[.ca] Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (ISBN 0674005392)

very informative and specific:
this book was assigned to me as a summer reading book for my advanced placement american history course... after reading the first chapter, i was automatically interested. i wouldn't exactly say i couldn't put the book down, but having to read it was more like an interesting leisure activity instead of a boring read. johnson's use of citing people who reappear throughout the book was very useful because it was more obvious that the horrors of the slave market were true statements from real slaves instead of a general statement without a citation. i strongly recommend this book to people of all ages!!!

tabsaw writes fiction about history:
In his review of Soul By Soul, tabsaw compares Johnson's book about the slave market unfavorably with the WPA interviews taken with former slaves themselves, and claims that Johnson, a skilled and careful historian, presents no documentation for his claims. In fact, a quick examination of a few of the many hundreds of footnotes in Soul By Soul illustrates that Johnson's work is well-grounded in the documentary evidence--much of it from court records and newspapers in which the slaveholders themselves described their world. For example, advertisements for runaway slaves routinely describe the markings on their bodies--ears cut off, whip scars, and the like. The WPA slave narratives are good, but they need to be read (like all historical sources) carefully. For example, the interviewers are all middle class and white, the interviewees are all black and aged, and the interviews take place in the 1930s Jim Crow South, where several African Americans were burned alive, lynched, or tortured to death in public every single week, year in and year out. The interviews take place in a situation where whites own almost all the property and make all the laws and where any white man can kill any black person without fear of prosecution. Does this sound like an environment likely to produce candid information about race relations? I don't mean to say we disregard the slave narratives, but obviously they cannot simply be taken at face value. Walter Johnson is a real historian, while tabsaw is just a neo-Confederate propagandist, searching for something to defend his fantasy of the Old South. As a Southerner myself, I don't find that either shocking or admirable, but Soul by Soul is a great book, and cannot fairly be faulted for such a misuse of evidence.

Well written:
This is a well-written book on an interesting subject. The author keeps the subject moving by the way he has the book organized. It follows in the path by which a slave went from one plantation to the slave market in New Orleans to a new plantation in the Lower South. I enjoyed reading the narrative.

Not what you might think:
In a book that argues that the slave trade itself fundamentally defines American slavery as a whole, a focus on the brutality and inhumanity of slavery would be expected. The tragedy of individuals torn from their families, kept in inhumane conditions in the slave markets, and sold to strangers who likely would physically abuse them is certainly one focus of Soul By Soul. However, Walter Johnson has gone much further than that in defining the slave markets as central to our understanding of slavery. Through creative interpretation of numerous personal and business documents drawn from slave dealers and owners, the court transcripts produced when their bargains went awry, and the haunting memoirs of slaves who either came through the markets themselves or had relatives who did, Johnson shows that the act of buying a human being was profoundly important to the Southern mind in ways that transcend economics or dynamics of power. It is thus not possible to dismiss Johnson_s interpretation with the argument that the majority of slaves never passed through the traders_ hands, so their experience with the market was negligible and therefore of less importance than Johnson would suggest. This is a book less about the experience of black slaves in the market than about the effect those markets had on the white psyche. Johnson sees southern whites as consumers, ready to be marketed to in the modern sense. Traders knew this and were prepared to advertise their wares in ways that would allow those consumerist impulses to be satisfied. The purchase of a first slave for a man just starting to build his fortune was an act of hope; the buyer_s dreams of prosperity rested upon the slave whom he had chosen, in a sense transferring dependence from the slave to the paternalist himself. Wealthier buyers could impose their own fantasies upon their purchases; domestic slaves could bring respectability to a household by relieving the master_s wife from physical labor. Slaves could also establish a master_s reputation among his peers by being _stubborn_ or _unruly_ slaves whom the master could break, establishing his power. They could also embody sexual fantasies, allow a white man to create a role for himself as a paternalist, or simply reflect well on their owner by being _good purchases._ Much as a man may express his desired appearance to others by purchasing a certain model of car, and judges others buy what they drive, so did slaveholders define and judge themselves according to the quality of slaves they owned. Similarly, just as slaveowners defined themselves according to their actions in the market, they also defined slaves_ humanity according to their market value, using racial and physical markers to determine the abilities of their purchases. However, the human nature of their property inevitably led to slave owners being dissatisfied with their purchases; slaves seldom fulfilled the materialist fantasies of their buyers. Violence was the surest response, as slave owners expressed their disappointment with _faulty products._ Slaves could be returned for failing to perform as the traders had promised, but more often they were simply whipped. Presumably, slaves_ common experiences drew them closer to one another, as Johnson argues. However, his sources show that slaves frequently judged each other in ways reminiscent of the slaveholders_ own criteria, that is upon skin color, intelligence, attitude, etc. Arguing that they automatically united against whites is perhaps sensible, but not supported by Johnson_s sources. This however, is one of the few flaws in Johnson_s otherwise insightful analysis.

Disappointing Read:
Slavery in our country's history was grievously wrong, wrong, wrong...but this book was dry, dry, dry. It left out very basic details and was bogged down in the author's repetitive, plodding musings. My mind would drift trying to get through one paragraph (and the paragraphs are quite wordy.) I wanted to soak up this book and its information. Unfortunately, it was just too dull and overwrought, and I came away knowing merely a bit more about the New Orleans slave market than I did going in.