Soul by Soul II
Reading: Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Trade (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 78-220.
At the heart of Johnson’s book lays his third chapter, “Making a World Out of Slaves,” in which he explores how slaveholders constructed their identities by buying slaves. Slaves literally made the physical world within which slaveholders dwelled, but, as Johnson argues, they also figuratively made slaveholders fully white, fully masculine or feminine, and fully free and independent. At least such was the “fantasy,” to use Johnson’s language, that slave buyers took into the slave market. The language of slave buying, he says, “transmuted the reality of dependence on slaves into the conventions of slaveholders’ self-willed independence” (88). More specifically, “Slaveholders became visible as farmers, planters, patriarchs, ladies, and so on, by taking credit for the work they bought slaves to do for them” (102) — and also by taking credit for the slaves themselves, should they seem duly submissive and productive.
According to Johnson’s distinctive argument, chief among the commodities purchased on the slave market was paternalism itself. Johnson shows that paternalism was not simply an ideology invoked to defend the institution of slavery. Paternalism was also an end in itself. Johnson makes it clear, however, that paternalism was not as benevolent as advertised: the power of paternalism rested upon real and threatened violence, including both physical violence inflicted upon individuals and emotional and social violence inflicted upon slaves through the slave trade itself.
So powerful were the slave buyers’ fantasies of mastery that slave traders found it profitable and necessary to cater to these fantasies in the slave market. In fact, Johnson shows that the process of “Turning People into Products” (the title of chapter 4) was driven as much by economic factors as by the slave buyers’ desires to purchase slaves who would reflect well upon their masters as paternalistic figures. Traders and buyers invented and imagined plausible histories for the slaves that they bought and sold. (The attributed special significance to the racial characteristics that they believed they could observe — see chapter 5, “Reading Bodies and Marking Race.”) Slave buyers took these speculations, fantasies, and expectations home with them, along with the slaves that they had purchased.
Johnson suggests that these high expectations were never met — that the reality of owning slaves could never live up to the fantasy that led the buyer into the market. He may be exaggerating here: isn’t it likely that some experienced slaveholders internally recognized and conceded the challenges and limits to their power? Johnson goes so far as to declare that “The only slave buyers who could be assured of getting what they wanted in the slave market were the ones who bought slaves in order to torture them” (206). This statement, too, seems hyperbolic, but it also draws attention to the fact that behind the chattel principle lay real human beings who resisted total commodification. Johnson has shown that the master-slave relationship required careful negotiation, from both sides, and that masters had to make some concessions to the humanity of their slave property, lest that property steal or even destroy itself.
Furthermore, Johnson shows that slaves being bought and sold had (and at least sometimes seized) opportunities to shape their own sales. They could send subtle signals to potential buyers in order to either increase or decrease their chances of being purchased. Because the the redhibition laws (in Louisiana) meant to protect buyers, newly purchased slaves could attempt to spoil a sale that had already taken place, should they find their new conditions too miserable to bear. Johnson makes it clear that slaves endeavored shape their own sales only by incurring a substantial risk of being beaten (by the trader or by their new owner), but it seems plausible that they did so with some frequency. (See chapter 6, “Acts of Sale.”)
In its complex whole, Soul by Soul makes a convincing case that “the history of the antebellum South” — or at least the history of antebellum slavery — “was made . . . in the slave pens” (214). The slave trade, and the logic of the chattel principle, cannot be dismissed as incidental to the history of antebellum slavery, even given the fact that many enslaved African Americans during this period were not sold. The slave market loomed as a threat to enslaved families and communities: the master could always put a slave in his pocket by invoking the chattel principle. In short, Johnson persuasively argues that the antebellum abolitionists correctly perceived that “the essence of slavery lay in its worst abuses” –not only in physical violence but in the market itself — “rather than its rosiest promises” (219). He also leaves his readers with the suggestion that white abolitionists appropriated this insight from the “indigenous antislavery of the enslaved South” (219).
April 11th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
The book “Soul by Soul” was an untraditional history of slavery in the United States. Many other historians have explored how slaves were treated on the plantations, but they have not done what Johnson did. Johnson chose to research the actual business of the slave trade. The book gave stories and records of the slave market, but also some shocking details about what slaves did to avoid being sold. Some slaves killed themselves, and even their loved ones, to prevent the traders from turning them into commodity. Also, many others lied about themselves and cut off fingers to decrease their own value, just to stay out of the plantations for a little longer. Overall, this account gave a very different, and interesting outlook of slaves’ transformations from human beings to profit.
