Twelve Years A Slave By Solomon Northup

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Recommended: An american slave analysis

Solomon Northup’s “Twelve Years a Slave” is considered a literary masterpiece for all the right reasons. It’s detailed description of his life as a slave was not only a rude awakening for those unware of slave life back in the 1850’s but also as an insight to what slavery was really like to us living in modern society. This book helped bring insight to slave life and how truly in distress many of those poor souls were. To start off this essay, we must first address the whole reason that slaves were slaves. Their masters. In most cases throughout history when slavery is mentioned historians may picture a plantation owned by a white man who runs it very strictly and roughly. Which isn’t wrong, but was rather not always the case. Yes, there were masters who treated their slaves and merely dirt, or animals required to earn them (Plantation owners) a good source of income. In the book owners who treated their slaves as such were Burch, Freeman, Tibeats and Epps. “In this manner he gave me twenty or thirty lashes, incessantly giving utterance to the word “tanning”…” (Northup, pg. 183) that quote was merely a small insight to the cruelty that Solomon …show more content…

It’s obvious that I feel that this book is extremely powerful and great, so I’d most definitely recommend it to a friend. I had yet to watch the movie but, I hear the movie is just as good as the book only three times as brutal when it comes to the mistreatment of the slaves. This autobiography was strong and powerful and I enjoyed it for the most part as I saw it in my head as some movie that appeared straight from the words of the book. I highly recommend people to read the book, but only if the can take the bluntness of the book since it’s a pretty heavy topic let alone, heavy content

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