| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Walter Johnson. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1999. Pp. 283. $26.00.

Winner of prizes from his press and fellow historians, Walter Johnson's account of the antebellum domestic slave trade reveals with telling detail the horror of what could be called America's equivalent of the Holocaust. To be sure, unlike Adolf Hitler's death-dealing camps, the objective was to sell and transfer some two million African Americans, chiefly from the Upper South, to buyers in the burgeoning Cotton States. The infamous New Orleans slave pens are central to Johnson's investigations. Yet, as in the twentieth-century Nazi camps, the specter of death was a frequent if unwelcome visitor. Slaves deceptively had to step forward as healthy specimens but then might promptly die, to the distress of inexperienced buyers. Probing fingers and luridly close inspections could not always discover the venereal disease, breast with incipient cancer, tubercular lungs, or heart damaged from overwork. Despite Johnson's elegant evocation of slavery's monstrousness, we will never fully comprehend how its casualties endured the soul-destroying wretchedness of their plight. . . .

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