A Person With a Price

Walter Johnson. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 283pp.

Stepping carefully around the historians' traditional arguments about the paternalism or capitalism of antebellum slavery, sliding quickly away from describing slavery in the field, the house or the cabin, Walter Johnson moves us down the road south and westward with a slave trader and a slave coffle to New Orleans. He takes us over a 20 foot fence into a slave pen where a sale is taking place. Circling around the freeze-frame of three people - a trader, a slave and a buyer - focusing in on each in turn, he shows us the story of how each arrived at this moment in time, their conflicting perspectives of and expectations for this sale, their attempts and failures to learn about each other so as to gain the advantage in this moment. His intention is to show us how it is here, in the slave sale, that the history of slavery, the history of the antebellum South was written, two million times. 

Interstate sales by traders were about two/thirds of that two million and those that took place in the New Orleans slave pens left a remarkable record. In Louisiana, slave sales had to be recorded; inevitably, there were disputed sales. In the 1980s, court case records of disputed sales from the Louisiana Supreme Court were discovered with their testimonies from buyers, traders. By triangulating these records with the nineteenth century slave narratives descriptions of sales and the letters and business records of the buyers and traders, Johnson shows us the asymmetric information, expectations and power in the slave sale. Through their business records, advertisements and letters, we read how the traders developed ideal categories for characterizing real slave bodies. Through letters to family and friends and in court testimony, we read the buyers' fantasies that, through slave purchases, they will become the powerfully masculine, savvy, honorable and beneficent masters they want to be. And from the escaped slave narratives, we sense the fear of the slave who has been or is in danger of being stolen from the familiarity of family and community, facing an unknown future, desperately weighing the instructions of the trader and the confidences of his fellows against the unknown future demands of the buyer facing him, trying to read those demands in his face and his questions.

Johnson's ground-breaking argument is that the nature of antebellum slavery can best be understood through the slave sale. A slave is a "person with a price." The threat of sale was the final ultimatum given by slaveholders even while they disguised it as an act of beneficent management. Sales, however, constructed whites: turning white males into omnipotent masters who could publicly display their expertise, their wealth and their benevolence through their slaves. Sales could turn poor white women into respectable ladies by taking them out of the fields, kitchens, wash houses and nurseries and inter their parlors. Sales made white children heirs to quantifiable estates whether any slave they inherited was sold or not.

Johnson relentlessly focuses on the sales themselves and the meanings that the participants brought to them and constructed out of them. His theoretical approach is similarly grounded in the data. He resists formal theoretical definitions, employing instead contemporary words and phrases: the nature of slavery was "the chattel principle" (pg. 19), planters "cre for nothing but to buy Negroes to raise cotton & raise cotton but to buy Negroes" (pg. 79) Almost tangentially, usually in the footnotes, he politely dismisses the historians' traditional conversations ove the relations of slavery, paternalism and capitalism or the honor culture of the south. Instead, his attention is on "the meanings that slaveholders [and traders and slaves] themselves attached to the market (pg. 247, n. 78).

Because of its temporary and gendered nature, focusing on the slave market blurs what we can see of women's and communities' experiences in slavery. Women's experiences are not absent but their stories are told more often through the experience of white men and male slaves. The stories of slave communities are limited as well, again because the slave sale was a moment in time. Stories are told of plantation communities being torn apart because of sale, of temporary communities constructed in the slave coffee and slave market and then, back again on the plantation, communities slowly, painfully being re-constructed with the arrival of the new slaves.

This does not preclude studying women's and communities' experiences through the lens of the slave trade and Johnson's findings would benefit significantly from the added perspectives. Studies of slave populations, antebellum enterprises and antebellum political economies could all benefit from Johnson's approaches. His research and analysis has opened up new questions to ask in previously researched areas and new ways of researching the answers.

Finally, by avoiding re-visiting historians' arguments, by avoiding arcane terminology and by telling the stories of all the participants in slavery, Johnson writes in an engaging manner that can appeal to an educated audience beyond the academy.