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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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