Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

by Walter Johnson

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, African American, Race, Grad School, Politics

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Walter Johnson is Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom and, most recently, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.

Reviews

[Mike Anastasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a crown jewel in American slave studies and opens up doors may historians assumed were permanently rusted shut from history's rainstorms. As part of my graduate school coursework, this review is of Walter Johnson's seminal narrative illustrating slave life in the New Orleans markets.

This book perfectly illustrates the horrors of American slavery, but also represents a shining light in an otherwise infinitely umbral abyss. Johnson observes various slave markets throughout the city of New Orleans, the southern capital of slave important from the late 1600s until 1808 (and probably later). Unlike most narratives, Johnson takes a resoundingly positive approach to handling this delicate material and proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that slaves were able to exhibit agency and a self-guided will that could literally alter the decisions made by their masters, shepherds and eventual owners.

Johnson argues that slaves were able to alter their appearances, gauge their actions and change their auras in a (typically successful) attempt to influence their sales. By refusing to cooperate with ring-leaders, pretend to be weaker or less attractive than they actually were and scream non-stop during viewing parties, slaves were able to keep certain purchasers from bidding on them.

Why does this matter? They're going to be sold anyway, right?

It's not as insignificant as it may seem.

Previous understanding of slave agency was that slaves had only one thing in life worth doing: dying. Johnson's thesis proves that, no matter how futile it may seem in hindsight, slaves were able to exhibit relatively tremendous efforts to alter their sales. Their success may have been limited, but Johnson also proves that word-of-mouth traveled down the chattel lines incredibly quickly; slaves frequently knew more about purchasers than the slave merchant did and they used that information to put particularly harsh or foreign owners off their fancies.

Johnson also sheds tremendous light on the conditions of these slave cells and mortifying details regarding merchandise treatment. At one point, he recalls a story of a slave being boiled in a cistern before being taken out to work a potato hoe in the dead of winter. The slaves' skin boiled up until he was unable to walk any longer, at which point he was left out overnight, where he froze to death.

This book is a must have for any student of American History, slavery or African diaspora and, thankfully, an anchor on graduate level syllabi the world over.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quickly realised that this is an academic book, but this did not put me off. In fact, I found it highly readable - probably because I am just a girlie swot at heart!

The author uses different perspectives and tales which, as well as being interesting, are often rather surprising. For example, they illustrate that slaves often had more choice in their fates than one would have expected, and were often treated as actual human beings, contrary to popular belief.

That said, it obviously does not mean that the life of a slave was wonderful by any means.

Slaves would often run away, but were usually recaptured and severely beaten. Families were torn apart if they could not persuade potential buyers to buy them all.

Solomon Northup (the man who is the protagonist in 12 Years A Slave, the 1853 memoir) features quite often. In one story, he flogs a white man, but his life is saved due to his status as "property".

Ultimately, although I found this book interesting, it always blows my mind that human beings were bought and sold, relatively recently. That is the stuff of the Roman Empire.

[Herman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Academic exploration of a New Orleans Slave market made some interesting, and relevant points such as ..."slaveholders depended upon the world to be relatively constant: they depended upon being in the same bed, answering to the same name, and tasting the same food in the same way when they woke up as they had when they went to sleep. And like anyone else, slaveholders also depended upon their property to help them keep themselves constant over time-They oriented themselves around the expectation that they would have the same things and the same rights over those things when they woke up as they had when they went to bed."....So this shows the strength and problem with this book at it's core its a didactic analysis of slavery and slaveholders worldview with many well-researched examples most from old court cases brought by slaveholders against one another over who cheated or lied to whom regarding this sale of this slave. The problem here is the overintellectualizing of this very emotional subject sometimes the examples given sound too much like the much-discussed painting, The Treachery of Images ("Ceci n'est pas une pipe"; "This is not a pipe"), by the French surrealist painter, René Magritte. Magritte foregrounds and problematizes the way that we attribute significance to images, the idea that an image of a pipe is not the same thing as the pipe itself (or the letters p-i-p-e). It is a representation of a pipe, once removed from its referent, the object to which it refers. So for chapters of this book the author does the same sort of analysis with the slave and the visual grammar that a slave but together at times to shape the slaveholders perception of him, weather to further a sale prospect "My wife is right over there Sir she's a good cook sir, and we would be mighty pleased if you buy us together." or to act dull and uninterested trying to ruin a sale that would not be desired by the slave. Somehow I find describing these things academically while more precise in language somehow makes the book sound in a way inauthentic. Still this and a earlier book I read The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry by Sublette, Ned are the two must read books on this subject I would say although there remain many books I have still to read I found this one to have given a very clear description of the slaveholder fantasy and how it shaped the Southern and US economy.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

