Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

Johnson shows that slavery comprised more than the literal bonds that shackled together the slave coffles as they trudged toward the slave markets of the South. Slavery for Johnson is generative, with slaveholder and slave bonded together and productive of one another: “[T]he histories of domination and resistance are inextricably intertwined” (188).

It becomes clear from Johnson’s portrayal of antebellum slavery that an insidious aspect of the phenomenon was the way it lived in the mind: “Whether it was brutally lashed across their backs or lovingly implanted in their minds […] slaves were supposed to […] record their masters’ virtues, plans, and power” (213). Physical torture was a way of colonizing the mental life of the oppressed. The slave trade necessitated the systemic denial of slaves’ dignity and depth as human beings: “pervasive violence belies the influential claim that slaveholders were able to exact a sort of unwitting consent from their slaves, a ‘hegemony’” (206). This mental hegemony was essential to the perpetuation of slavery.

Bonds were also integral to antebellum slavery in a social sense. The purchase of people was made profitable not only by their labor, but by the social advancement slaveholding promised and symbolized.