Ex Post Facto

Reading: Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Trade (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 1-77.

In the introduction and opening chapters of this book on the antebellum slave trade, Walter Johnson suggests two key arguments. The first argument is quite explicit. Johnson rejects the ideology of slaveholder paternalism by maintaining that the “chattel principle,” the notion of “a person with a price,” lay at the very heart and soul of antebellum slavery, for slaveholders and slaves alike. The chattel principle came glaringly to the forefront of an enslaved African American’s experience, of course, when he or she or a loved one was sold away. But Johnson also shows how the chattel principle played a more subtle role in the daily lives of both masters and slaves, even in the absence of the slave trader.

Johnson’s second argument about antebellum slavery exists in implicit tension with this first point about how the institution of slavery ruthlessly commodified its human victims. Despite the chattel principle, Johnson suggests, slaves did frequently assert their humanity, and slave traders and masters frequently found that they had to attend to and sometimes concede to the humanity of their human chattel. Even though the chattel principle remained inescapably fundamental, slavery involved a complex process of negotiation between masters, traders, buyers, and slaves.

Johnson fleshes out these points in substantial detail, and these early chapters suggest a few key questions:

1. What was the chattel principle, and how did it emerge in the everyday operation of the institution of slavery?
2. How did the chattel principle give the lie to the ideology of paternalism?
3. How did enslaved African Americans resist commodification and assert their humanity, even as they were being bought and sold?
4. How did slave traders acknowledge and deal with the humanity of their stock in trade?
5. How does Johnson’s depiction of slavery and the slave trade fit within the context of what other historians have said on these subjects?