What Johnson accomplishes within the structure of Soul by Soul is quite impressive. As the instructor teaching the seminar for which I read this book put it, each chapter is refracted around the chattel principle, but each is distinct in focus and features conflicting perspectives on the principle. Johnson manages to recirculate individuals - slaves, slave traders, slaveholders - throughout each chapter, revealing the workings of the chattel principle through their correspondence, slave/abolitionist narratives, and Louisiana court records.

Johnson declares his intentions with the epigraph that opens the book, a quote from The Fugitive Blacksmith, a slave narrative written by fugitive slave and abolitionist James W.C. Pennington, who wrote, "The being of slavery, its soul and its body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle: the cart-whip, starvation, and nakedness are its inevitable consequences." Each following chapter examines a different facet or sub-principle of the chattel principle, and in the process implicates not only the economic, but ethical underpinnings of the antebellum South in a way that puts the lie to any remotely sentimental depiction of the Old South. A truly remarkable book.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I could rate separately on content and meaning versus writing and readability, this would get five stars for the former and four for the latter. I found it a tough go to read. But I encourage anyone to give it a chance. The thesis, as I understood it, is that slavery is usually considered using a perspective that ignores the agency of the enslaved people. It also usually proceeds from a perspective that slave owners and traders thought of slaves as animals, no different or little different than cattle. Images of naked slaves in loincloths or rags perpetuate this perspective. This book makes clear that on the contrary, and much more damning, those who bought, sold, and kept enslaved people knew them to be fellow human beings, dressed them for sale in suits and dresses, listened to them as fellow humans, and considered their testimony (about themselves, their history, or their former or current owners) before, during and after their sale. Johnson used extensive sources, including slave narratives, slave market records, legal testimony (given during "redhibition" suits that issued from the equivalent of today's "lemon laws"), and slave owner and trader journals and letters. The sources are quoted liberally, and this is both fascinating and overwhelming to read. Stringing together one quote after another demonstrates that Johnson's thesis comes from close reading of primary sources. But it doesn't make for very easy to read prose. This also reads as a scholarly text, not as a narrative non-fiction work, and in fact it might be so (there are also extensive endnotes). I received the book from one of my students, and believe they used it in a class in high school or college. I recommend anyone to read the final chapter, which encapsulates the rest of the book, and I recommend the entire book to anyone interested in the 19th century, or our own, who feels their own education on slavery and the period of slavery expansion (just before the Civil War) lacked depth and rigor.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an academic book. It is rather dry, and it took me a while to get into it. At the same time, the author's horror at the routineness of slavery as a business, and the cost to the actual enslaved human beings, shows clearly. The book is centered on the slave markets of New Orleans (not the auction houses) and how people (slave traders and owners and mostly the slaves themselves) got there and progressed through there.

The character of the Southern slaveholder comes through as, well, horrible. The men were caught up in wanting to appear manly to their social peers and "betters." And they were willing to be brutal to achieve what the author often calls their fantasies of how their lives should be. Of course, the consequences of that fell mostly on the slaves. The slaveholding women, who apparently never went to the slave market but used male intermediaries, don't come across much better, though the author touches on their much less powerful position in the patriarchy.

