88 pages • 2 hours read
Solomon NorthupTwelve Years a Slave
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1853A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Social Construction of Slavery
Twelve Years a Slave opens with an epigraph excerpted from “The Task,” a 1785 blank verse in six books by British poet William Cowper. This epigraph declares:
Such dupes are men to custom, and so prone
To reverence what is ancient, and can plead
A course of long observance for its use,
That even servitude, the worst of ills,
Because it is delivered from sire to son,
Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing.
Thus, from the very beginning of the book, Northup primes his readers to consider the ways slavery is passed down as a revered institution from “sire to son,” upheld from generation to generation. So doing, Northup stimulates abolitionist critique not only around the economic institution of slavery, but around the social construction of slavery and the ways its construction is upheld.
Throughout his memoir, Northup exposes the social construction of slavery by revealing every part of the system, including the capture of slaves, their transportation, their sale by market, and the different modes of production on plantations. Northup repeatedly draws attention to the fact that the DC slave pen where he is imprisoned and beaten is located “within the very shadow of the Capitol” (23), suggesting that the law-making leaders of the country turn a blind eye toward injustices happening within their view (indeed, several institutions even in the free North profited from Southern slavery). Northup also exposes the operations of the slave market, where the buying and selling of human beings is normalized. Black captives are stripped, examined, and commanded to perform physical acts to demonstrate their strength and health. They are treated like horses or cattle, and thus, buyers and sellers come to think of them as no more than horses or cattle.
In the chapters focused on plantation life, Northup further examines the ways slave owners intellectually and emotionally distance themselves from their slaves. He shows how slave masters systematically train their slaves to pick cotton to the point of exhaustion. Overseers teach slaves that they must meet a personal quota—established from the first day they arrive on the plantation—or risk being brutally whipped as punishment. Thus, slaves are conditioned to work without stopping—even when they are exhausted—and slave owners are conditioned to view slaves as production units rather than human beings who require rest.
Slave masters such as Epps further distance themselves from their slaves by mocking and making light of their needs. Epps’s frequent late-night parties wherein he forces his tired slaves to dance and mockingly beats them if they stop are a prime example of this emotional distancing. In these “parties,” it is clear that Epps perceives his slaves not as human beings with their own physical and psychological needs, but as objects he owns with which he can amuse himself. This dehumanizing perception is further emphasized when Epps brings his 10-year-old son to the fields and encourages him to berate and beat the slaves, essentially teaching him to view slaves as less than human. Thus, Northup vividly illustrates Cowper’s reflection regarding how the “worst ills” are “delivered from sire to son.”
Even with Northup’s kind, well-mannered master William Ford, he grimly applies Cowper’s logic. Northup writes, “The influences and associations that had always surrounded him, blinded him to the inherent wrong at the bottom of the system of Slavery” (57). Northup thereby emphasizes that far from being an isolated evil, slavery is a normalized socioeconomic institution practiced by good and evil men alike, and that much of its power comes from this social normalization.
Systems of Power, Control, and Punishment
Throughout Twelve Years a Slave, Northup describes the systems slave masters use to enforce desired behaviors and suppress rebellion among slaves. Slaves are not only whipped and beaten for stepping outside the boundaries of what masters deem acceptable behavior; a specific number of lashes is assigned based on the severity of the behavior. Slaves receive 25 lashes for offenses that are considered mild—“for instance, when a dry leaf or piece of boll is found in the cotton, or when a branch is broken in the field”—whereas 100 lashes “is the punishment inflicted for the serious offense of standing idle in the field” and 150 to 200 lashes are given to “him who quarrels with his cabin-mates” (117). It is telling, for example, that “quarreling with cabin-mates” is considered a higher offense than “standing idle in the field.” Any stirring of discontentment, rebellion, or violence among slaves is considered extremely dangerous and is thus most severely punished.
Similarly, Northup illustrates this fear of slave rebellion—and slave masters’ violent suppression of rebellion—in his descriptions of the New Orleans slave market. Northup explains, “Scars upon a slave’s back were considered evidence of a rebellious nature or unruly spirit, and hurt his sale” (48). When slaves are deemed contentious, Northup shares, they are often bought by the most brutal of masters: those who pride themselves for their cruelty and take personal pleasure from the act of punishing Black captives.
Perhaps most disturbingly, Northup reveals the ways in which slave masters force their Black captives to participate in their own subjugation, making them culpable members of the system that controls and punishes their perceived misbehavior. Northup describes a period when Epps appoints him as an overseer of fellow slaves: “If Epps was present, I dared not show any lenity, not having the Christian fortitude of a certain well-known Uncle Tom sufficiently to brave his wrath, by refusing to perform the office” (149). By making slaves participants in their own abuse, slave masters such as Epps further enforce—and normalize—systems of behavior.
The Subjugation of Women and Families
Northup uses the subjugation of women and their families as a means of illustrating slavery’s darkest cruelties and of emotionally appealing to his white Christian reading audience, for whom the family is the center of social and moral values. From the first chapter, Northup emphasizes his own separation from the family he loves as the most horrifying outcome of his illegal entrapment and enslavement, proclaiming, “Their presence was my delight, and I clasped them to my bosom with as warm and tender love as if their clouded skins had been white as snow” (11). This sentimental appeal to “white as snow” skin reveals how keenly aware Northup is of his White reading audience. Thus, he features the narratives most likely to stir their emotions and summon them to action for the abolitionist cause.
Northup appeals to his readers’ attachment to their own families by describing Eliza’s heartrending separation from her children, Randall and Emily. Northup further appeals to readers’ empathy by describing the devastating emotional, mental, and physical deterioration Eliza experiences as a result of this separation. In so doing, he urges his readers to identify with the plight of slaves and thus elevate the concerns of Black Americans—and the concerns of the Black American family—to the level of their own.
Northup also uses Patsey’s sexual abuse and mistreatment to spur his readers’ outrage and action on behalf of the abolitionist cause. As the victim of Epps’s undesired sexual advances, Patsey is also subjected to his wife’s jealousy and unduly punished as a result. Northup describes her as “a joyous creature, a laughing, light-hearted girl, rejoicing in the mere sense of existence” but explains that her abuse by Epps has left her “literally excoriated” (123). Not only is her skin scarred by Epps’s beatings; she has felt her personhood psychologically stripped away. Northup uses Patsey’s tragic narrative as a call to restore the personhood of other women like her: Black women who have been sexually groomed, abused, impregnated, and beaten down by slave owners.
