Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award Winner of the John
Hope Franklin Prize Winner of the Avery O. Craven Award 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.
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