Solomon Northup is a free African-American man in 1841, working as a violinist and living with his wife and two children in Saratoga Springs, New York. Two white men, Brown and Hamilton, offer him short-term employment as a musician in Washington, D.C.; instead, they drug him and deliver him to James H. Birch, the owner of a slave pen. Northup proclaims his freedom, only to be violently beaten and tortured. He is shipped to New Orleans with other slaves, who tell him he must adapt to survive in the South. Slave trader Theophilus Freeman gives Northup the identity of “Platt,” a runaway slave from Georgia, and sells him to plantation owner William Ford.