Analysis

Once again, Northup’s narrative touches on the themes of human dignity and man’s inhumanity to man. Both his white owner and his white protector have caused Platt to suffer unnecessarily—something that does not go unnoticed in Northup’s account. Tibeats, of course, is murderous in his treatment, but Chapin is deliberately negligent. Trapped in the heat of the day and the physical torment of his bonds—with a hangman’s noose still wrapped around his neck—Northup’s thoughts wander to the popular argument that southern blacks were happy in their servitude. No southern slave, fed and whipped by his master, Northup says in the midst of his agony, is happier than a free black man in the North.

Northup also uses this episode as an opportunity to decry the corrupted southern legal system that denied basic civil rights to its black citizens. He points out, “Had he [Tibeats] stabbed me to the heart in the presence of a hundred slaves, not one of them, by the laws of Louisiana, could have given evidence against him.” This obvious injustice is yet another of the ways that slavery strips humanity of its inherent dignity and imposes immorality on all it touches.