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)

    Central to his book, he attempts to reinterpret the slave history in American south. In order to persuade his reader of his new approach, Johnson discusses how the lives of slave traders, buyers and slaves were closely connected, as well as the role of each participant played in it in detail. He points out, “the slave trade did not begin or end in the same place for traders, buyers, and slaves. For slaves, the slave trade was often much more than a financial exchange bounded in space and time. A slave trader’s short-term speculation might have been a slave’s lifelong fear; a one-time economic miscalculation or a fit of pique on the part of an owner might lead to a life-changing sale for a slave. For buyers, too, the slave market was a place they thought about and talked about long before they entered the confines of the pens and long after they left with a slave.”  Obviously, the lives of slave trader, buyers and slaves should not be separated from each other. Otherwise, it is impossible for us to understand their history in southern states in the 19th century.    

         Unlike W. E. Du Bois who assumed the slaveholders were in an antithesis relationship with their slaves, Johnson thinks historians should explain the slave history in southern states from both sides rather than adopt an one-side perspective. After all, without slaveholder, we don’t know how much profit they could make on slave trade; meanwhile, without slaves, we couldn’t understand how cruel physically and fearful psychologically slaves had experienced. Although historians discuss slave trade a lot from an Atlantic perspective, rarely have they pay attention to domestic slave trade in the United States from three different perspectives. To some degree, Johnson contributes his original insights about the interstate slave market for the lives of slaves.