Thesis Statement on '12 Years a Slave'

Thesis Statement

Norman R. Yetman in Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives says “the view that slavery could be best described by those who had themselves experienced it”. As per his statement slave experience has found expression in a voluminous number during the 19th century. Over 6,000 commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who had endured have been published to seek the attention of the public. Although most of these accounts appeared prior to the Civil War, about one-third of them are the results of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Workers Progress Administration to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of the efforts of the Federal Writers was the Slave Narrative Collection. A group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves even today stands as one of the most enduring and unexpected achievements of the Writers’ Project compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38.

The Collection consists of over 2,000 interviews with ex-slaves. The exclusive interviews were the evidence concerning antebellum slave life and the respondents’ personal reaction to bondage. It was an unparalleled opportunity for the aged slaves to give their personal account of life under the “peculiar institution,” and to describe in their words how it felt like to be a slave. The Collection constitutes an illuminating source about antebellum Southern life, the institution of slavery, and most importantly, the reactions and perspectives of those who had been enslaved. It also provides a unique and virtually unsurpassed group portrait of a historical population. Aside from the large number of autobiographies contained in it, its most attractive feature is the composition of the sample of the slave population represented. Whereas the antebellum slave narratives had been employed primarily as abolitionist propaganda and represented an altered sample of the total slave population, which achieved great diversity and inclusiveness.

The recollection of the past is always a highly subjective phenomenon, one continually subject to modification and distortion. The alleged untrustworthiness of slave narratives does not have any frequent and insignificant objection to using it in historical research. Therefore, the utility of the narratives depends upon the context of the objectives of the researcher. Several uses for the Collection are immediately apparent. First, it provides important source materials for an understanding of antebellum life, the nature and effects of the institution of slavery, and the impact of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Also provides an invaluable reference source for testing historical and social scientific generalizations, in addition, to suggesting new subjects for research.

The Collection has relevance to literary as well as to historical and socio-scientific analyses. It represents a unique literary style and once flourishing cultural form that is today rapidly becoming extinct under the impact of modern mass communications. The former slaves interviewed by the Federal Writers were among the most able practitioners of this style. More specifically, the recording of the recollections of these aged Black people has preserved an important component of the oral tradition of Black Americans. In these interviews folk speech, idiom, and vernacular storytelling are fused with folk images, symbols, and myths to convey a sense of the experiential significance and reality of life in bondage. The Collection thus contributes to an understanding of the 'folk' or ethnohistory of Black America and can become an integral component in the task of reconstructing the rich heritage of Black people.

Selected Slave Narratives

Damian Alan Pargas and Felicia Rasu in Critical Readings on Global Slavery state nobody knew slavery like an enslaved person, and few enslaved people experienced the complexities of human bondage in such diverse settings and from as many perspectives as Olaudah Equiano. Born an Igbo prince in the Kingdom of Benin’s Essaka district in 1745 (in what is now eastern Nigeria), Equiano grew up in a society that accustomed him to slavery from early childhood. His father had many slaves, and in his region enslavement through warfare, kidnapping, and as punishment for the severest of crimes was common. Considered for all intents and purposes property, enslaved people in his village could be bought, sold, and bequeathed, and many slaves entered elite households as part of a woman's dowry, along with cattle and other household goods, The practice of slavery was so ubiquitous that, as Equiano later recalled in his now classic 1789 memoir, “some of these slaves have even slaves under them, as their own property, and for their own use.”! (Pargas 1)

Until the age of eleven, Equiano knew West African slavery exclusively from the perspective of his father’s household—i.e., an elite slaveholder’s household—but that changed one day when he and his sister were kidnapped in a raid and reduced to bondage themselves. Marched on a several-day journey from his home community Equiano now discovered first-hand what it really meant to be enslaved. Permanently severed from kin and forcibly moved as a tradable commodity, his experiences echoed those of enslaved people in most world societies: “outsiders, rootless and historical individuals who were ultimately held against their will by the threat of force,” in the words of Herbert Klein (Pargas 2). Equiano was sold to a chieftain in a pleasant country, and although he claimed that his master used him extremely well, he also feared corporal punishments and concocted desperate schemes to escape and return to his family—a dream that was only definitively dashed when he was sold yet again and carried through a number of places, steadily becoming further and further removed from his place of birth. Some six or seven months after having been kidnapped, Equiano finally arrived at the sea coast, where he was crammed onto a transatlantic slave ship and subsequently endured all the horrors of the middle passage. Confusion, despair, disease, the groans of the dying, and even the suicides of fellow captives formed the grim backdrop to his experiences during the tortuous voyage.

Equiano had entered the world of Atlantic slavery. Although he had already experienced slavery in the hinterlands of the Niger Delta, he consistently expressed shock at the slave system in which he now found himself. In West Africa, he had known slavery to be a universal yet relatively small-scale practice, confined mostly to elite households. He had known enslaved people to be treated harshly as non-persons, but he had also known them to be treated well and over time become integrated into their masters’ extended families. Nothing prepared Equiano for the brutal and inhumane treatment he witnessed on the plantations of the New World. Indeed, he described slavery in the Americas as “nothing but misery, stripes, and chains” (Pargas 2). Its strict racial hierarchies as well as the infrequency with which enslaved people existed baffled him. Moreover, the extensive geographic scope of the Atlantic system which connected three continents and systematically transported millions of enslaved people across the ocean initially surpassed the young boy’s comprehension.

