Home > Slavery > Solomon Northrup Biography

Born July 1808
Essex County, New York
Died 1863
Warren County, New York

Freeborn black, slave, slave narrative author

The story of Solomon Northrup's life as a free black man in the North who was abducted into slavery in the Deep South gained widespread notoriety in the early 1850s. This was due in part to the vast popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which the horrors of slavery in the American South were vividly portrayed. Solomon Northrup, with the help of an editor, told of his incredible misfortune in a book called Twelve Years a Slave, which was published in 1853. Northrup's autobiography of life as a plantation slave, an account that was hailed as entirely believable even by slavery's allies in the South, added credibility to Stowe's fictionalized depiction of the same subject.