April 11th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
I totally agree that Johnson did something other authors had not done. He put such facts in his writing that made me so angry individuals could be treated this way, but yet I wanted to read more. Slaves were trated not like humans, but property that could be sold any day. Slaves made a family become white because the owners no longer had to do the work themselves. Slaves didn’t know where they would be the next day, but they knew they would basically be stepping into a situation similar to the one they were in.
April 12th, 2007 at 7:21 am
The book “Soul by Soul” takes the way we look and our understanding of antebellum slavery to a whole new level. I believe Johnson takes a social historian’s point of view on the antebellum South. Johnson studies the slave pens and the everyday attitudes of slaveholders to fully understand the complex social structure that slavery posed on the antebellum South. As Johnson points out the institute of slavery defined the level one could reach in the South’s social pecking order. A man or woman was not fully independent until they were a slaveholder and even then if they had a debt owed on the slave they could not claim the slave as fully their own. Even being striped of most of their human rights slaves were able to control parts of their lives by manipulate and lying to slaveholders and slave traders. Gaining their trust slave were able to escape and do a multiple of activities generally not allowed to a slave in the antebellum South. Johnson’s “Soul by Soul” took us into the real underbelly of the antebellum South; taking us through the process of turning a human into a slave and the social structure that in produced.
April 12th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Not only did Johnson shed new light on the world that encompassed slavery, but he gave first hand accounts for the cruelty that the slaves lived and died in. He gives examples of how slave traders and holders would evaluate their slaves but also what the slaves themselves were thinking as well. New slaves could judge the situation that they were being sold into by the look of the old slaves, by the difficult of work, and the provisions that the slave holder provided. These slaves knew what was going on around them at all times; it was a matter of life and death for them and Johnson shows that excellently.
April 12th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Johnson wrote “Soul By Soul” and pointed out numerous things about slaves that many of us did not know before. Slaves became the popular market seller. They were not considered people, they were an item that everyone must have. The whites used the chattel principle to rationalize what they were doing. They claimed the blacks were better with them than alone; they felt as though they had to parent the blacks so they could survive. But how could you be a parent to something you can sell without hesitation? The whites used the slaves to gain class in society, the more they had, the better they were, and the more they were worth, the more rich you were. Slaves were used as a commodity, if a white person went into debt, they could just sell a slave. The slaves have always been portrayed as being unintelligent, but Johnson shows us that they actually knew how to manipulate their situation. They could run away, harm themselves, or purposely get themselves returned. The slaves did not know their value the white men placed on them; however, they knew enough of their value to control whether or not they were sold. White men kept books on the value of their slaves, rather than the value of other assets, since slaves were seen as their most precious asset.
April 12th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Walter Johnson wrote a retrospective review of Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll. It includes some great comments on paternalism and slave resistance, in particular. Here’s a link:
http://tinyurl.com/2dm8lz
April 12th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Johnson’s outlook at the slave on the market table and the methods slave traders and owners used to justify this mean of atrocity was much like how the movie Amistad really brought another look to slavery. Growing up all I ever learned was that slaves were brought to America, they were owned, they were freed by the Civil War and then African Americans continued to face adversity up to modern day. There was never much detail into the slave trade itself and like Amistad, Johnson’s book really hits home to what slaves experienced and really challenges the moral fiber of the early American white slaveholder.
April 13th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
The paragraph written on Tuesday:
Slaveholder paternalism was an ideal excuse to try and justify how it was possible to supress a man’s natural rights. To try and break free from this corrupt nature of the white man, enslaved person’s of the time struggled to find unity and brothership for no single one person could maintain an independent way of life. Johnson drove home the fact that the human property rumored to be called “slaves” lived in fear, and that hindered them to make their own revolution and depended on the vanilla faced men of the north to liberate them. Though the market for slave trade made a lot people rich and a lot of people enslaved, it solidified just how real the issue was. Those living under the Chattel Principle did what they could to not fall victim to such a deed. This was accomplished by many a way: running away, self-mutalation, embracing their culture, finding Jesus, and working the minimum without being beaten mercilessly or sold, but not to become an asset either.