Life on a Cotton Plantation:
The Cotton Gin and Lowell Cloth
Document 14

Document 14: Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, Solomon Northup, 1853

Solomon Northup was a free-born Black man from New York. His autobiography details how he was tricked into going to Washington, D.C., where he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in southern states. He was held in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana before getting information secretly to his friends and family in New York, who in turn secured his release with the state's aid. Northup’s autobiography includes detailed descriptions of cotton and sugar farming and the cruel treatment of enslaved people on major plantations in Louisiana. In this excerpt, Northup describes the daily traumatic experience of cotton-weighing on Edwin Epps’s plantation.

Vocabulary

Gin-house: The building on the plantation that held the cotton gin machinery

Transcript

… The day's work over in the field, the baskets are "toted," or in other words, carried to the gin-house, where the cotton is weighed. No matter how fatigued and weary he may be—no matter how much he longs for sleep and rest—a slave never approaches the gin-house with his basket of cotton but with fear. If it falls short in weight—if he has not performed the full task appointed him, he knows that he must suffer. And if he has exceeded it by ten or twenty pounds, in all probability his master will measure the next day's task accordingly. So, whether he has too little or too much, his approach to the gin-house is always with fear and trembling. Most frequently they have too little, and therefore it is they are not anxious to leave the field. After weighing, follow the whippings ….

Text-Dependent Questions

How does Northup describe the work experience of an enslaved person on a cotton plantation? What words does he use to give his readers an accurate depiction of the horrors and trauma of slavery?
What are the consequences of having picked too much cotton? Of having picked too little?
What emotions or feelings are described in this scene?

Discussion Questions

Refer to the graph in Document 13. How does Northup’s description of the “weighing” reshape the story you would tell about the graph?

Print document and transcript

Citation“Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853,” Solomon Northup, 1853, Page 167-168Documenting the American South, https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html

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