Twelve Years a Slave

Written by: Solomon Northup
Edited by: Christopher G. Diller; Susan Cook Bell

Publication Date: October 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781554815883 / 1554815886
324 pages; 5½" x 8½"

Twelve Years a Slave is one of the most important firsthand accounts of American slavery. Solomon Northup’s narrative recounts his extraordinary experience of being kidnapped from his home in New York and sold into bondage in Louisiana, offering a vivid portrait of life under slavery and of his struggle to maintain his humanity in the face of brutality.

This Broadview Edition is based on the 1853 first edition and includes the original illustrations. It situates Northup’s narrative within the literary, historical, and political world of antebellum America, exploring its authorship, reception, and relationship to the broader tradition of slave narratives. The appendices gather a wide range of contemporary sources that illuminate the world surrounding Northup’s narrative, including proslavery and antislavery writings from the period, fugitive slave laws and Underground Railroad materials, and contemporary responses to the narrative itself.

Introduction

Transatlantic and American Slavery Facts and Figures

Solomon Northup: A Brief Chronology

A Note on the Text

Twelve Years a Slave

Appendix A: Proslavery and Antislavery Views and Voices

1. Proslavery Views and Voices

a. From George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society (1854)
b. From James O. Breeden, editor, Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in The Old South (1980)
c. “A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union” (1861)

2. The Colonization Debate

a. Bishop Richard Allen, “The Argument Against Colonization” (2 November 1827)
b. From Lyman Beecher, “Dr. Beecher’s Address” (November 1834)
c. Benjamin Coates to Frederick Douglass, North Star (16 January 1851)
d. From Martin Delany, “Political Destiny of the Colored Race, on the American Continent” (August 1854)

3. Gradual Emancipation Views

a. “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania (1780)

4. Antislavery Views and Voices

a. From Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839)
b. From Frederick Douglass, [What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?] (5 July 1852)
c. William Lloyd Garrison, No Compromise with Slavery (1854)
d. The Slave Ship Brooks

Appendix B: Fugitive Slave Laws and Fugitivity

1. Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, US Constitution
2. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
3. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
4. Map of the Underground Railroad
5. Runaway Slave and Fugitive Hunting Notices

a. Advertisement for a Runaway Slave [Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Gazette (14 September 1769)]
b. Broadside Offering Reward for Runaway Slaves (23 August 1852)
c. Political Cartoon (24 April 1851)

Appendix C: Contemporary Notices and Book Reviews of Twelve Years a Slave

1. “A Striking Contrast,” New Orleans Bee (22 January 1853)
2. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin—No. 2,” Salem Press (26 July 1853)
3. “Literary Notices,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (5 August 1853)
4. “Publisher’s Advertisement,” The Liberator (26 August 1853)
5. “Letter to Frederick Douglass from Sigma,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (13 January 1854)
6. “More Uncle Tom,” Daily Picayune (26 January 1855)