Twelve Years a Slave
Glossary
"
- "Platt"
- The false name Theophilus Freeman assigned Northup at his sale in New Orleans, claiming him as a runaway slave from Georgia. Northup was known by this name throughout his twelve years of bondage in Louisiana, unable to safely reveal his true identity or free status.
- Related: Theophilus Freeman, Solomon Northup
A
- Anne (Anne Northup)
- Solomon Northup's wife, a skilled cook working away from home at Sandy Hill on the morning he was lured away by the men who would sell him into slavery — an absence that meant Solomon's disappearance was not immediately investigated as it otherwise might have been.
- Related: Solomon Northup, Saratoga Springs
B
- Bayou Boeuf
- The Louisiana bayou region where Northup spent the great majority of his twelve years enslaved, encompassing the plantations of William Ford, John Tibeats, and finally Edwin Epps, and the setting for nearly the entire narrative from Chapter 8 onward.
- Related: William Ford, Edwin Epps, Marksville
E
- Edwin Epps
- The cotton planter who owned Northup for approximately ten years, the longest and cruelest phase of his enslavement. Northup describes him precisely — "a large, portly, heavy-bodied man" with "the sharp, inquisitive expression of a jockey" — as a man of casual, habitual violence, especially during the daily weighing of cotton.
- Related: Bayou Boeuf, Patsey, Mistress Epps
- Eliza
- A fellow captive in Burch's pen and aboard the brig Orleans, separated from her two children Randall and Emily during the sale in New Orleans — one of the memoir's most sustained depictions of the specific cruelty of families broken apart by the slave trade.
- Related: Theophilus Freeman, James H. Burch
H
- Henry B. Northup
- A New York lawyer — a descendant of the family that had once owned Solomon's father, whose surname Solomon's family retained — who traveled to Louisiana under a New York state law permitting the rescue of free citizens illegally enslaved, and secured Solomon Northup's legal release from Edwin Epps in January 1853.
- Related: Samuel Bass, Solomon Northup
J
- James H. Burch
- The Washington, D.C. slave trader who purchased Northup from his kidnappers and had him whipped nearly to death for insisting he was a free man, then shipped him south to New Orleans in the custody of his partner Theophilus Freeman.
- Related: Williams' Slave Pen, Theophilus Freeman, Eliza
- John M. Tibeats
- A carpenter to whom Ford, in financial difficulty, was forced to transfer partial ownership of Northup. Tibeats was viciously cruel, attempting to whip and later to hang Northup over trivial disputes about carpentry work — the memoir's starkest early portrait of arbitrary plantation violence.
- Related: William Ford, Bayou Boeuf
M
- Marksville
- The Louisiana town where Samuel Bass posted his secret letter to Northup's acquaintances in Saratoga on August 15, 1852 — the mailing that eventually reached Henry B. Northup and set his rescue in motion.
- Related: Samuel Bass, Henry B. Northup
- Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton
- The two men who befriended Northup in Saratoga with an offer of paid work in a circus, then drugged and delivered him to a slave pen in Washington, D.C. — the confidence scheme that began his twelve years of enslavement.
- Related: The Kidnapping (1841), Solomon Northup
- Mistress Epps
- Edwin Epps' wife, whose jealousy of Patsey — rooted in her husband's abuse of the younger woman — drove her to demand Patsey's punishment even when Epps himself showed restraint, a dynamic Northup describes as making Patsey's daily life "completely miserable."
- Related: Edwin Epps, Patsey
N
- New York's Rescue Statute
- The New York state law permitting the Governor to appoint an agent to travel south and recover a free citizen of the state who had been kidnapped and illegally enslaved — the legal mechanism Henry B. Northup invoked to secure Solomon Northup's release from Edwin Epps in January 1853.
- Related: Henry B. Northup, Samuel Bass
- Northup's Violin
- Northup's skill as a fiddler, cultivated in his free life in New York, followed him into slavery — used first as the pretext for his kidnapping, and later as a rare source of extra income and even occasional travel, as he was hired out to play at dances and parties throughout his enslavement.
- Related: Solomon Northup, The Kidnapping (1841)
P
- Patsey
- An enslaved woman on the Epps plantation and, in Northup's account, "the most remarkable cotton picker on Bayou Boeuf," capable of picking five hundred pounds a day. She endured relentless abuse from both Edwin Epps, who assaulted her, and Mistress Epps, whose jealousy fueled demands for her punishment — culminating in a savage whipping Northup calls the most cruel he ever witnessed.
- Related: Edwin Epps, Mistress Epps, Cotton-Picking Quota
R
- Randall and Emily
- Eliza's two young children, sold away from her separately during the New Orleans slave sale despite her anguished pleading with Freeman to keep the family together — one of the memoir's clearest illustrations of the domestic devastation the trade routinely inflicted.
