Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

 Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) 


In African American history, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 was naturally a classic. In that book, Du Bois examines the role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War, when the slaves had been freed and the attempt was made to reconstruct American society. He discussed the struggle of African Americans in reconstruction era with their slave masters, but his approach was “one-sided.” It is so “incomplete” that Walter Johnson argues their history should be “told from the perspectives of all of those whose agency shaped the outcome.”[1] Following W. E. B. Du, Johnson pays his attention to the nineteenth-century New Orleans slave market and attempts to renew our understanding of African American history. Rather than explore the opposition between slaves and their masters, Johnson discusses the slave life, as well as the roles of the participants in the interstate slave trade. In this paper, focusing on his Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, I am going to discuss his contribution to slave history in American south.      [1] Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8.