Soul by Soul

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner AwardWinner of the John Hope Franklin PrizeWinner of the Avery O. Craven AwardSoul 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.

The focus of this fine book, which is at once doggedly scrupulous and quietly passionate, is the slave market that operated in New Orleans in the years before the Civil War… An area of recent and still tentative study has to do with the effect the slaves had on the people who bought and sold them; to this Johnson makes important and original contributions… In what it tells us about the slaves, Soul by Soul adds more detail to what is by now a staggering body of information. It is in telling us more about what slavery did to the men and women who stood on the privileged side of the divide that Johnson performs his most useful service. Slavery brutalized its victims, but it also corrupted its masters. It was, in every single regard, unspeakable., A forceful reminder that life in the Crescent City after the battle wasn't all toleration… [This is an] elegant and intelligent book., Just when readers might have thought nothing new could be written about slavery, Walter Johnson's behind-the-scenes look at the New Orleans slave market unmasks the brutalities of trafficking in human flesh in a terrifying, unforgettable manner. Mr. Johnson's carefully researched saga picks up after the 1808 U.S. ban on trans-Atlantic slave trading. Far from shutting down slavery, the prohibition simply boosted domestic slave trafficking… Soul by Soul gives context to its content, making it a fascinating 'insider's' view of a world created by slavery., [Soul by Soul has] an interesting and compelling argument… Where Johnson succeeds…[is in] using the New Orleans slave market, its contents and its customers as a way to understand a culture that no longer exists., Johnson's extremely rich and subtle work, the first in-depth look at the slave markets, never lets the reader forget the reality that this was a trade in human beings… Among the most striking and important aspects of the book is the way Johnson makes clear the resistance of enslaved African-Americans to becoming mere items of property… Johnson teaches us that, despite the insistence of white slaveholders that slaves were simply possessions, enslaved African-Americans routinely asserted their humanity and forced slaveholders to take this into account when bringing people to market. At the same time that Johnson keeps the spotlight squarely on the humanity of enslaved African-Americans, he also presents a complicated account of those who went to the markets to buy… Anyone interested in American history must strive to understand something about slavery, and as Johnson shows us, the event of the sale of one human being to another is at the center of the story of slavery. The horror of that transaction remains so powerful that even today descendants of its victims, as well as of its perpetrators, are still trying to comprehend it. Walter Johnson's important book makes a valuable contribution to that endeavor.

Walter Johnson is Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom and, most recently, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.