“slave manifest” for the Orleans is preserved in the National Archives. There are two pages: one lists the slaves who had departed Richmond, Virginia (including Northup, under the name Plat Hamilton); the second page gives the names of those taken aboard at Norfolk. The names on the manifest do not exactly match the ones Northup gives in his book – but a number do match. The second page (which at the top has Richmond crossed out, and Norfolk written in) includes the notation, added once the ship arrived at New Orleans: “Examin'd and found Correct with the exception of Robert Jones who Capt Wickham states died on the Passage.” It is inconceivable that, had some parties prepared a falsified book, they would have managed (or even bothered) to seek out an obscure government document that showed the Orleans took on extra slaves at Norfolk, and that Robert had passed away in the course of the voyage.
The question of authorship has also arisen over time. Did Northup pen the narrative, or was it David Wilson? Wilson has sometimes been called the book's “ghost writer,” yet he is clearly identified as the book's editor (even supplying his own preface). Wilson explains that the content of the book came from Northup, in response to questions from Wilson. We know that Wilson authored other books, and a comparison of the writing style in Twelve Years a Slave with those titles indicates much more dry and matter-of-fact language compared to the Northup book, which is highly descriptive. Though it's possible that the difference is due to the intervention of an editor at the publishing house, it is more likely that this is simply Northup's style. We know that, when he lectured, he was a dramatic storyteller who did not require Wilson's presence on stage to captivate an audience.
Another clear sign of Northup's voice in the book are the sometimes tortuously detailed detours from the main narrative. In Chapter XIV, for example, he devotes several paragraphs to how he designed and built a fish trap. Throughout the book, he goes into great detail in explaining agricultural practices in Louisiana. It is hard to imagine that anyone besides Northup would have demanded inclusion of such secondary topics.
Finally, there is the matter of Northup's motivation for putting his story to paper. He states this very clearly at the book's beginning: “I can speak of Slavery only so far as it came under my own observation – only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person. My object is, to give a candid and truthful statement of facts: to repeat the story of my life, without exaggeration …” Although incidents portrayed by Northup are sometimes used as evidence of what slavery was like throughout the United States, it was not his intention to present a wide overview of slavery – whose practices differed greatly from one region to the next.
As the veracity of slave narratives go, Northup's has one clear advantage. Because he was kidnapped into slavery, instead of having been born into it, he has less reason to overstate the horrors of the trade. Most other narratives were written by people who had fled slavery. They ran away and, in doing so, they were breaking the laws of the time. To justify why they had absconded, they needed to give as evil an image of slavery as possible. Northup did not need to do that, and could afford, at times, to make certain aspects of his experience sound almost positive. Indeed, along with chilling portraits of men like James Burch (slave dealer), John Tibeats (carpenter overseer who tried to kill Northup several times) and, of course, Edwin Epps (brutal, drunken plantation master), Northup is careful to give accounts of better individuals in the slave system, including William Ford (his initial “owner” who treated his slaves kindly and who became a Baptist preacher), and Mr. Chapin, a white overseer who saved Northup from being lynched and hanged by Tibeats.
RECEPTION AND IMPACT
When Twelve Years a Slave was released in the summer of 1853, it was received very well by the public. Though not as popular as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a work of fiction, many readers liked that Northup's book related actual events. One reader recommended the book to “those persons who are so conscientious that they will not read ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin' because they say it is a Novel” and promised that after reading Northup, “they [would] acquit Mrs. Stowe of all exaggeration.” (6)
In the mid-nineteenth century the abolitionist movement was strong, but many Americans felt that slavery was basically the hand dealt to African Americans. For people living in the North who had little direct contact with the “peculiar institution,” it was not something that impacted their daily lives. However, they often encountered free blacks, who provided various services in their communities. That a decent, industrious man like Northup could be lured away from home, held in a slave pen, spirited away to the deep South, and made into a slave – this was unacceptable. Thus Twelve Years a Slave, while preaching to the congregation of those who hated slavery, also likely made converts of many who were still unsure of what they thought.
Abraham Lincoln, in a speech in 1854, estimated that if all the nation's free people of color were made into slaves, they would be worth $200 million. (7) So long as the United States had a population of blacks who were divided into free and slaves, kidnapping was arguably too profitable to disappear.
As a first-hand account that detailed the process of kidnapping from the inside, Twelve Years a Slave mostly stands alone in documenting the crime. There is also the Narrative of Stephen Dickenson, Jr. (8), and the Narrative of Dimmock Charlton. The former tells how three African American sailors were removed from the steamship they worked on, taken to a slave pen, and sold as slaves. The latter details how a black man – rescued from the slave trade by the British – was taken from a warship as a prisoner of war during the War of 1812, and then made into a slave in America.
In a 1999 lecture, historian Joseph Logsdon (who with Sue Eakin produced the first scholarly edition of Twelve Years a Slave) stated that he had begun the assignment thinking that kidnapping was rare. He quickly learned it was a reasonably common crime. Northup's narrative stands in for the many victims who did not have their stories told.
THE FORGOTTEN PHENOMENON
Thousands of books have been written on American slavery. Much less attention has been given to the kidnapping problem. Twelve Years a Slave stands as a reminder that it occurred, but the question of its prevalence has never been fully answered. Incidents that have been discovered come almost entirely from cases where the victims were rescued. Unknown is the number of people who were abducted or fooled into slavery via duplicity (as Northup was) but were never able to contact friends or relatives, and who never became the subject of a rescue mission.
These victims went on “dragging out lives of unrequited toil” (as Northup feared happened to Eliza Berry's two children who were sold away from her, in one of the book's more horrible scenes). Such people remained enslaved until death or emancipation – whichever came first. A correspondent for a Northern newspaper, reporting from Alabama just weeks after the end of the Civil War, came across a man in his seventies who had been born free in a Northern state and kidnapped at the age of 15. In all that time, he had never had the least chance to regain his liberty. (9) Even if a captive was able to read and write, it was virtually impossible to send a letter back home. Slaves were forbidden pen and paper, and if caught reading a book were invariably flogged.
To illustrate how common it was for free blacks to be kidnapped and sold into slavery, consider that among the few dozen African Americans on board the Orleans there were three who'd been kidnapped: Northup, Robert, and Arthur. Newspapers from those days contained many reports of kidnappings. Kidnappers could make substantial sums of money selling free persons as slaves, and for able conmen like Merrill Brown
