Book Review

During the first seventy years of this nation's existence, approximately one million enslaved African Americans were forced from the upper South to the newly conquered territories of the lower South. Historians of Africa have argued that the decades after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808 saw a vast expansion of slave trading within Africa. Now Walter Johnson lays open the horrific experience of the nineteenth-century slave market in North America. More than any other aspect of North American slavery, Johnson argues, the slave market—with its bald expression of the "chattel principle" and its complex negotiations between relatively weak and powerful people—captures "the central tension of antebellum slavery."

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Soul by Soul focuses on the New Orleans slave market and is founded on a wide array of sources that include slaveholders' letters, acts of sale, and records of the Louisiana Supreme Court, which only recently became available to researchers. Johnson also draws deeply from published narratives of escaped slaves, "the survivors' stories," finding "traces of the experience of slavery antecedent to the ideology of antislavery." For example, the narratives' frequent fine-grained descriptions of other slaves suggest that slaves approached one another cautiously, anxious to avoid "mistaken confidence[s]" in people who were, after all, strangers.

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