The jacket blurb, which is also the Goodreads description, summarizes the book well.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnson's book focuses on the American slave trade, looking at the ways, the whos, and hows.



He focues on the traders (including the man who sold Northup) as well as those who were trader and those who brought. It was mostly a man's world. What is most interesting is how some slaves were able to influence sales.



Part of Summer Civil War Reading

[Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading for all Americans, especially those still bent on romanticizing the antebellum south or the “lost cause” of the Confederacy. No one exposed to the pages of this book can be excused for dismissing the severity of this stain on our history, nor the continued anger of its victims’ descendants. It’s an unflinching, sober, un-sensationalized and indisputably documented look at the mechanics of human bondage and the calculated dehumanization needed for turning fellow human beings into market commodities. I couldn’t help seeing comparisons to car ownership: aspirational status symbols, different models and colors and values assigned there on, lemon laws to protect buyers from dishonest sellers - except, substitute humans for cars. And the full knowledge of the actual humanity of their chattel in determining how to control and justify their trade belies the knowing cruelty of pro-slavery Americans. We must all embrace this truth of our past as evidence that the institutionalized racism of slavery was never fully dismantled, if we are ever to have national reconciliation.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Academics who can actually write give me major feelings of jealousy, and Johnson can really, REALLY write. The organising principle of this book - each chapter revolving around the perspectives of different participants involved in a slave sale - meant that a complex subject easily bogged down in detail was immense readable, if still sickening. The book still maintained detail and the harrowing nature of the slave market while emphasising the potential for personal agency amongst slaves and the compounding principles and practices that upheld slavery even when they were contradictory and even when they meant acknowledging the implicit humanity of the people being sold. This is a book that, by virtue of the quality of the writing, transcends the category of historical or academic text to become simply an essential reading experience to help understand not only the history of slavery in America (and the functioning of the chattel principle more generally) but to better understand what it is to be human and de-humanised.

[Sam Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book. Johnson looks at slave auctions and how the process commodified and dehumanized them to mere objects for sale. Assesses the vulnerabilities of slave traders (who based on class and gender, had to achieve upward status based on their sales) and slaves (who were stuck between competing slave traders, but who had some degree of power to manipulate the process). Johnson looks at gender, whiteness, and class and gives us a window into slave markets. The argument that the New Orleans slave trade "made antebellum" America was a bit of a stretch, but still a horrific portrayal of slave sales.

[Lindsey Castle · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be fair, I read this book for school, and there is nothing like reading for class that ruins a good book. I learned a lot, but it was incredibly dry and drawn out.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Admittedly, the slave market is not what contemporary people tend to think of the most when they think of slavery.  It is easy to think of the plantation, and so that is the image that people tend to have.  I suspect I would have liked this author and this book a lot less if the author had been explicit to the reader about the perspective that he brought to bear on the slave market as being an essential place in the negotiation and manipulation of value and communication in the business of the slave trade.  To be sure, slave traders were often viewed as unloved middlemen within the system of antebellum Southern slavery, but like despised middlemen everywhere they served a valuable purpose and this book gives them their due.  Where this book is particularly good is at exploring the way that slaves themselves were able to negotiate meaning as traders attempted to make profits through the usual false representations and buyers sought to uncover the truth, a process in which the slaves had at least some agency even in a dangerous situation where beatings could result either from overly discouraging or encouraging sales.

