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

It is very helpful for us to understand southern slave history through analyzing the relationships between slaves and slaveholders. However, Johnson believes that it is still necessary for historians to put slave traders, buyers and slaves together. According to him, the history of African American slaves in American south “is a story of back and forth glances and estimations, of hushed conspiracies and loud boasts, of power, fear, and desire, of mistrust and dissimulation, of human beings broken down into parts and recomposed as commodities, of futures promised, purchased, and resisted.

It is, in no small measure, the story of antebellum slavery.”  Moreover, he points out, the southern history “begins with the efforts of various historical actors — traders, buyers, or slaves — to imagine, assimilate, respond to, or resist the slave trade, with the desires and fears that gave the trade its daily shape.”  Rather than just discuss the role of slaves, buyers, or traders in the southern slave trade, Johnson explores the interdependence of these agents, as well as their significance in southern slave trade. Johnson argues that the historical writing of the slave history in American south should bring all the participants in together. In fact, in order to understand southern history, he has “tried to understand a slave sale from the contingent perspective of each of its participants — to assess their asymmetric information, expectations, and power, to search out their mutual misunderstandings and calculated misrepresentations, to investigate what each had at stake and how each tried to shape the outcome.”