Soul by Soul

The "peculiar institution" of slavery has been the subject of any number of historical and fictional accounts. In this pioneering work, Walter Johnson takes a unique approach to the subject, carefully examining the actual "business of slavery." In the period between 1820 and 1860, the slave trade accounted for a significant part of the South's economy. Focusing on New Orleans, the largest slave market in North America, Johnson offers the first in-depth look at the daily life of the slave trade — the buying, selling, marketing, and competition that flourished. In building his narrative, Johnson used the traditional sources of nineteenth-century slave accounts and the correspondence of slave owners. However, it is within recently discovered Louisiana Supreme Court records regulating the sale of slaves that Johnson found the documentation that makes his story come alive: "Captured in the neat script of a law clerk are conversations a century and a half old: visitors describing the physical space of the pens and the bargains they saw made there; slave traders discussing their finances and explaining the daily practice of their business; slave buyers talking about their aspirations, anxieties, and the strategies they used to select their slaves." Soul by Soul is a powerful work illustrating the full brutality of slavery by reducing it down to its "purest form: a person with a price."