Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market by Walter Johnson (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001) attempts to offer an alternative perspective to the history of slavery in the South. Rather than focusing on plantation life or historical accounts of the region, Johnson offers a meticulous study of the legalities of slavery and gives special attention to the marketplace of slavery. Johnson underlines the normalcy of slavery in the eyes of white Southerners and traders. To traders, the slaves were largely commodities or cargo; to the slaveholders they were potential ways to enrich their plantations or make domestic life easier. "My object is to get the most I can from the property...I care but little to whom or how they are sold, whether together or separated," said one owner, regarding breaking up families for the slave trade (Johnson 39).

Walter Johnson is a professor of history and African-American studies at Harvard University. Soul by Soul is his first full-length work. His career has focused upon the history of capitalism, imperialism, and racism in the United States. Johnson's stated intention is to take a fresh perspective on one of the most written-about periods in American history. He is grappling with a question that he feels few have satisfactorily answered, namely how Americans became so comfortable viewing human beings of a different race as chattel.

Johnson uses court records of slave sales as well as personal accounts over the course of his work. He examines the prices of slaves and the deeds of sale to find clues about the mentality of buyers and sellers. Slaves were actually under warranty as merchandise, and some of Johnson's richest sources of evidence are the legal disputes that arose over slave transactions. Johnson focuses on Louisiana because of the wealth of legal documentation regarding the state. Every state had slightly different laws governing the ethics of slavery, such as the Code Noir in Louisiana which forbade separating children younger than ten from their mothers, although this law was often disregarded as families were 'repackaged' to make them seem more attractive to slave-buyers (Johnson 126). Single women without children, for example, were more in demand than women with children. Slaves were also 'marketed' based upon a view of race as a kind of sliding scale, as to whether they were white, 'griffe' or mulatto (Johnson 126).

There is a sense of double consciousness in the act of selling a human being that Johnson sees in many of the accounts of the marketplace, both in firsthand accounts and also in the accounts of slaves themselves. "Henry Bibb so distanced himself from his own sale that he described his time in the New Orleans slave pens in the third person" (Johnson 162). Johnson sees slavery as an intellectual problem or contraction that had to be worked out and justified by slaveholders and slaves alike. On one hand, it was a legal fact and treated much like the sale of a dog or a cow today; on the other hand the real emotions of slaves were palpable and clearly noted by the slave-dealers, even though they attempted to rein them in and treated slaves like objects.

One obvious objection to Johnson's approach is that his data disproportionately draws from specific states, more so than others. The Louisiana legal system was very different from the systems present even in most other areas of the South, and the complex racial dynamics of the Creole community within New Orleans give the city a distinct character. Johnson also does not merely present the documents he used, such as the legal cases, for the reader to scan as primary sources. He reads them much as one might a work of literature, looking for hidden meanings not immediately obvious to the observer. Johnson, perhaps most controversially, believes that slaves often took part in what he calls 'shaping' the sales themselves, by pretending to be ill if they did not want to be sold, for example, or attempting to seem stronger to avoid being sold to a bad situation. "As many skeptics have put it, 'after all, they were still enslaved.' But placed between subordination and resistance on the scale of daily life, these differences between possible sales had the salience of survival itself" (Johnson 187).

Johnson's book is valuable for the data he brings to light that would be impossible to sift through otherwise. He unearths many details about slavery that the reader would otherwise be unaware of -- although the reader knows that slavery occurred, exactly how business was conducted can seem mysterious, unless an account of the marketplace and the courts are brought to light. His discussion of commoditization of slavery is chillingly convincing because of the way that it parallels how marketing is conducted for other products (including animals) today. Slaves, based upon the projected needs of buyers were marketed as particular 'types' of slaves, and said to have certain character traits that would make them seem to be the 'product' that the buyer world need, whether that was a strong field hand or a good cook. It is hard not to think of how a serviceable car is sold today, or how certain dogs are marketed as having particularly tractable dispositions and thus good for children in the home.