Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

Harvard history professor Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) explicates the central role of the 19th century New Orleans slave market in supporting the Southern slave trade. Johnson’s main contention is that slavery was a tragic “byproduct” of the sugar, tobacco, and cotton industries. Johnson pairs primary sources, such as slave accounts, with bills of sale and slaveholder correspondence in his reconstruction of the antebellum slave trade. Johnson shows how the burgeoning cotton market and the demise of the international slave trade in 1808 reinforced the domestic market for slaves.

Chapter 1 introduces the “chattel principle” through which a person was commodified. This transformation entailed the stripping of identity from a person who became a body that could be priced and sold. The pre-established commercial landscape of the South facilitated this process. Slaveholders developed justifications for the dehumanization, including obscuring it beneath the cover of paternalism. Chapter 2 focalizes the operations of slaveholders, including their itinerancy and the differences between slaveholder and auctioneer. Johnson also tracks the subversive community and communications of enslaved people that stretched across America.

In Chapter 3, Johnson moves on to examine the culture and rhetoric that pervaded the slave market. This ideology was pervasive due to the slave trade’s dominant role in the Southern economy. Plantations and slave pens were filled with the propaganda of patriarchy, honor codes, and notions of white sophistication. Slave traders used this etiquette to discharge their anxieties about their proximity to the humanity of those they were selling as products, and their awareness of the fragility of their own privilege, which was proportionately dependent upon slaves’ subjugation and sale.

Chapter 4 explores the rituals of performance and prurient examination that evolved to validate the sale of human beings. Slaveholders invented categories based on skin color and skills to support their pricing structures. Johnson claims that specific language and conventions were required to legitimize the sale of people. Race is the subject of Chapter 5, which shows how emphasis on “skin deep” physical features helped obliterate the depth of the people sold. Erroneous attribution of certain character traits to physical features reassured traders of their monopoly over the slaves’ humanity. Johnson argues that biological racism enabled the widespread commodification of people.

Chapter 6 reflects on the performativity and power struggles for which the slave market was the stage. Acts of sale suggest that slaveholders and slaves waged war through the manipulation of slave-selling etiquette. Court records show how frequently negotiations devolved into litigation. As an afterword to his exposition of life in the antebellum slave market, Johnson turns in the final chapter to the way slaves lived after they were sold. Many failed to acclimate to the brutal and alienating conditions of plantation life. Violence toward slaves escalated to horrifying extremes as owners realized that their dreams of absolute power were just that.