This book of a bit more than 200 pages is divided into seven chapters.  The author begins with an introduction that discusses the slave as a person with a price, and therefore an ambiguous aspect of both humanity (most of whom do not have explicit prices) and of property (most of which is obviously non-sentient).  After that the author talks about the chattel principle that viewed slave as movable property in the manner of livestock (1) and discussed the business of slave trading and how it was that slave traders sought to profit from buying slaves low and selling them high (2).  The author spends some time examining how the world of white slaveowners, both male and female, was made of slaves and the profits that slaves generated through their labor (3) while also spending some time in how it was that the slave market turned people into products (4).  The author looks at how white slaveowners sought to read bodies and mark race, a process which frequently involved ambiguities (5) and discusses the various acts of sale and how they were negotiated (6) before closing with the book with a discussion of life in the shadow of the slave market (7) as well as an epilogue on the connection between southern history and the slave trade, after which there is a record of abbreviations, notes, acknowledgments, and an index.

The awkwardness of the slave market to contemporary audiences consists in the problem that we have in viewing the slave as simultaneously a person and property in the way that it existed at the time.  It was this simultaneous identity that provided the slaves with agency that other forms of property do not possess.  It was the property status of slave that made the slave market profitable and made the international slave trade a necessary element in preserving the profitability of slavery for states like Kentucky and Virginia and Maryland, but it was the anomalous role of slaves as people with their own wills and interests that allowed them to negotiate at least some aspects of their sale, whether that meant seeking to recruit people to buy them and their spouses to preserve the unity of slave families (always a chancy matter), or whether it meant choosing to look bright and responsive so as to appeal to a likely owner in the same way that an owner went to the market to find a "likely" slave.  In pointing out some of the mysterious and often neglected aspects of slave trading like the problem of lawsuits and of the importance of buying slaves in establishing an identity as a slaveowner and hence an elite member of the Southern aristocracy, the author does good work in putting slavery in a worthwhile context.

[Pam Venne · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

Johnson takes you into the heart of the markets and helps you understand the rationale behind the "purchases" of slaves and the impact that had on the buyers' perception by others in town.

It is a hard read. It is an embarrassing and debasing part of the 'American Dream." Man's continual search for power and wealth has caused more problems around the world than we want to admit. We caused the Dust Bowl era and that has never been totally recovered. We were part of slavery and we must learn from our past that buying and selling other human beings is so beneath us that we end up paying for it long after the official act ends.

May we never go back to a society where our drive for power and wealth overcomes us to this abject state of inhumanity.

[Cabot · Rating 4 out of 5]

A high four stars, and another one from my Old South class. Johnson is one of the pioneers of foregrounding the agency of enslaved people, and this is an excellent example of that. This book shows how performative New Orleans slave markets were, and positions them as a key battleground in the perpetual warfare of slavery and the history of the American South broadly. It’s also well-written/argued, theoretically interesting, and easy to follow.

[Ai Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was fun--well, as fun as a book about enslavement can be. Johnson does a great job of highlighting the ways that the three stakeholders in the slave market engage in that market. Histories of capitalism etc. aren't super my thing, but if they are yours you'll probably love this book--Johnson's writing style is really great and accessible, and his use of sources is interesting.

[Philipp Moeller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Johnson's account of southern slavery captures its inherent contradictions — commodity and individual, economic calculus and paternalist fantasy — like no other discussion of the topic that I have encountered so far.

[Tyler Amick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well done. Johnson provides insightful new perspectives in how to consider the history of American slavery

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite the insightful book.

[Marcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is very difficult to study slavery in the USA. What would have been everywhere 200 years ago is as if it never existed today. And yet the consequences are everywhere from the White House built with slave labor and today inhabited by a first lady who is descended from both master and slave to our prisons filled with black men and the number of black children living in poverty.
Mr. Johnson's writing style is a bit convoluted. He expresses an idea or a principle and then keeps looping back to that principle with examples taken from both the slave and the slaveholder. The question of how men could have thought it a good idea to buy and sell other humans is never answered, of course, because there is no sufficient answer, especially in a country recently founded on the principle that all men are created equal.
To me the book inextricably links the capitalism that we know today with the slave trade. The "market" that Johnson describes sounds very much like the money markets we know today. You had the excess capital of the upper south being sold to the lower south where they would stand a good chance of being worked to death. After 1800, slaves became currency and so the market was pervasive. Similar to today where a house is both shelter and investment.
For me the result has been a dehumanization of labor. I thought that in order to be a slave trader or master, you would have to deny the slaves their humanity. What Johnson's book seems to show is that to be successful, a trader or master , didn't deny slaves their humanity; they had to figure out how to use it to their own ends. A peculiar institution indeed.

