27 pages • 54 minutes read
Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
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Introduction-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary: “A Person with a Price”
Johnson situates his reader in 19th century New Orleans, home to North America’s largest slave market. Up to 100 people were crushed into slave pens. Slaves were sourced from Europe and America’s colonial empire. Over the course of four centuries, 10 or 11 million people were shipped to the new world in “one of the largest forced migrations in world history” (8). Importation of African slaves was banned in America in 1808. The price of slaves tracked the price of cotton throughout the 1830s and 1840s, a major segment of the economy of the South. More than 2 million slaves were sold during the Antebellum period (7). The book traces the history of slavery through the biographies of slaves, slaveholders, abolitionists, and original documents: “This is the story of the making of the antebellum South” (18).
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Chattel Principle”
J. W. C. Pennington, an escapee from slavery, referred to the financial value of a slave as “the chattel principle.” In their biographies, slaves such as John Brown and Elizabeth Keckley both recall discussions of their value (20). Slaveholders threatened slaves with the sale of their families, inducing a state of perpetual dread: A quarter of all sales separated husband and wife, and 50 percent destroyed a nuclear family. Even among whites, slaveholders enjoyed a reputation for avarice and dishonesty, as Daniel Hundley recorded in his 1860 account, Social Relations in our Southern States (24). Villanization of slaveholders allowed the rest of the slave trade to proceed unimpeded.
The economy of the South was backed by the slave trade, including 80 percent of security offered in mortgages, collateral, and debts. Slaves also operated a semi-organized system of resistance. Many men and some women fled, though women were less able to survive on the run. Some slaves used escape or the threat of self-destruction to control the terms of their sale. Occasionally this worked, and families remained intact. Paternalism and coercive tactics governed the relation between slaveholder and slave (39). Due to the repetitive routes the slave traders followed annually, slaves could sometimes glean news of family members. Slave songs echo with the memories of poignant partings between mothers and children, lovers and communities (44).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Between the Prices”
Mississippi slave trader John White recorded his slave sales, a practice common among professional and part-time slaveholders. Interstate traders traveled during summer, buying slaves. In transit, slaves were manacled to one another. Other traders, like Bernard Kendig, kept costs low by trading in a single market (50). Slaveholders’ commercial identities were often obscure, and different states had different licensing laws governing the sale of property, including slaves. Local traders and auctioneers were also participants in the slave market. In season, slaveholders would live together, even acting as executor or each other’s wills.
Traders grouped slaves into price categories. Slaves manacled together in itinerant slave “coffles” were evaluated for risk of escape and quickly formed alliances. Solomon Northup of Twelve Years a Slave was not alone in seeking signs of inferiority in his fellow slaves, an inferiority corroborated by slaves’ anonymity upon entering the trade. Slave autobiographies redress this decontextualization. Due to the uncertainties surrounding enslavement, it was difficult to know who to trust with plans of insurrection (72). Escaped slave Charles Ball records numerous conversations with other slaves, which enabled his escape. In 1841, slaves aboard the Creole revolted and sailed for Nassau, based on information gleaned from a network of subversive connections.
Introduction-Chapter 2 Analysis
Johnson locates his reconstruction of the antebellum slave in the slave pen, a specially designed building that housed the slaves and facilitated their sale in a highly systematized way. Subsequent chapters of the book explore the significance of the slave pen from different perspectives, entering more deeply into the world of antebellum slavery. Johnson argues that the slave pen was a microcosm of antebellum society: Not only did its occupants literally hail from an exotic land, but the social hierarchy was worked out at the slave market, as Johnson will show in Chapter 3.
Johnson links the economics of the slave trade with its social structures. Whether it be the division of African families by the slaveholders, or the disrepute of the slaveholders in the eyes of wider society, society developed ways of facilitating economics. The slave pen holds the powerfully divergent forces of social and familial bonds together with business. The yoke of the antebellum slave is not just a burden, it also involves an unnatural pairing. A slave was a “person with a price.”
From the locus of the slave pen, Johnson moves to that of the slave coffle. Dislocation runs throughout Chapter 2, which follows the movement of slaves and slaveholders across the country. Slaveholders would seek to earn a living on the road, while the slaves themselves had been forcibly extracted from their homes and communities. This dislocation was essential to the reframing of Africans and the vindication of their dehumanization in the slave trade. The appropriation of social connections enacted by the slave trade finds a literal equivalent in the chain that binds one slave to another in the coffle. Slavery had denatured the social enzyme, so to speak. Families and communities were split apart, leaving them vulnerable to oppression and colonial ideologies.
Holding this new social “molecule” in place was paternalism. This ideology reframed control as care, destructiveness as economic imperative. In this sense, there is an irony in that those who implemented slavery felt themselves economically or socially bound to do so. Johnson describes the paternal attitude of the antebellum South as “the synthesis of humanity and self-interest” (86). Paternalism was a mechanism for the denial not only of the autonomy of the enslaved, but of enslavement itself. Paternalism flourished through the hypocrisy of social life, reproducing itself as a defense against the unthinkable realities of slavery. Thus, it was not only slaves who operated subversively at the interstices of society. Society itself represented the alienation of the individual.
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