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Life Inside The Antebellum Slave Market By Walter Johnson: Chapter Summary

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Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market by historian Walter Johnson focuses specifically on New Orleans during the 1800s. Even more specifically, Johnson drills down to the showrooms were people were treated like objects to be bought and sold. He examines the ins and outs of the slave trade through the activities that took place in these showrooms. The thesis of this nonfiction book is that slavery was caused and supported in large part by mercantilism in that people were commoditized in the same way tobacco, sugar, and cotton were, for example. Unfortunately, the 1808 ban of international slave trade did not diminish this trend, but rather forced it to morph into a domestic slave trade, which led to worse conditions for enslaved persons as cotton became a more powerful market. Another important underlying thesis of this book is that the New Orleans slave market was …show more content…

In the first chapter, Johnson presents the chattel principle. Basically, this principle tied a slave’s identity to his or her worth on the market. In other words, they were their bodies—bodies that were worth a certain price. Johnson argues that without a commercial culture, the slave market could not have subsisted. Due to the nature of commoditization of people, slave owners had to come up with justifications to sell slaves—this also allowed them to keep up a façade of paternalism.

Chapter two examines slave traders when they weren’t trading people. Johnson looks at the other roles and jobs they filled. He also examines the sense of community among enslaved persons that developed during slave markets. Johnson differentiates between the stakes held by auctioneers versus those held by traders, for

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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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In the documents “Considering the Evidence: Voices from the Slave Trade” it shows how the Atlantic slave trade was an enormous enterprise and enormously significant in modern world history. In document 15.1 - The Journey to Slavery it talks about the voice of an individual victim of the slave trade known as Olaudah Equiano. Equiano was taken from his home and sold into the slave trade. He worked for three different families while in the slave trade but what is different about him is that he learned to read and write while being a slave. He traveled extensively as a seaman aboard one of his masters' ships, and was allowed to buy his freedom in 1766.

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However, after reading the book I came away with a completely different view point. The Half that Has Never Been Told, tackles a subject everyone nowadays is scared to even think about let alone write a book on. Baptist takes this side of the debate on head on and does an excellent job providing facts and giving the people the rest of the story and making it historically correct. Baptist’s main point is how the slave trade founded the common day capitalist economy we still use to this day. He provides examples of how slave owners used their power to control the aspects they wanted to control.

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Eli Whitney’s invention helped give slavery a new life in the 1700s and 1800s (11). Eli Whitney was a mechanical engineer, who was the first to invent the cotton gin. The cotton gin is a machine that quickly and efficiently separates cotton fibers from their seeds (2). His machine moves like brush like teeth through the raw cotton, which makes the hard task go by faster. The cotton gin grew to produce a thousand pounds of cotton a day in the 18th century (11).

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The Slave Ship, by Marcus Rediker was wrote in 2007 about the cruel and brutal actions the slaves endured on their journey across the Atlantic Ocean. He states, “this has been a painful book to write, if I have done any justice to the subject, it will be a painful book to read.” Marcus Rediker accomplished exactly that. This book was not only compelling but emotional, heartbreaking, and makes a reader think, how could someone be so cruel to another living being. Within the first couple pages, the book brought me to tears.

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The book "Soul by Soul" talks about one of the largest antebellum slave market that has happened in the South, specifically, in New Orleans. The author, Walter Johnson, describes the slave "pens" of New Orleans to establish a full understanding on how the American slave system worked. While in the pens, slaves were locked in cages or cells. A tight jail for hundreds of slaves with poor sanitary conditions, smells, and noise from all the slaves living together inside the Crammed quarters. Basically, a life as cattle living packed in a stable.

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The detailed descriptions included in primary sources, along with the descriptive and emotional illustrations included in graphic history are crucial elements in studying and understanding the process and history of the transatlantic slave trade. Rafe Blaufarb and Liz Clarke tie both of these together to help readers truly understand this historic tragedy in the book, Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle Against the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Although different than the standard book that may be used, that simply spews information out in an uncreative and somewhat boring way, this book is a tool that can be chosen in classrooms to teach different aspects of the slave trade. Working together, the primary sources and graphic history

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Devin Plascencia HST 2201 Enslavement may have functioned as the single-greatest contributing factor to the economic prosperity of the United States. Even so, enslaved Americans’ experiences were far from singular. Not only did enslaved experiences differ based on the demands of each cash crop – namely tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton – but also based on the size of slaveholding residencies, urban or rural conditions, and the temperaments of individual enslavers. Historical eras also informed differing slave experiences. Making use of evidence from historians Peter Kolchin and Chandra Manning, I argue that the experiences of enslaved Americans differed between the antebellum period and the Civil War.

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