Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup is a memoir of a black man who was born free in New York state but kidnapped, sold into slavery and kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana before the American Civil War. He provided details of slave markets in Washington, DC, as well as describing at length cotton cultivation on major plantations in Louisiana.

Before the end of the civil war, over one hundred former slaves had written moving stories of their captivity and by 1944, when George Washington Carver published his autobiography, over six thousand ex-slaves had written what are called slave narratives. No group of slaves anywhere, in any other era, has left such prolific testimony to the horror of bondage and servitude.