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CHAPTER IV FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS
Every human is born to be a human who has a freedom and does not bondage to other people. In other words, they have their own rights. But, as the time goes by,
people develop to be better while the others still in their base position. This causes the difference among them, such as status, position, power and so forth. This
condition is impacted toward society. A group of people starts to control the weak group. They consider the weak group as minority, marginal, and even worst, as
merely as a property or animals. The weak people are not treated as human. This effect causes social issues. It spreads all over the world with its variations of the
issues. Some of them are slavery and injustice. These are portrayed in the novel Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup.
Twelve Years a Slave is a slave narrative which is based on true story of Solomon Northup, a freed African-American who was kidnapped in Washington DC,
held in a slave pen and sold into slavery in the pre-Civil War South in 1841. It is a story of deception, violence and callous disregard for human rights. The American
slave narrative dramatizes how slavery corrupts America’s greatest institutions and thereby threatened to destroy the very social, economic, religious, and political
bedrock upon which the country is founded. Twelve Years a Slave supports the antislavery argument that the institution of slavery undermined and perverted the
institutions of marriage and the family. Slave narratives had a mission: to convert readers’ hearts and minds to the antislavery cause by revealing how slavery
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undermined and perverted the principal institutions upon which America was founded.
4.1 Slavery in America and its Characteristic
Slavery is one of social issues that is discussed in this novel. This novel mainly talks about slave life under masters’ control and oppression. Slavery means
the state of being a slave, a person who is legally owned by another person and is forced to work for them. Slaves are often considered as a property, tool and as equal
as animals. They do not have any rights: they belong to masters wholly. The masters can do anything to them: whipping, beating, even raping them. Everything that
should be done by the slaves is as the master’s wish. One of slavery that happens and gives the impact to the world is in America.
This is one of the worst histories of America. It is due to its association with the race of a particular nation and human rights – on this case is the black people from Africa.
As the result of the slavery in America, black people are often regarded as low class people, uneducated, and treated as if they have no same status and position with the
white people. This social issue decreases the degree of a particular groups or nations. In other words, it breaks the human rights: people are equal.
The slavery in America is portrayed in the Twelve Years a Slave. It shows the reality of slavery that most people, especially white people at the time, consider
slavery as a natural thing. In addition, this novel is based on true story of a Black freed man named Solomon Northup. He is a successful violinist when he is
kidnapped and sold into slavery. Taken from his family in New York State and forced to work on the cotton plantations in the Deep South, he spends the next twelve
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years in captivity until his eventual escape. Deep South is a region which is well- known for its agriculture: plantation of cotton, sugar-cane and others. Most of
Southerners have broad fields and plantations which require a lot of labors to cultivate them. Therefore, the demand of slave – especially from Africa – is
increasing, especially for Deep South and the Southwest. There are so many slaves in the Southern states:
Gradually, agriculture in the Upper South faltered as the soil wore out. Slave owners recognized that they could profit by exporting
slaves to regions of the country with a growing need for labor—the Deep South and the Southwest. By the 1790s, Virginia, Maryland,
and Delaware were exporting more slaves than they imported. From 1820 to 1860, the interregional movement of slaves—from
North to South and especially to the Southwest—averaged each year some 20,000 slaves, partly through planter migrations but
mostly through trading. “For slave children living in the Upper South in 1820, the cumulative chance of being ‘sold South’ by
1860 might have been something like 30 percent. . . . In the exporting states it would have been quite rare [for a slave] to have
survived into middle age without being sold locally or interregionally.
Schneider, 2007: 51-52
On the contrary, in the Northern States slaves are fewer than the Southern States. In fact, many of them are freed by their masters as Solomon Northup’s father,
Mintus experience. Born into slavery in the United States, he ultimately found a sympathetic master in Captain Henry Northup of New York. In 1798, as stipulated
in the captain’s will, Mintus became a freedman. The War of Independence, or Revolutionary War, played a decisive role in turning the tide against slavery.
Inspired by their own newfound freedom from colonial subjugation, many American landowners freed their slaves, many of whom had fought alongside their masters
against the British. Northerners tend to appreciate human rights and racial equality. They have a notion that slavery is a moral issue.
