Book Review 413: Soul by Soul

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, by Walter Johnson 283 pages, illustrated. Harvard, $98.32.

In every slave state except one, slaves were personal property and when bought or sold left no more traces in the legal records than the sale of a mule. In Louisiana, slaves were real property and transactions had to be recorded by a notary.

That combined with the fact that New Orleans was the largest slave market left a large body of evidence about what day-to-day life in the slave pens was like.

All slave states had a sort of lemon law -- called redhibition -- that allowed buyers up to a year to force a seller to take back a defective slave or pay compensation for a dead one. Louisiana's redhibition law with more favorable to buyers than most, generating another mass of legal papers, especially in appeals to the state supreme court.

These along with other evidence including slave narratives constitute the evidence for Walter Johnson's "Soul by Soul", a history that treats the slave trade as a "technology of the soul."

In another arresting image, Johnson repeatedly describes slave owners is being "made by slaves," and he provides plenty of evidence that this was so. People who participated in the trade were categorized by society by how they did so.

Buyers claimed to have good eyes that would detect hidden injuries or diseases or bad attitudes like "propensity to run away." Buyers also needed to be able to detect the tricks of the traders.

They were also judged by the kinds of slaves they sought to acquire, whether field hands, house servants or drivers to conduct a carriage and four. A man with no slaves announced his intention to move into a new level of society when he acquired one slave; and if he said he did so to relieve his wife of daily chores, that was a signal that she was to move into a more genteel realm.

Despite the increasingly frantic defense of the propriety of slaveholding as the 19th-century wore on, the business of slave trading continued to have a low social status. Genteel slaveholders often pretended to have nothing to do with it even if they needed to acquire or dispose of slaves. Johnson exposes this pose for the sham it was.

Everyone possessing slaves participated in the trade in some way, including women who were never seen inside the slave pens  -- buildings with blank brick walls 30 and even 40 feet high..

The black laborers themselves were desperate for information with little advantage in acquiring it. Johnson shows that slaves did exchange information, on their home farms, during the long journey south and in the pens in New Orleans. They needed to know the character of who was thinking of buying them, where he was taking them and what he intended to do with them. Work in the cane fields was virtually a sentence of death.

To some extent slaves were able to manipulate buyers, as by showing a propensity to run away if they were destined for a remote plantation and preferred to remain in the city. Sometimes they were able to prevent the breakup of their families, although not often.

There were 4 million slaves in America and in the National Period (1800 to 1860) about 2 million changed ownership with 600,000 entering the trade, which was almost entirely from the declining agricultural states of Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky to Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, east Texas and the parts of Louisiana that had not earlier been given to sugar.

The hunger for slaves in those districts was inexhaustible and what was wanted most were prime field hands -- healthy, strong young men to clear the land. It was a smaller market for trained house servants -- cooks, laundresses, seamstresses, hairdressers and the like; and a much smaller market still for the most expensive slaves, "fancy girls" sold as sex toys.

Some of these beauties went for more than $5,000 when a prime field hand fetched something over $1,000.

Children were hardly wanted that all even though it was usual to put them to work at age 4 or 5. It was thought that they did not repay the cost of feeding and clothing.

It was an information society before the Internet. Traders in the pens attempted to present slaves as individuals, marketing one as a good driver or another as an experienced hairdresser, but their long supply chain forced them to come up with a grading system that was entirely impersonal.

In some court cases, expert witnesses claimed to be able to assess the value of a slave they had never seen simply on the basis of a grade that had been given by some trader who they also had never seen.

The slave pens in New Orleans were an irresistible magnet for visitors from the North, from other parts of the South and from overseas who left pen portraits, watercolors, sketches and oils of what they thought they saw. It may be doubted how well they understood. Even the people in the trade seem scarcely to have understood what was going on, with the slaves in the worst position of all to know.

In "Soul by Soul" at least part of life of the trade has been recovered.