Johnson, Walter

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

Harvard (Cambridge)

1999

OUR SYNOPSIS: Walter Johnson examines North America’s largest slave market, in New Orleans, as a lens for telling “the story of antebellum slavery.” (3) By analyzing the everyday operations of the domestic slave trade, he shows how it structured the economy of the U.S. South, with the New Orleans slave market at its center. Primarily utilizing the narratives of formerly enslaved people, he foregrounds their voices in this story while placing these sources in conversation with legal records, financial records, and enslaver correspondence. He shows that being both person and property structured the life experiences of enslaved people from a young age. They also resisted enslavement and the slave trade throughout their lives, for example threatening to run away or running away for set periods as a negotiation tactic. Johnson strongly demonstrates that the slave trade influenced the entire economy of the antebellum South, underwriting the economic development of the region.

BIG QUESTIONS:

What does the New Orleans slave market reveal about how American capitalism developed?
How did the constant possible threat of sale impact the life experiences of enslaved people?
In what ways did enslaved people resist the capitalist oppression of the domestic slave trade?

FEATURE QUOTES:

“Here the traveling observers and writers found what they were looking for: a part of slavery that could be used to understand the whole of the institution. Slavery reduced to the simplicity of a pure form: a person with a price.” (2)
“Every one of the two million human-selling transactions which outlined the history of the antebellum South provided a way into its deepest secrets: into the aspirations of southern slaveholders and the fears of southern slaves; into the depth of slaveholders’ daily dependence on their slaves, despite claims of lofty independence; into the dreams of resistance that often lurked within the hearts of slaves; into the terrible density of the interchange between masters and slaves, whose bodies and souls were daily fused into common futures in the slave market.” (17)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

Richard Macks, WPA Narratives, vol. 8 (Maryland), 53, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn080/.

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

Connect to Baltimore's prominent role in the domestic slave trade and directly related connections to the New Orleans slave trade market.