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Arriving weakened and exceedingly miserable in the Americas, Equiano passed through the West Indies and briefly resided on a Virginia plantation before being sold to the captain of a British merchant ship. From then on he found himself almost exclusively in the service of captains of British navy vessels and West Indian slave ships. During this, he sometimes had to assist in the process of transporting newly arrived African slaves between the insatiable labor markets of the Caribbean islands. After years of forced exile, a process of acculturation took place, and Equiano found himself identifying with both his native land and with the land of his enslavers. Criss-crossing the ocean several times, the enslaved Igbo prince gradually came to adopt elements of his masters’ culture, learning English and ultimately converting to Christianity. He also never lost hope of becoming free one day, and in 1766, when he was in his early twenties, he was permitted to purchase his own freedom with earnings from extra-economic activities. This made him extraordinarily lucky compared to the vast majority of his fellow captives, and he knew it. As a free man, Equiano continued to live a seafaring life—on one occasion he even assisted an English acquaintance in the purchase and transportation of slaves from Jamaica to the Mosquito Coast—but he ultimately settled in England and became a prominent abolitionist, playing a major role in the British abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.

In the course of his lifetime, Olaudah Equiano developed a broad and multi-faceted understanding of slavery. He had been born into a slaveholding culture and become an ardent antislavery activist; he had been the free son of an elite slaveholder and a slave himself; he had been enslaved by Africans in Africa and by Europeans in the Americas; he had traveled the seas chained as cargo in the filthy hold of a slave ship and later again as an assistant to European enslavers; he had been, in the words of Orlando Patterson, a “natally alienated outsider” who later adopted the customs and culture of his enslavers’ (Pargas 3). In short, Equiano experienced slavery as both a global and a globalizing phenomenon—global in the sense that it existed in diverse settings around the world, from Essaka to the Caribbean, and globalizing in the sense that it connected world societies, from England to Benin to Virginia. Much like Equiano’s story, this anthology promotes the examination of slavery from global and globalizing perspectives. Building upon a recent surge in slavery research, it encourages the readers to view slave systems across time and space as both ubiquitous and interconnected.

Twelve Years a Slave was recorded by David Wilson, a white lawyer and legislator from New York who claimed to have presented “a faithful history of Solomon Northup’s life, as received it from his lips”. Dedicated to Harriet Beecher Stowe and introduced as “another Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Northup’s book was published in 1853, less than a year after his liberation. It sold over thirty thousand copies. It is therefore not only one of the longest North American slave narratives but also one of the best-selling.

Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, A Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, From a Cotton Plantation near the Red River in Louisiana, was published in 1853. Solomon Northup was a free black living in New York who was lured south, kidnapped, and sold into slavery. His memoir, written shortly after his escape, recounts the harrowing events of his kidnapping and his dehumanizing and violent treatment as a slave on plantations in the interior of Louisiana where he worked in the cotton and sugar cane fields. During all those years, Northup looked for a chance to escape and was finally helped by an abolitionist carpenter with whom he chanced to work. With legal documents from the state of New York, Northup was finally freed and was able to bring legal action against his captors.

Solomon Northup was born a free man in Minerva, New York, in 1808. His father Mintus was originally enslaved to the Northup family from Rhode Island, but he was freed after the family moved to New York. As a young man, Northup helped his father with chores and worked as a raftsman on the waterways of upstate New York. He married Anne Hampton, a woman of mixed (black, white, and Native American) ancestry, on Christmas Day, 1829. They had three children together. During the 1830s, Northup became locally renowned as an excellent fiddle player. In 1841, two men offered Northup generous wages to join a traveling musical show, but soon after he accepted, they drugged him and sold him into slavery.

He was frequently sold at auction in New Orleans. Northup served a number of masters, some brutally cruel and others whose humanity he praised. After years of bondage, he came into contact with an outspoken abolitionist from Canada, who sent letters to notify Northup’s family of his whereabouts. An official state agent was sent to Louisiana to reclaim Northup, and he was successful through a number of coincidences. After he was freed, Northup filed kidnapping charges against the men who had defrauded him, but the lengthy trial that followed was ultimately dropped because of legal technicalities, and he received no remuneration. Little is known about Northup’s life after the trial, but he is believed to have died in 1863.

Researching and writing about the life of Solomon Northup has been both fascinating and inspiring. Following the Civil War, many slaves wrote about their experiences. Solomon Northup’s narrative, written prior to the Civil War, is particularly gripping. Having previously lived as a free man in New York State, his enslavement seemed all the more bitter. His desire to escape fueled his determination to survive. Solomon drew strength and solace from his music, which allowed him a temporary refuge from his seemingly endless years in Louisiana cane and cotton fields. Soon after he returned to his wife and family, Northup published his autobiography, Twelve Years a Slave. Solomon Northup’s memoir, co-authored with David Wilson, reflects not only Northup’s memory of his experiences but also his deepest feelings about them. Judith and Dennis Fradin in Stolen Into Slavery say, “Of course, memory can be tricky. Therefore we verified the basic events of Solomon's life in bills of sale and in court records. But it is Solomon's interpretation of events that gives us a unique glimpse into that most “peculiar institution,” American slavery”.