[Kati Giblin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by my history major boyfriend. It's always difficult to read and write about the abject horrors of slavery. This book doesn't sugarcoat those aspects, but as other reviews have pointed out, it does a good job of illustrating how slaves could exert limited amounts of agency despite being forcibly transformed into commodities and victims of American capitalism. Their communities were broken down, and then reformed, and I think that's a major theme in black American history.

I also appreciated the sociological perspective that the author brings to this study. He writes extensively about the ways that white southerners used black slaves to define their own social status and form their own identities (which is horrifying). He also does a great job at explaining how black slaves could be made to feel that they are not in control of their own bodies - their bodies were merely commodities to be bought and sold by white Americans. It's a very good thing that this book demonstrates how ingrained slavery was in the local culture. It helps us understand how southerners justified it, and good-hearted people can use this knowledge to make sure it never happens again.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, this book was very interesting! I had no idea that the slave-trading, buying and selling process was basically an economy in itself. It is very chilling to learn what the motivations behind the buying of slaves and how they went through with this.
I like how the book focuses on two distinct groups in the community: the slave-traders/sellers/buyers and the slaves — there was no one else. I also liked learning more about the Chattel principal; I had heard of that term before but I had never knew what it meant.
However, I do not like how Walter Johnson used the term “many” a lot; he never gave an exact amount to the numerical average he was describing. Moreover, Johnson never mentions racism, once in this book. Racism was definitely prevalent in the South during this time, yet the author doesn’t say this is a motivation behind the slave-buying process.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wasn't an easy book to read, but it was worth it. It's academic in style, so it's not a page-turner (except in a few places), but there's a lot of interesting information. This is a deep dive into the antebellum slave market. The author looks at this from the perspectives of the buyers, sellers, and those being sold. There are so many different situations described that it really allowed me to think about what it was like for each of these people and the motivations behind their actions. Without going into gruesome detail, the author captured the horrors, both emotionally and physically of the slave trade simply by laying it all out in a straightforward way. Because of this book, I have a much deeper understanding of this important facet of our nation's history.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Soul by Soul" is a classic work of history - one of the first that truly delved into slavery from the perspective of the slaves. It also provides interesting insight into Southern whites who were not slave owners, and how becoming a slave owner increased their standing in the community.

The focus is on one of the largest slave markets in the country at New Orleans. It is a story that needed to be told. His research is impeccable, the numbers staggering, and the first person stories emotional.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very insightful attempt to describe the attitudes that slave owners had towards potential black purchases. Johnson also accounts for the many tools slaves used in order to avoid separation and being sold. He also describes the atmosphere of the slave purchase it self.

[Brian Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Likely the best book on slavery in the antebellum U.S. I've ever read. The domestic slave trade created these hyper-articulated systems of representation and performance around slave sales and slave ownership that just don't seem to exist in earlier periods and in other places.

[Eric Grunder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some 100,000 humans where packaged, priced and sold at the New Orleans slave market. Johnson takes the reader inside that market through painstaking research that shows not only the hellishness of the place but also how those subject to its horrors found ways to manipulate the system.

[Natasha M · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was amazing. I read it for History before 1877. I loved it. It made me cry.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that manages to balance the agency of the subject while clearly coming off as enraged by the conditions that the subjects had to live under.

[Jewell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A terrific and moving book on slavery.

[Cindy-Rae · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent! Excellent! Best book on the topic. I own it and reread many parts of the book in my research of the subject.