- Related: Eliza, Theophilus Freeman
S
- Samuel Bass
- A Canadian carpenter working on Epps' plantation who, unlike most white men Northup encountered in Louisiana, spoke openly against slavery. Bass agreed to secretly mail letters on Northup's behalf to acquaintances in New York, setting in motion the legal effort that finally secured his freedom.
- Related: Henry B. Northup, Edwin Epps
- Saratoga Springs
- The New York village where Solomon Northup lived as a free man with his family before his kidnapping, and to which he finally returned after twelve years of enslavement in Louisiana.
- Related: Solomon Northup, Anne Northup
- Solomon Northup
- The narrator and author of this memoir, a free Black man born in New York State, a skilled violinist, farmer, and family man from Saratoga Springs, who was drugged and kidnapped into slavery in Washington, D.C. in 1841 and held in bondage in Louisiana for twelve years before being rescued in January 1853.
- Related: Saratoga Springs, Anne Northup, Henry B. Northup
T
- The Brig Orleans
- The ship that carried Northup and other enslaved people from Virginia down the Atlantic coast and into the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans, a passage during which several fellow captives, including Robert, died of smallpox.
- Related: Eliza, Theophilus Freeman
- The Cotton-Picking Quota (Task System)
- The daily minimum of cotton — never less than two hundred pounds per hand — each enslaved worker was required to pick, with severe whipping as the penalty for falling short. Because pickers as skilled as Patsey could gather five hundred pounds, the quota system meant a slower worker's failure was measured against an unrelentingly high individual bar, not an average.
- Related: Edwin Epps, Patsey, Bayou Boeuf
- The Editor (David Wilson)
- The white lawyer who transcribed and prepared Northup's narrative for publication immediately after his rescue, stating in the opening chapter that his sole object was to give "a faithful history of Solomon Northup's life, as he received it from his lips," and noting that Northup "invariably repeated the same story without deviating in the slightest particular."
- Related: Solomon Northup
- The Kidnapping (1841)
- The act by which two men, calling themselves Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton, lured Northup to Washington, D.C. with the promise of temporary work playing violin for a traveling circus, then drugged him. He woke in chains in a slave pen, the first step of his twelve years of bondage.
- Related: Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton, Williams' Slave Pen, James H. Burch
- The Near-Hanging
- The episode in which Tibeats and two accomplices attempted to lynch Northup after a dispute, leaving him bound with a noose around his neck, standing on tiptoe for hours in the sun to avoid strangling, until Ford's overseer Chapin intervened and cut him down — one of the memoir's most harrowing sustained scenes.
- Related: John M. Tibeats, William Ford
- The Overseer
- The plantation employee responsible for supervising field labor and enforcing quotas, typically riding into the fields on horseback with whip in hand; Northup notes that smaller planters like Epps, lacking enough enslaved workers to justify hiring one, often acted as their own overseer.
- Related: Cotton-Picking Quota, Edwin Epps
- The Slave Pen
- The generic holding facility — in Washington under Burch and in New Orleans under Freeman — where kidnapped and trafficked people were held, inspected, and sold, disguised from the street as ordinary residences even as families were separated and people examined and priced like livestock.
- Related: Williams' Slave Pen, Theophilus Freeman, James H. Burch
- Theophilus Freeman
- James Burch's New Orleans partner and keeper of the city's slave pen, described with bitter irony as "the very amiable, pious-hearted Mr. Theophilus Freeman," who renamed Northup "Platt" and sold him and other captives to plantation owners.
- Related: James H. Burch, William Ford, Eliza
W
- Wiley and Phebe
- A married couple enslaved alongside Northup on the Epps plantation; Wiley's capture and severe punishment after attempting to escape, recounted at length in Chapters 18 and 19, is one of several individual stories Northup weaves into his own to document the range of suffering on Bayou Boeuf.
- Related: Edwin Epps, Bayou Boeuf
- William Ford
- Northup's first Louisiana owner, a Baptist preacher on Bayou Boeuf whom Northup describes as an unusually humane master — "there never was a more kind, noble, candid, Christian man" — though the narrative is equally clear that even a good-hearted man remained the instrument of an inherently brutal system.
- Related: John M. Tibeats, Bayou Boeuf, Theophilus Freeman
- Williams' Slave Pen
- The holding pen in Washington, D.C., described as presenting from the outside "only the appearance of a quiet private residence" while standing within plain sight of the Capitol — the building where Northup first woke in chains and understood he had been made a slave.
- Related: James H. Burch, The Kidnapping (1841)