welve Years a Slave is a memoir by Solomon Northup, first published in 1853. Northup was a free black man living in New York when he was tricked into going to Washington, D.C. with the promise of a brief, high-paying job. However, once there, he was drugged, imprisoned, and transported by ship to New Orleans, where he was sold into slavery. Warned against ever mentioning that he was a free man, Northup remained a slave for twelve years. He managed to become free again after secretly sending messages to friends and family in New York, via the help of Samuel Bass, a white abolitionist who was working on the house of his then owner. Finally, they managed to secure his release. The book describes the slave markets and the treatment of slaves on major plantations in Louisiana, and was published a year after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.