SOURCE: Introduction to Twelve Years a Slave: By Solomon Northup, Louisiana State University Press, 1968, pp. ix-xxiv.

In the following essay, Eakin and Logsdon consider the significance of Northup's narrative and provide an overview of the primary and secondary sources which preceded their edition.

The story of Solomon Northup approaches the incredible. “It is a strange history,” wrote Frederick Douglass when the book was first published in 1853; “its truth is stranger than fiction.” The nineteenth-century title itself evokes disbelief: Twelve Years a Slave, Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River in Louisiana. This—the abduction of a free Negro adult from the North and his enslavement in the South—provides a sensational element which cannot be matched in any of the dozens of narratives written by former slaves. Douglass, who had...