Twelve Years a SlaveSolomon Northup was a free man living and working in New York in the years before the Civil War. He was kidnapped and enslaved in 1841 and freed twelve years later in 1853. He lived the rest of his life as a free man, but the date and nature of his death are to this day unknown. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Ph. D. Cambridge), is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research, Harvard