Cover: Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, from Harvard University PressCover: Soul by Soul in PAPERBACK

Soul by Soul

Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

Product Details

PAPERBACK

$30.00 • £26.95 • €27.95

ISBN 9780674005396

Publication Date: 03/02/2001

Short

320 pages

6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

20 halftones

World

Add to Cart

Educators: Request an Exam Copy (Learn more)

Media Requests:

Related Subjects

Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.

Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders’ letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market’s slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by “feeding them up,” dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage.

Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the “peculiar institution” in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery.

Awards & Accolades

  • Co-Winner, 2001 Frances B. Simkins Award, Southern Historical Association
  • Co-Winner, 2000 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians
  • 2000 SHEAR Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Share This

Suzuki: The Man and His Dream to Teach the Children of the World, by Eri Hotta, from Harvard University Press

Recent News

Black lives matter. Black voices matter. A statement from HUP »

From Our Blog

Photograph of the book Fearless Women against red/white striped background

A Conversation with Elizabeth Cobbs about Fearless Women

For Women’s History Month, we are highlighting the work of Elizabeth Cobbs, whose new book Fearless Women shows how the movement for women’s rights has been deeply entwined with the history of the United States since its founding. Cobbs traces the lives of pathbreaking women who, inspired by American ideals, fought for the cause in their own ways