Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market [Paperback]

The focus of this fine book, which is at once doggedly scrupulous and quietly passionate, is the slave market that operated in New Orleans in the years before the Civil War...An area of recent and still tentative study has to do with the effect the slaves had on the people who bought and sold them; to this Johnson makes important and original contributions...In what it tells us about the slaves, Soul by Soul adds more detail to what is by now a staggering body of information. It is in telling us more about what slavery did to the men and women who stood on the privileged side of the divide that Johnson performs his most useful service. Slavery brutalized its victims, but it also corrupted its masters. It was, in every single regard, unspeakable. -- Jonathan Yardley Washington Post Book World A forceful reminder that life in the Crescent City after the battle wasn't all toleration...[This is an] elegant and intelligent book. -- Nicholas Lemann New Yorker Just when readers might have thought nothing new could be written about slavery, Walter Johnson's behind-the-scenes look at the New Orleans slave market unmasks the brutalities of trafficking in human flesh in a terrifying, unforgettable manner. Mr. Johnson's carefully researched saga picks up after the 1808 U.S. ban on trans-Atlantic slave trading. Far from shutting down slavery, the prohibition simply boosted domestic slave trafficking...Soul by Soul gives context to its content, making it a fascinating "insider's" view of a world created by slavery. -- Meta G. Carstarphen Dallas Morning News [Soul by Soul has] an interesting and compelling argument...Where Johnson succeeds...[is in] using the New Orleans slave market, its contents and its customers as a way to understand a culture that no longer exists. -- Matthew DeBord salon.com Johnson's extremely rich and subtle work, the first in-depth look at the slave markets, never lets the reader forget the reality that this was a trade in human beings...Among the most striking and important aspects of the book is the way Johnson makes clear the resistance of enslaved African-Americans to becoming mere items of property...Johnson teaches us that, despite the insistence of white slaveholders that slaves were simply possessions, enslaved African-Americans routinely asserted their humanity and forced slaveholders to take this into account when bringing people to market. At the same time that Johnson keeps the spotlight squarely on the humanity of enslaved African-Americans, he also presents a complicated account of those who went to the markets to buy...Anyone interested in American history must strive to understand something about slavery, and as Johnson shows us, the event of the sale of one human being to another is at the center of the story of slavery. The horror of that transaction remains so powerful that even today descendents of its victims, as well as of its perpetrators, are still trying to comprehend it. Walter Johnson's important book makes a valuable contribution to that endeavor. -- Judith Weisenfeld Newsday Walter Johnson has gone where no historian has gone before: inside the slave markets of the antebellum South...Johnson, through his book, has spoken for the unknown thousands who couldn't speak for themselves...Johnson has given a voice to those voiceless slaves whose descendents owe it to their ancestors to read this book. -- Gregory Kane Baltimore Sun A challenging, eye-opening study that deserves a wide audience...Johnson delves into the contradictions and complexities that arise when human beings are treated as commodities. he gets inside the heads of slaves, traders and buyers in order to explore the desires, fears and strategies they brought to this inhuman transaction...Soul by Soul shines a penetrating light on the brutal heart of the South's peculiar institution. -- Fritz Lanham Houston Chronicle Soul by Soul is a stunning excavation of the past, a book that is sure to be read and debated for years to come. Walter Johnson creates a common identity for the slaves by letting their voices give shape to the narrative. In an age such as ours, so premised on individual liberty, the author performs a kind of moral autopsy on the mindset of slave owning. -- Jason Berry Gambit Weekly Johnson tells us many things about [the] commodification of human beings, some of which you probably know and others that are more surprising...Johnson's book covers wide territory, from the petty encounters of small slave traders to the extraordinary power of slavery in the southern economy. -- Peter Walker Financial Times Johnson provides the fullest, most penetrating examination of the antebellum slave market to date. Using slave narratives, court records, planters' letters, and more, Johnson enters the slave pens and showrooms of the New Orleans slave market to observe how slavery turned men and women into merchandise and how slaves resisted such efforts to steal their humanity. He tracks the slaves from their march to the market to the terrifying moments of sale and adaptation to new masters, places, and work. Johnson's original, important, and brilliantly presented book makes a case for the slave market as "best place to see slavery." It was there that self-interest, concepts of race, and the slave "community" came