of pleasure were acts of quiet resistance: a reminder of his need to escape and freely pursue such pleasures as a liberated man.
