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Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
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Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders’ letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market’s slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by “feeding them up,†dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage.Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the “peculiar institution“ in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery.
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Product details
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press; 58327th edition (1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674005392
ISBN-13: 978-0674005396
Product Dimensions:
6.1 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.9 out of 5 stars
45 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#186,795 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Walter Johnson’s award winning book, published in 1999, takes a cultural history approach to his study, arguing that the slave market, not the plantation, is the defining feature of slavery in the south. Johnson notes the contradictory nature of the system: the bodies of slaves are assigned a value, but those same bodies are people, not things. Furthermore, in order to do this, slave-sellers use a system of categorization based on physical attributes (skin color, gender, stature). This paradoxical process necessitates the acknowledgement of their individuality as human beings, while, at the same time, it turns them into commodities and property. (Johnson, 5-8) The author also noted that a central piece of his complex argument is slaveholders “often represented themselves to one another by reference to their slaves.†(13) Lastly, Johnson argues that the slaves had some agency in the process by attempting to glean information about their potential owner and in the way they present themselves and answer questions during the sales process. While the historiography on slavery is often written from the vantage point of the plantation or the slave community, Johnson is the first to insist that the purchasing of slaves was fundamental to what slavery was. In this, he differs from historians such as Eugene D. Genovese whose focus is on the community the slaves create. Having said that, Johnson covers some of the same ground as Genovese (paternalism) and influences other historians such as Stephanie Smallwood whose more recent work also talks about the violence of slavery in Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, 2009. Moreover, when it comes to evidence, Johnson primarily relies upon slave narratives. The author does acknowledge that while there are problems with these (amongst which are their obvious use by abolitionists of the day as political propaganda against the system), by using sources produced by slaveholders and visitors to the south along with the narratives, it is possible to interrogate and authenticate the latter. (Johnson, 11) Johnson also relies upon two hundred court cases of disputed slave sales that went before the Supreme Court of Louisiana, letters by slaveholders, and the sales records generated by the slave trade itself. (Johnson, 12-14) In other words, he has a plethora of primary sources, some of which historians in the past had been wary of using. Historiographically speaking, Johnson is following in the footsteps of historian Kenneth Stamp and his highly influential The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South. Stamp argues that slavery was an institution based on profit, not on paternalism (an argument put forward by U.B. Phillips in 1908). However, Johnson was not simply indebted to Stamp; he builds on that argument by showing the importance of the domestic slave trade and arguing (as noted above) that it was the heart of slavery in America by the nineteenth century. Finally, the book has a number of strengths and very few weaknesses. One of the strengths was the books dialectical approach in which the author moves back and forth between the viewpoint of the slave buyer and seller. As Johnson himself notes, he was attempting “to understand a slave sale from the contingent perspective of each of its participants.†(9) As the narrative advances, it spirals around evidence and analysis used earlier, reinforcing the argument. Another area of strength was the fact that Johnson looks at a subject, which has certainly not suffered from a lack of study, but he does so from a radically different vantage point. It is this uniqueness which makes the book compelling and enjoyable. Historian Bertram Wyatt Brown, of the University of Florida, criticizes the author of not supporting his conclusions with his evidence. The reviewer then goes on to say the weaknesses do not outweigh the strengths, thereby undercutting his own criticism. In fact, the evidence Johnson brings to his argument is formidable and does support his conclusions. I find it hard to criticize anything in Johnson’s work. In my opinion, it was a masterpiece that stands the test of time and, fifteen years later, continues to influence how historians view the antebellum south and the “peculiar institution.â€
This title throws some light on the secondary market for slaves in the ante-bellum south. Most of us (myself included) may have assumed that the slave market was much as depicted in Roots, where Kunta Kinte was auctioned off. This was of course the primary market. The secondary market depicted in this book operated more like a used car lot, where prices were determined by negotiating with the slave trader. This was not an easy transaction to maneuver, since, unlike cars, there was no bluebook on slaves. This led to all sorts of criteria, both silly and common sense, to determine valuations. The assumptions of the slave-owning class played into the process, and slaves created mechanisms to influence the sale as well. This last may have been the most interesting observation of the book, at least for me.That said, the book drags. It has a lot of detail, maybe too much. It also seems that the author describes in painful detail a lot of common sense activity on the part of the buyers, sellers and slave themselves. It seems like sophisticated intellectual theories are constructed around normal human behaviors.All in all an informative volume. Not a page turner, but a good, book on a little researched topic..
Before I get into a review of the book, I want to lodge a complaint about the kindle version. There are no page options in this version, and that's really disappointing and aggravating. The kindle technology has been around long enough, there's no reason why this feature is not included. And considering the price of the kindle version, this feature should DEFINITELY be included. Or, at the VERY LEAST, clearly stated in the information page so that someone ordering it would know they weren't able to go by page numbers (especially important when discussing in a class or book club setting).The book itself is an interesting piece of scholarship on slavery through the lens of slave markets. A fascinating look at the process and system created, it's sure to raise as many questions as it answers and pushes the reader to think deeper about the complexity of the slave system. If you're looking to expand your understanding of slavery in the antebellum south, this book provides some great information and means of thinking exactly what informed the functioning of the system.
This is a wonderful account of how the American system of slavery helped to create, shape, and expand the American psyche. The author takes us through the commodification of human-beings by detailing how prices were set, what tricks slave-traders would use to push the merchandise and the difficulties the slaves endured if they did not help to sell themselves. Most refreshing is that the author restores the humanity to those enslaved by citing first-hand accounts of how the slaves would "size up the crowd" and then would feign illness, stubborness or even craziness in order not to be sold to someone who had a reputation for being especially mean or who would take them far away from their families. The author provides a very revealing behind-the-scene look at how the slave markets worked in supplying slaves. Most importantly, we get a fascinating account of how the slaves manipulated the system, the traders, and the buyers to their own advantage. This book goes beyond the usual focus of books on slavery and introduces a broader theoryof how the selling of human beings shaped the American social/political structures even to present day.
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