27 pages • 54 minutes read
Walter JohnsonSoul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 7-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Life in the Shadow of the Slave Market”
Antebellum printers had only two stock images to represent slaves; one male and one female. Slaves and slaveholders were interdependent, both walking a fine line between fantasy and reality. Upon arrival at an owner’s plantation, it would become apparent what kind of master he was. Slaves undertaking unfamiliar tasks were frequently beaten, a punishment that drove the cotton pickers. Sick slaves were not spared and often perished, escaped, or committed suicide.
Some slave owners made a show of displaying a “tough but fair” attitude to their slaves (198). Slave communities formed new alliances and subversive support systems. Slave buying was a social performance that bonded friends and business partners (200). John Knight’s dreams of docile and amiable plantation slaves were thwarted after he discovered that one had been born free—a fact that posed a threat to his monopoly—and several more died during poor weather. Overworked, ill, and resentful, Knight’s real slaves did not match his fantasy, and he closed the plantation.
Unable to buy success at the slave market as they had believed, owners maintained their dominance by force, often taking out their frustrations on their slaves. Twelve-year-old Monday was beaten because his lupus made his nose run (205). Law pitted slaveholder against slave buyer, and in such disputes, holders often accused buyers of mistreating slaves. Doctors and the slaves themselves testified to the mistreatment: Finally, “relations between whites depended on the acts and opinions of black slaves” (213), and slaves “proved unwilling vessels for their buyers’ dreams” (213).
Epilogue Summary: “Southern History and the Slave Trade”
In the 50 years before the Civil War, tobacco gave way to cotton, and the shifting demand for slaves fractured slave families. Politicians considered reopening the African slave trade to lower the price of slaves and perpetuate the market. In compromises between North and South, the slave pen was the locus of slavery, with revolutionary consequences. The relationship between master and slave was rewritten, not in terms of individual relationships, but in terms of “the chattel principle” (218). This ideal became essential to the northern, abolitionist argument against slavery. Gradually, detractors such as J. W. C. Pennington built an argument for systemic change. Finally, the slave pens closed in 1865.
Chapter 7-Epilogue Analysis
Beneath the social surface, real life continued, and Johnson records slaves such as those owned by John Knight “reclaiming their history and identity from their buyer” (196). This war was waged in the linguistic realm. Eliza Smith sought to protect herself from Knight’s designs on her reproductive capacity by resisting the appellation “Mama” (196). This pushed back against the practice of making slaves take their owners’ surnames. Sadly, the mortification of the slave trade entailed the real suffering and death of many slaves. Ultimately, it was this desperate form of resistance that made its way into law sufficiently that the slave trade began to falter. Reality began to grind down slaveholders’ fantasies: “Those, like Robert Nash Ogden, who bought slaves to drive their fancy carriages to town occasionally ended up on the road, walking home after a bruising ride” (203). The economic bubble manufactured through the slave trade was about to burst, as it did for John Knight.
Slaveholders reacted with violent rage, increasingly aware of their dependence upon their slaves for their ill-won superiority: “Accusations of mistreatment” were evidenced by slaves’ bodies, which had formerly signified their owners’ omnipotence. Masters increasingly relied on their slaves’ testimony in legal cases over slaveholding. The balance of power had begun to shift. When finally, the slave pens closed in 1865, the legal dismantlement of the system of slavery became literal. Where once they had been employed in dispossessing a nation of its identity, slaveholders were now themselves dispossessed of a livelihood. The closure of the slave pens did not mark the end of racial injustice, but the beginning of a new “search for freedom” (220).
