Editing Solomon Northup (section)

==Historiography==
Although the memoir is often classified among the genre of [[slave narrative]]s, the scholar Sam Worley says that it does not fit the genre's standard format. Northup was assisted in the writing by [[David Wilson (New York politician)|David Wilson]], a white man, and, according to Worley, some believed he would have biased the material. Worley discounted concerns that Wilson was pursuing his own interests in the book. He writes of the memoir:

<blockquote>''Twelve Years'' is convincingly Northup's tale and no one else's because of its amazing attention to empirical detail and unwillingness to reduce the complexity of Northup's experience to a stark moral allegory.<ref name="Worley"/></blockquote>

Northup's biographer, David Fiske, has investigated Northup's role in the book's writing and asserts the authenticity of authorship.<ref name="Fiske - book" /> Northup's complete and descriptive account has been used by numerous historians researching slavery. His description of the "Yellow House" (also known as "The Williams Slave Pen"), in view of the Capitol, has helped researchers document the history of slavery in the District of Columbia.{{efn|Northup described the slave pen owned by William Williams in Washington: "It was like a farmer's barnyard in most respects, save it was so constructed that the outside world could never see the human cattle that were herded there. The building to which the yard was attached, was two stories high, fronting on one of the public streets of Washington. Its outside presented only the appearance of a quiet private residence. A stranger looking at it, would never have dreamed of its execrable uses. Strange as it may seem, within plain sight of this same house, looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol. The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave's chains, almost commingled. A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol! Such is a correct description as it was in 1841, of Williams' slave pen in Washington, in one of the cellars of which I found myself so unaccountably confined." [http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/20/simmons-slaves-held-in-dc-within-the-very-shadows-/#ixzz2qbAT6x5h "Free blacks kidnapped, sold into slavery in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol"], ''Washington Times'' October 20, 2013}}