In “A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which Stowe published in 1853 in response to critics who had said she exaggerated and sensationalized slavery’s brutality, she wrote, “It is a singular coincidence, that Solomon Northup was carried to a plantation in the Red River country, that same region where the scene of Uncle Tom’s captivity was laid and his account of this plantation, his mode of life there, and some incidents which he describes, form a striking parallel to that history.” The novelist also saw the unmistakable similarities-even in the settings for both stories. Readers couldn’t help but notice that the real-life horrors exposed in Northup’s expansive book, written with the assistance of lawyer turned writer David Wilson, echoed those in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling anti-slavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” published just the year before. In antebellum America, the slave narrative was a case of life imitating art. Three months later, Northup was back in the Times with news of his impending memoir, “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.” With the searing memories still fresh in his mind, Northup recounted the brutality he experienced and witnessed during his years in bondage. From there, he was transported to Louisiana, where he toiled for a dozen years as a slave on cotton and sugar plantations before proof of his status as a freeman resulted in his emancipation. There, the two men drugged the married father of three, who awoke to find himself bound in chains inside a dark underground cell of the Williams Slave Pen. by a pair of white men who promised him employment as a fiddler in a traveling circus. Shocked New Yorkers read the incredible tale of Solomon Northup, a free black man who had been lured from upstate Saratoga Springs to the slave territory of Washington, D.C.

The sensational story blared from the front page of the January 20, 1853, edition of the New York Times.

Northup 12 years a slave