Solomon Northup, the author of the bestselling 1853 memoir Twelve Years a Slave, the narrative of “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 born #OnThisDay in either 1807 or 1808.

(The book can be read here. —I’ve clipped some illustrations from it and added them to this post.)

A trained violinist, Northup was engaged by what he thought were two circus promoters to work as a traveling musician, but instead found himself drugged, bound, beaten and sold into slavery. He was transported to New Orleans and was sold to the lumber mill owner William Prince Ford, who he reports treated him comparatively well due to his having valuable skills. However he was at times leased to other owners who he had life threatening encounters with. The following ten years he belonged to a sadistic cotton planter named by Edwin Epps, who would beat his slaves to get them to pick more cotton.

Northup maintained a discreet silence about his origins as a free man from New York until he finally revealed the truth to a white carpenter and secret abolitionist Samuel Bass, who contacted Northup’s family in the north. Using money from a state fund set up by the state of New York to free slaves who had been kidnapped from the north, Henry B. Northup (whose family had years before freed Solomon’s father from captivity) set out to Louisiana to fond Northup and free him, enlisting a local attorney to help.

Northup was finally freed from bondage in 1853, but was unsuccessful when he tried to sue the men who had kidnapped him years before.

The memoir, which historians consider as credible in all of its verifiable particulars, has been adapted into a PBS documentary, Solomon Northup’s Odyssey (1984), and the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave directed by Steve McQueen and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Lupita Nyong’o, and Brad Pitt, which won three Academy awards including Best Picture.