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51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not what you might think, September 19, 2001
This review is from: Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Hardcover)
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 Johnsons 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 buyers 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 masters wife from physical labor. Slaves could also establish a masters 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 Johnsons sources. This however, is one of the few flaws in Johnsons otherwise insightful analysis.
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41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
tabsaw writes fiction about history, August 29, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Hardcover)
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.
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51 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
New Paradigm for Slave/Owner Relations in the Old South, February 6, 2000
This review is from: Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Hardcover)
"Soul by Soul" is required reading for anyone interested in the history of the American South. Anyone familiar with the historiography of the antebellum South is familiar with discussions of slaves and owners and "the worlds they made." Genovese, Fox-Genovese, and Sobel, among others, make various arguments about how slaves and owners worked together or in opposition to create the world of the Antebellum South. Johnson convincingly molds this trope into a new paradigm for discussing the relationships of slaves and owners. He argues that the buying and selling of slaves was central to antebullum white culture -- it was through the buying and selling of slaves that white people sought upward mobility and gentility and it was in discussions of these sales (successful and unsuccessful) that whites judged one another. In the end, Johnson reformulates the long-standing trope of "worlds made," arguing that slave owners were "made of slaves": their self-image (and, as important in a pre-modern society, their pubic image) was made of their ability to make shrewd decisions both about the purchase and management of slaves. He also presents convincing evidence that far from being passive victims in the domestic slave trade, African-Americans did, sometimes at great personal risk, influence the terms of their own sale. Johnson's arguments will shape discussions of slaves and slave owners for many years to come. "Soul by Soul" is required reading for anyone who studies the American South.
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