TwelveYearsaSlave

Northup observed: “The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slaves’ chains almost commingled.” These slave pens were constructed by large traders, and the Negroes were confined in them while awaiting sale or transportation to a market. Northup was shipped to the New Orleans market. As he was marched to the ship handcuffed in a slave coffee, he reflected that the slaves were moving “through the capital of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man’s inalienable right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness! Hail! Columbia, happy land, indeed !” At New Orleans, Northup was sold by the firm of Theophilus Freeman to a planter who lived on a Texas road, twelve miles from Lamourie. Sold again to a planter near the Red River in Louisiana, he was enslaved on a plantation for a dozen years until a letter, which a friendly white carpenter had written for him, brought one of his former patrons with an agent’s commission from the Governor of New York. With the assistance of the local authorities, Northup’s real identity was established, his liber......