Twelve Years Of A Slave And Betty Cofer: A Comparative Analysis

Often, people view slavery as cruel, inhumane, unjustifiable, and brutal. However, slavery was not as atrocious as believed. Many slaves respected their owners and enjoyed serving them, while others loathed them. As time proceeded, many slaves were freed, unfortunately, many of them were treated as if they weren’t. In the excerpts from Twelve Years of a Slave and Betty Cofer, there is an opposition between how the slaves were treated along with the genesis of slavery, however, the dialect between the two pieces is similar.
To begin, a difference between Twelve Years of a Slave and Betty Cofer was how the slaves were treated. In Twelve Years of a Slave, the narrator, who was Solomon Northup was revealed as a freed man, who was kidnapped by a
In the first narrative, Solomon Northup claimed to be a free black man living in Saratoga Springs: “A resident of Saratoga, where I had a wife and children, who were also free, and that my name was Northup” (Twelve Years 1). Despite his nonexistence as a slave, he was still mistreated because of the color of his skin. He had attempted to demonstrate how equal he was to the white men who were abusing him, however because he was black, he was spdenied the equality that had truly been present. On the other hand, Cofer was born into slavery, meaning her family was involved in slavery for many generations: “Here in 1856, was a born negro girl, Betty, to a slave mother” (Cofer 1). She was a girl, cursed by birth into slavery, and had no choice but to serve to her owners. The two contrast in the genesis of slavery; unlike Betty Cofer, Northup wasn’t born into slavery nor involved in it, but innocently forced into the brutality of the slavery realm because he appeared to be a descendant of slaves, when in actuality he and his family were absent of the slavery his race had to involuntarily endure.
In conclusion, the similarity between Twelve Years of a Slave and Betty Cofer was the dialect, while differing from each other was the way the slaves were treated and the origin of slavery. These narratives show the reader how slavery had different point of views to it. Most of society believe that the people serving their owners hated it, but that was not always the case. By comparing and contrasting these narratives, it gave the different perspectives of slavery. However, it also revealed how horrible our world has treated these people, giving them no voice or the freedom that they