Solomon Northup Canvas Print

8" by 12" Canvas Print

The staff at Whitney Plantation is honored to host the first public showing of Wesley Wofford’s “Hope Out of Darkness" statue of Solomon Northup, before it is permanently installed in Marksville, Louisiana at the Avoyelles Parish Courthouse in 2026. Northup finally regained his freedom at the courthouse on January 4, 1853.

Solomon Northup was born free in New York state in 1807. He was a skilled violinist, farmer, lumber rafter and landowner. In 1841, he was deceived into taking a job as a musician in Washington, D.C. The men drugged, kidnapped, and sold Solomon into slavery. He was shipped to a New Orleans slave market and would spend twelve long years in bondage at various plantations in central Louisiana, all the while trying to find a way to prove his freedom and contact his family in New York. Northup wrote his story of capture, enslavement, and the fight for his freedom in his autobiography, Twelve Years a Slave. It became very influential in the abolitionist movement and remains one of the most important texts in American history.

Wofford says that his sculpture depicts “the duality of his life – freedom and enslavement.” In his left hand, he holds “a bundle of papers, symbolizing Northup’s free legal documents and his memoir Twelve Years a Slave.”