Perhaps one of the most unique nineteenth-century narratives is that of Solomon Northrup, a free black man who was lured from upstate New York to Washington, DC, then kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Northup's narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, offers an outsider's account of the first-hand experience of enslavement as an insider and served as a powerful condemnation of the system of chattel slavery when it first appeared in 1853 (Northup, 1853). Although literate, the conditions under which Northup was taken into slavery prevented him from communicating his whereabouts to his family for twelve years, during which time he was mostly held on remote cotton and sugar plantations in central Louisiana, one of the deadliest regions of the South for  
enslaved people. Northup survived his years of slavery and eventually succeeded in contacting friends in the North who brought him out of bondage.  
Northup's narrative is, in fact, one of the most detailed in terms of factual descriptions of the conditions of the enslaved and the labour regimes imposed upon them in the Deep South:  
I can speak of Slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person. My object is, to give a candid and truthful statement of facts: to repeat the story of my life, without exaggeration, leaving it for others to determine, whether even the pages of fiction present a picture of more cruel wrong or a severer bondage (Northup, 1853).  
Northup became a recognized figure at antislavery gatherings after his return to the North but his narrative was dismissed as too improbable to be true by historians until the mid-twentieth century when the scholars Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon published an authenticated version that restored it to its place among the most valuable and insightful accounts of slavery in the antebellum South (Northup et al., 1968). In 2013, it was made into an Oscar-winning film hailed as one of the most accurate ever portrayals of slavery in American cinema (McQueen, 2013).