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Although McQueen portrays some of these activities, his two-hour movie cannot present the full range of observations that Northup offered in his 336-page narrative. On Sundays, Northup visited other locales, played his fiddle for whites at social events, and kept some of the earnings. Talented slaves could experience small degrees of liberty. Steve McQueen's movie feels more like an unrelentingly hellish view of slavery than does Northup's book, which depicts the occasional opportunities slaves had for relief from the brutal plantation regimen-a few days during the Christmas holidays for rest, celebration, and good eating. Twelve Years a Slaveeducated Americans about slave life in the Deep South and contributed to the growth of anti-slavery sentiment before the Civil War. Twelve Years a Slave, written with assistance from David Wilson, a New York lawyer, became enormously popular, selling 30,000 copies. He failed to win convictions in a court of law, but succeeded in a broader sense. With assistance from legal authorities, Northup endeavored to make his kidnappers pay for their crime.
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In 1853 Solomon Northup returned to his family as a free man. Northup was shipped to the slave auctions of New Orleans and thereafter spent 12 years laboring in the cotton and sugar plantations of Louisiana until a white carpenter from Canada sent a communication to Northup's friends in New York. Once Northup was in the nation's capital, the men drugged him, marketed him as a slave, and earned several hundred dollars for their crime.
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In 1841 two visitors tricked him into traveling to Washington, DC, to earn money in a circus. At least two historians, Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon, have confirmed that Northup presented a remarkably accurate picture of antebellum slavery and plantation society near the Red River in Louisiana.Īs indicated in both the book and movie, Solomon Northup lived as a free man with his wife and children in Saratoga Springs, New York. Director Steve McQueen succeeded in connecting emotions to history, making viewers care about Solomon Northup's sudden descent into slavery.Īpologists may dismiss the gut-wrenching picture of human bondage drawn in 12 Years a Slave as over-the-top, Hollywood melodrama-arguing that master-slave relations were never as bad as the movie suggests-but McQueen has a convenient response: this is a movie based substantially on Solomon Northup's 1853 narrative, Twelve Years a Slave. The movie felt believable, they reported, due not only to the caption indicating its basis in fact, but because the settings and characters looked authentic. When asked about their intense reaction to the film, some described feeling as though they had just experienced slavery. The audience leaving the theater after a recent screening of 12 Years a Slave looked deeply shaken.
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