preview

Solomon Northup's Relationship with His Slave Master Essay

Good Essays

In his true-life narrative "Twelve Years a Slave," Solomon Northup is a free man who is deceived into a situation that brings about his capture and ultimate misfortune to become a slave in the south. Solomon is a husband and father. Northup writes:

"From the time of my marriage to this day the love I have borne my wife has been sincere and unabated; and only those who have felt the glowing tenderness a father cherishes for his offspring, can appreciate my affection for the beloved children which have since been born to us" (22).

We see from this passage that Solomon is a loving devoted husband and father. He understands the relationship between a father and his children. Solomon appears through this writings to have been a good …show more content…

Ford preached of "kindness towards each other" (Northup 97). Ford would praise his slaves and servants and in return, the slaves would work hard to please him.

"It is a fact I have more than once observed, that those who treated their slaves most leniently, were rewarded by the greatest amount of labor. I know it from my own experience. It was a source of pleasure to surprise Master Ford with a greater day's work than was required, while, under subsequent masters, there was no prompter to extra effort but the overseer's lash. It was the desire of Ford's approving voice that suggested to an idea that resulted to his profit" (Northup 98).

Reading and writing were not tolerated of the slaves, but Ford would allow a slave the opportunity to own and read a bible. Northup looks back to these as the days as the "bright side of slavery" (103) and would have served him forever had he had his wife and children with him.

Solomon still wanted to return home and to his free man status. There was not a slave who did not want their freedom. No matter how pleasant or nasty a master was, it is human nature to need freedom. In Twelve Years a Slave it does not appear that a master would feel the obligation to care for his slaves from birth to death. In the case of death, it would be from premature death, not death from old age. As a slave lost his ability

Get Access