together to reveal how white men traded their own souls for a stake in human property. An essential book for anyone who wants to understand why slavery matters. -- Randall M. Miller Library Journal This extraordinary study is a flesh-and-blood daily history of the slave market. Johnson takes readers inside the Dixie slave pens and traders' coffles (long rows of slaves manacled and chained to one another)...Using former slave survivors' narratives, letters written by slaveholders, docket records of cases of disputed slave slaves and Southern medical and agricultural journals, Johnson interweaves the voices of traders, buyers, auctioneers and the slaves themselves...The evil business of slavery has seldom been exposed with so much humanity and insight as in this eloquent study, scholarly yet wholly accessible, a compelling cross-sectional microcosm of millions of human tragedies. Publishers Weekly Johnson selected the operations of the market to depict the variegated processes that turned a person into a commodity. Sales could be complicated transactions. Their objects, the enslaved persons, could always ruin value by escape or suicide, and consequently traders and purchasers of people sometimes conceded minimal humanity to placate those in their thrall. Organized with a blessed eschewal of academese, Johnson's work is a superior examination of the speculation in slaves as individuals conducted it. -- Gilbert Taylor Booklist [Johnson] shows that the slaves were able to shape, albeit in small measure, the outcomes of sales...[He] illuminates not just the slaves, but the white Southerners who bought and sold then, offering particular insight into the ways white people constructed their own identities by dreaming of the slaves they would one day buy...A refreshing, elegantly written angle on antebellum slavery. Kirkus Reviews Johnson takes us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest and busiest in the South, and discovers that the buyers and sellers of slaves could easily mix the language and values associated with paternalism and commercialism. Unlike later historians, they saw no conflict between their needs for status and sound business practice...[Johnson] advances the original and potentially controversial argument that to be truly "white" in the Old South one had to own slaves. -- George M. Fredrickson New York Review of Books It is not often that we get an academic monograph as smart and well-written as this one. On almost every page Johnson has something fresh and original to say about the old chestnuts of historical debate: paternalism, honor, miscegenation, slave culture. Soul by Soul reaffirms the importance of making sure our graduate programs remain open to even the most outlandish intellectual fads, which very often are honest efforts to see the world in new ways. -- Lawrence N. Powell New Orleans Times-Picayune What distinguishes Soul by Soul from other recent works on the experience of slavery, and, indeed, the history of the antebellum South, is the innovative use of court records. Johnson...begins by asserting the importance of seeing the moment of sale through the eyes of the people who were sold and not just through the eyes of slaveowners and traders. A careful reading of the voluminous quantity of published slave narratives forms the foundation of the volume but much of the insight comes from an exploration of roughly two hundred disputed slave transactions that were brought before the Lousiana Supreme Court...No research is without flaws, and no scholar impervious to the claim that something should have been done differently. Johnson carefully crafts his narrative to acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of his evidence...By focusing on the moment of sale, and analyzing what it meant to both slaveowner and slave, Soul by Soul establishes itself as perhaps the most innovative work on slavery published in the last twenty-five years. -- Robert Wolff H-Net Reviews Soul by Soul is the first modern study to deal specifically with the workings of the American slave market. This is the subject that the defenders of slavery preferred not to discuss. Instead, they liked to emphasize the paternalistic aspects of slavery--the natural bonds linking master and servant and the cradle-to-grave care that distinguished the lot of the Southern bondsman from that of the Northern "wage slave"...This is an important book, well researched and clearly written. It describes how slaves were bought and sold, and what these transactions meant for the parties involved. It shows that, even at the best of times, slaves lived in the shadow of the slave market. -- Howard Temperley Times Literary Supplement Soul By Soul is an important contribution to the historiography of slavery. -- Adam Linker Blackbookshelf.com 20010301 This book should not be read in part or assigned as a casual reference. It stands as a whole, an effort...

This work 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 the reader inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced and sold, the author 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 interdependencies among those involved. Using recently discovered material, 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. Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism and resistance in the slave market.