[The following is an excerpt from Solomon Northup’s chilling memoir, 12 Years a Slave. Solomon Northup was a free man living in the Northern states, who was kidnapped by black-market slave traders and illegally sold in the deep south as a “runaway slave from Georgia,” named Platt. After 12 years in captivity, he was eventually freed after getting word out to friends and acquaintances in the North, about his whereabouts and condition.]
Oh! how heavily the weight of slavery pressed upon me then. I must toil day after day, endure abuse and taunts and scoffs, sleep on the hard ground, live on the coarsest fare, and not only this, but live the slave of a blood-seeking wretch, of whom I must stand henceforth in continued fear and dread. Why had I not died in my young years – before God had given me children to love and live for? What unhappiness and suffering and sorrow it would have prevented. I sighed for liberty; but the bondman’s chain was round me, and could not be shaken off. I could only gaze wistfully towards the North, and think of the thousands of miles that stretched between me and the soil of freedom, over which a black freeman may not pass.
Source:
Northup, Solomon. “Chapter 9.” Twelve Years a Slave. Graymalkin Media, 2014. 84-5. Print.
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