Twelve Years a Slave. Solomon Northup
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Название: Twelve Years a Slave

Автор: Solomon Northup

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Историческая литература

Серия:

isbn: 9780857089083

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СКАЧАТЬ “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.

      An illustration of Ship's manifest from the Orleans, which transported Northup south to his life as a slave. He is listed as Plat Hamilton, male, age 26, height 5’7”, skin colour yellow.Ship's manifest from the Orleans, which transported Northup south to his life as a slave. He is listed as “Plat Hamilton,” male, age 26, height 5’7”, skin colour “yellow.”

      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.

      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)

      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.

      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.