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 the first half of the 19th century, the south was transformed from a declining tobacco economy stretched along the eastern seaboard to a thriving cotton economy that reached westward as far as Texas. Accompanying with this transformation, the lives of slaveholders and slaves were also changed. According to Johnson, “the transformation of the slaveholders’ economy brought with it a transformation of the lives of the slaves upon whom it depended. Most important were the separations. The trade decimated the slave communities of the upper South through waves of exportation determined by slaveholder’s shifting demand — first men, then women, and finally children became featured categories of trade.”  In the half century before the Civil War, the back-and-force bargaining of slaveholder and slave was repeated two million times in a pattern that traced the outline of southern history.