12 Years a Slave Overview

Hey everyone. How have you been? This blog post is going to be about a memoir called 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup. For this blog post I am doing a group project with a friend of mine, Brian Whitney. A link to his blog will be posted below. http://brianreadingblog.blogspot.com/ So lets get down to it.

To start, my partner and I believe that the central idea for the book is that slavery can be brutal in many ways and should not be something that any person should have to endure. For example, Mr. Chapin (a slave driver) explains in the memoir that ,"'in the first place, he does not deserve this treatment. It is a shame to murder him in this manner. I never knew a more faithful boy than Platt (Solomon)'"(Northup, 75). There many other examples of this horrendous punishments also given in the book to support this central idea.

A brief summary of the book is, Solomon Northup, who resided in the free state of New York, was lured by easy money down to the city of Washington where he was captured by slavers and sold into slavery. He stayed a slave for 12 years enduring many punishments and having to go through many changes in his life before finally being set free by his friends and family in the North.

An outside source that I found was the article Slavery in the Modern World. In the article it talks about another book that also documents slavery during that time. This connects to my book as they both have a similar theme, that the horrors of slavery shouldn't be experienced. The link will be posted below.
http://www.thenation.com/article/178136/slavery-modern-world