Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Summary
This book 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. 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. 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. Johnson thus tells the story of the slave trade from three perspectives (traders, buyers, and slaves), moving away from the demographic map and assesses how the asymmetric information, expectations and power and how each shaped the final outcome. “In the slave market,” Johnson argues, “the central tension of antebellum slavery was daily played out as slaveholders invested their money and their hopes in people whom they could never fully commodify.” (16) 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. In emphasizing the everyday life of the trade (the arrow on the map), Johnson thus shows how contingent the process was; slavery was being pulled apart at the seams even as it unfolded and expanded across the Atlantic and in the American South.

Example: Physical examination of slaves in the slave market – size, skin color, scars, physical carriage – were made meaningful (knowledge) through medical, managerial, and sexual concerns. “In the slave market, the racial ideologies by which slaveholders organized their society were put to work doing the hard work of differentiating commodities and negotiating prices.”

See also: Eugene Genovese, Walter Johnson (2), Leslie Harris,