Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

The semiotics of slavery maintained the social acceptability of exploitation through a kind of societal espionage. Subjugation was not a violation of basic human rights, but a social and economic necessity. Things were made to signify something other than what they were in truth. Encoding took place at the level of language in the neologism “likely,” which was used by slaveholders to refer to the likelihood of slaves to perform as desired: The individual slave stood for the fantasy of his or her buyer. The eroticization of slave ownership was encoded in language through the use of euphemisms such as “fancy” (113). The presence of linguistic codes both obscured obscenity and gestured toward it. An even clearer example of the linguistic codification surrounding slavery is David Wise’s shift in pronoun from “her” to “it” while describing a particular slave girl.

Another clear example of the social codification of slavery was paternalism. As Johnson puts it: “Through the incredible generative power of slaveholding ideology, the slave-made landscape of the antebellum South was translated into a series of statements about slaveholders” (102). The purchase of a slave was typically reframed as “investment, necessity, or benevolence” (88). Purchasing a slave enabled buyers to perform mastery: “[T]hrough the exhibition of their new slaves […] these men came into a higher form of public being” (200).