lavery as brutal, unjust and inhuman, and these are most likely Northup's opinions alone, as there is no evidence that Wilson was ever an abolitionist. The book is dedicated to Harriet Beecher Stowe and begins with a quotation from an anti-slavery poem by Cowper. Though Northup's stated objective at the beginning of the narrative is somewhat muted ("to give a candid and truthful statement of facts... leaving it to others to determine, whether even the pages of fiction present a picture of more cruel wrong or a severer bondage") as his story unfolds, the language becomes clearer and more decisive, as the facts of what Northup endured and witnessed are set out as incontrovertible evidence of the immorality of slavery.Separation is a paramount theme, entwined for Northup who had a free family awaiting his return, rather than a slave family he might have had to leave behind with strategies of survival and plans for escape. Not only Northup's own story, but those of the slaves he met and lived with are included in his narrative,. especially in the first half, which details how Northup was transported from Washington to Richmond and finally to Louisiana, where he was sold to a planter in the Bayou Boeuf area, William Ford. Northup's experience, while not commonplace, was also not unique: of the fourteen slaves on the trip to New Orleans, two others were kidnaped free men, wrested from their families. (The closing of the African slave trade in 1808, as the plantation revolution was taking hold in the Mississippi Delta area, created a voracious appetite for slaves in the deep South. The contemporary decline of the staple-crop plantation system in the Chesapeake area made slaves a profitable export for the Chesapeake states, and Washington, D.C., a logical place to sell slaves, and that profitability no doubt was an inducement to kidnappers.) In Williams' slave pen in Washington, Northup met a man named Clemens Ray, who had long lived ...
