Twelve Years a Slave opens with an epigraph excerpted from “The Task,” a 1785 blank verse in six books by British poet William Cowper. This epigraph declares:

Such dupes are men to custom, and so prone

To reverence what is ancient, and can plead

A course of long observance for its use,

That even servitude, the worst of ills,

Because it is delivered from sire to son,

Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing.

Thus, from the very beginning of the book, Northup primes his readers to consider the ways slavery is passed down as a revered institution from “sire to son,” upheld from generation to generation. So doing, Northup stimulates abolitionist critique not only around the economic institution of slavery, but around the social construction of slavery and the ways its construction is upheld.

Throughout his memoir, Northup exposes the social construction of slavery by revealing every part of the system, including the capture of slaves, their transportation, their sale by market, and the different modes of production on plantations. Northup repeatedly draws attention to the fact that the DC slave pen where he is imprisoned and beaten is located “within the very shadow of the Capitol” (23), suggesting that the law-making leaders of the country turn a blind eye toward injustices happening within their view (indeed, several institutions even in the free North profited from Southern slavery).