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

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


In American south, slavery system was deeply existed and slave trade was quite a normal phenomenon in the 19th century. At the end of the eighteenth century, slaves continued to cultivate tobacco, rice, and indigo, which greatly promoted the first expansion of American slavery. Meanwhile, with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, and the subjugation of southern Indians, the movement of the native Indians along the Trail of Tears in 1838, American slavery was expanded to new regions in the South. Slaveholders called it a “kingdom” for cotton, according to Johnson, “they populated the new states of the emerging Southwest — Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana — with slaves brought from the east: 155,000 in the 1820s; 288,000 in the 1830s; 189,000 in the 1840s; 250,000 in the 1850s.”  Domestic slave trade played such an important role for southerners that it is worth historians to pay more attention to it. In order to understand American southern history, focusing on interstate slave trade in American south, Johnson attempts to interpret slave history in another way and renew our understanding of southern history.              

  To understand southern slave history, Johnson considers the relationships between slaves and slaveholders in slave market. Johnson firstly talks about the “chattel principle,” which he means “any slave’s identity might be disrupted as easily as a price could be set and a piece of paper passed from one hand to another.”  That’s to say, a slave’s identity could change as his or her price changed on the market.  Then he points out, “slaveholders and slaves were fused into an unstable mutuality which made it hard to tell where one’s history ended and the other’s began. Every slave had a price, and slave’s communities, their families, and their own bodies were suffused with the threat of sale, whether they were in the pens or not. And every slaveholder lived through the stolen body of a slave.”  For slaves, their bodies shaped their slavery; for the slaveholder, slave bodies were properties with particular values for them. In southern slave market, every slave had a price, which was coexisted with the commercial culture in American south. Under the “chattel principle,” slave owners found justifications for selling slaves and negotiating with slave traders.