Illustrated 1855 Printing of Solomon Northup’s :Twelve Years a Slave" Documenting Washington Slave Markets and Louisiana Plantation Labor

Solomon Northup

First Edition

[Slavery & Abolition][African American History] Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave (1855) stands as one of the most consequential firsthand accounts of American slavery, documenting the kidnapping and illegal enslavement of a free Black man from New York and exposing the interstate slave trade that linked Washington, D.C., to the plantation economies of Louisiana. Born free in New York State, Northup was deceived into traveling to the nation’s capital in 1841, where he was drugged, imprisoned, and sold into slavery. His narrative provides rare and detailed testimony of slave pens in Washington, the markets of New Orleans, and the labor regimes of cotton and sugar plantations in Louisiana. A first edition (later printing) published during the intensifying crisis around national abolition in the 1850s, the work contributed to Northern antislavery discourse by candidly explaining the vulnerability of free Black citizens under federal law and the complicity of national institutions in sustaining bondage. Northup’s reflections, including his observation that cruelty was rooted in “the system under which he lives,” articulates broader antebellum debates over slavery as an institution rather than merely as individual failing.

Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon Northup. New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855. First edition, later printing (twenty-eighth thousand stated on title page). This printing comprises 336 pages and includes a frontispiece portrait of Northup and six inserted plates. Bound in original brown cloth embossed with a scene of an enslaver whipping an enslaved man on both covers, spine gilt-lettered, 12mo.

Issued first in 1853 shortly after Northup regained his freedom, the narrative went through multiple printings and additional editions by 1859, reflecting sustained public engagement with firsthand testimony of the domestic slave trade. The graphic illustrations underscore the publisher’s intention to present the work as a moral indictment of slavery. Ex libris bookplate of historian Arthur M. Schlesinger appears on the front pastedown, accompanied by a penciled inscription on the front free endpaper, linking this copy to twentieth-century American historical scholarship. Frontispiece portrait and six plates present. Original brown cloth as described. No dust jacket, as issued. Some rippling to pages. Binding and text block tight. Overall good. A significant antebellum printing of a foundational slave narrative that documents the kidnapping of free Black Americans and the operational realities of slavery in the nation's capital and the Deep South.

Item #21523

Price: $2,200.00