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Those who had kidnapped and enslaved Northup received no punishment. Later, in New York State, his northern kidnappers were located and charged, but the case was tied up in court for two years because of jurisdictional challenges and finally dropped when Washington, D.C. Birch, was arrested and tried, but acquitted because District of Columbia law at the time prohibited Northup as a black man from testifying against white people. The slave trader in Washington, D.C., James H. His family and friends enlisted the aid of the Governor of New York, Washington Hunt, and Northup regained his freedom on January 3, 1853. He remained a slave until he met Samuel Bass, a Canadian working on his plantation who helped get word to New York, where state law provided aid to free New York citizens who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery.

He was shipped to New Orleans, purchased by a planter, and held as a slave for 12 years in the Red River region of Louisiana, mostly in Avoyelles Parish. (where slavery was legal) there he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold as a slave. In 1841, he was offered a traveling musician's job and went to Washington, D.C.

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A farmer and a professional violinist, Northup had been a landowner in Washington County, New York. A free-born African American from New York, he was the son of a freed slave and a free woman of color. 1807 or 1808) was an American abolitionist and the primary author of the memoir Twelve Years a Slave.