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A Brief Summary Of Walter Johnson's Soul By Soul

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Slavery ran the Antebellum South economically and socially from 1810 to 1850. Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul claims that to truly understand the intricate system, one needs to study the clashing perspectives of each of its participants: the enslaved, slave owners, and slave traders. Throughout the book, Johnson immerses the reader and himself into the slave trade through his sources and analyses. Johnson proved his thesis, although the excessive evidence, lack of slave perspectives, and hypocrisy within the book extremely weakened and made his point unclear. Strong arguments and evidence from all three perspectives defended his thesis statement. Each point of view interlinks and is dependent upon one another. Slaves, slave owners, and slave …show more content…

The slave market transformed the outcome of slaves' lives, and it is extremely important to analyze the effect and outcome of it by studying life as a slave and as a slave owner. He is reducing the importance of the perspectives and lives of the slaves by not including their experiences after a sale. By limiting his evidence solely to the slave market, he is preventing readers from understanding that although a sale is simply a way for traders to make money, and for buyers to obtain social and economic status, it is a life-altering moment for slaves. Johnson’s focus on the stories and perspectives of slaveholders created an absence of slave accounts and highlighted the hypocrisy within his writing. In the introduction, he mentioned how a major portion of his sources were slaveholders because they “intertwined with stories about slaves” and that he sought out “slaveholders’ commonsense opinion of the limits of what was possible in the slave pens”. This statement makes it sound like Johnson is implying that he is relying heavily on evidence from the slaveholders because slaves did not have common sense, therefore he could not trust their …show more content…

Again, Johnson did not write one word about how these little girls and women were traumatized for life and what it did to their mental and physical health. These instances occurred many other times within the book, yet these stood out. Intentionally leaving out the victim’s perspective in these stories or an analysis of how it may have affected them, instills a bias in the reader's head that almost excuses the slaveholders and their actions. Although Johnson proved his thesis, the absence of analysis, important perspectives, and hypocrisy weakened his argument and made it unclear. He included a variety of evidence from the different participants in the slave trade which illustrated the intricacy of the Antebellum South. His focus on the slaveholders' accounts rather than the slaves’ de-emphasized the significance of the slave’s stories. This weakened his point that all perspectives need to be analyzed to understand the slave market. Soul by Soul helps readers understand that slavery is more complex than a country-wide act of brutality and racism. It was a power trip, an attempt at paternalism, and a way of transforming humans into the perfect

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In Antebellum America, slavery was a common practice and way to increase economics in the south. In Walter Johnson book, Soul by Soul, he discusses life inside the antebellum slave market, and brings readers on a journey of the human drama of buyers, traders, and slaves. Johnson focuses his research on the New Orleans slave market, where more than 100,000 men, women, and children were priced and sold. He captures the attention of his readers by analyzing these chilling statistics and the brutal economics of trading. He utilized primary documents and accounts to support his research, in order to illustrate to readers how the slave market functioned first hand.

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