The stealing of enslaved people was also a major economy, involving networks in the North where even free people of color were kidnapped and sold down South. The most famous case was Solomon Northup, kidnapped in March 1841 in Washington, D.C. and taken to New Orleans where he was sold to a planter from the Red River. He was freed in 1853 after twelve long years in bondage.
His 1853 memoir sold more than thirty thousand copies in its first three years and was eventually adapted into an Academy Award winning film. It can now, occasionally, be found on banned book lists, including the list for literature banned from Kansas prisons.
Image description: A first edition copy of Solomon Northup’s book Twelve Years a Slave is opened to the title page. It shows an etching of “Solomon in his plantation suit.”
Source: Whitney Plantation!!
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