Notes

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market by historian Walter Johnson focuses on New Orleans during the 1800s. Specifically, Johnson investigates the showrooms were people were treated like objects to be bought and sold. He examines the ins and outs of the slave trade through the activities that took place in these showrooms. The thesis of this nonfiction book is that slavery was caused and supported in large part by mercantilism—people were commoditized in the same way as were tobacco, sugar, and cotton. Unfortunately, the 1808 ban of international slave trade did not diminish this trend but rather forced it to morph into a domestic slave trade, which led to worse conditions for enslaved persons as cotton became a more powerful market. Another important underlying thesis of this book is that the New Orleans slave market was largely responsible for supporting the slave economy in the South, with thousands of slaves passing through this one market.

It’s important to note, from a historiography standpoint, that Johnson paired primary sources—first-hand narratives by enslaved persons—along with his other sources, such as dockets, letters from slaveholders, and acts of sales, to construct Soul by Soul.

In the first chapter, Johnson presents the chattel principle, which tied a slave’s identity to his or her worth on the market. In other words, they were their bodies—bodies that were worth a certain price. Johnson argues that without a commercial culture, the slave market could not have subsisted. Due to the nature of commoditization of people, slave owners had to come up with justifications to sell slaves—this also allowed them to keep up a façade of paternalism.

Chapter 2 examines slave traders when they weren’t trading people. Johnson looks at the other roles and jobs they filled. He also examines the sense of community among enslaved persons that developed during slave markets. Johnson differentiates between the stakes held by auctioneers versus those held by traders, for example.

Johnson focuses on the culture that the slave market created in chapter 3. Because the market dominated the economy in the South, it existed not only in the fields of plantations but in the rhetoric used to speak about slavery and enslaved persons. Honor, patriarchy, chivalry, and gentility among the white people were all born of and fed by this culture. This culture and rhetoric allowed slave traders to convince themselves that the success of the slave trade was directly linked—and directly proportionate—to their own freedoms because their economic success relied on the success of the slave trade; that economic success meant they enjoyed more freedoms and privileges.

In chapter 4, Johnson examines how exactly one group of people turns another group of people into products. By housing them and talking about them as though they’re products to the group in power, the oppressed group becomes a product, suffering dehumanization. Johnson argues that slave traders created the culture in which slaves were kept and forced to work by the way they talked about enslaved persons.

Johnson then turns to an examination of how race factored into the creation of the slave market culture in chapter 5. For this, he turns to the public sphere to examine the rhetoric that existed in churches, medical journals, and courtrooms, for example. Physical features were associated with mental ability as well as character traits so that, like a bruised apple, slave traders could look at an enslaved person’s body and make claims of that person’s worth. Johnson concludes that without biological racism, the slave market in the South could not have been as prolific, because it was that very practice that allowed people to be commoditized.