Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

“I have read the narratives for symbolic truths that stretch beyond the facticity of specific events.”

For both Brown and Johnson, slavery is mercurial, a many-headed Hydra that Johnson attacks indirectly through his expositions of myriad sources and narratives. Johnson’s readings of historical sources typically grasp at this inherent polyvalence of slavery by drawing suggestive inferences and subtexts out of the historical material.

“The relentless objectification to which slaves in the market were subjected.”

Johnson’s approach to representing antebellum slavery seems to provide a counterpoint to the objectification that characterized the phenomenon. If slavery was a kind of interpretive violence, with a slaves’ value being read in her features, Johnson is careful to avoid perpetuating this violence.

“[The slaveholders’] pre-emptive explanations, lies, and violence betray their awareness of the feelings of the people they sold.” 

Johnson aggregates the testimonies of the slaveholders into a representation of them as inflicting their own interpretive aggression onto those they enslaved. The parallel with Johnson’s own work remains in contention throughout this thoroughly self-reflexive history.

“The slave traders did not ignore or abolish the humanity of the people they categorized and compared and bought and sold. They used it.”

Johnson does not allow his reader to lapse into easy explanations for slavery, such as dehumanization, or racism. Rather, Johnson shows that it was the recognition of slaves’ humanity, and not its obliteration, that poses one of the most threatening ethical problems for the modern reader to parse.

“Conversation had become conspiracy.”

Highly attentive to the linguistic situation of slavery, Johnson circumscribes the historical narratives he cites with metaphors of espionage. If the very being of the slave was on an important level denied, then her speech was still more of a challenge to the reigning powers. Johnson’s focus on language is an important way in which he tethers history to the present.

“‘If I can procure one or two good servants, we may expect to live in a little more satisfaction.’”

This citation reveals the operation of the semiotics of desire in the slave trade. Slaves were, as Johnson argues, invested with the desire of their buyer. Noticeably absent in the logic of this quotation from buyer J. F. Smith is the elision of the servants’ own desires.

“The slave trade as a technology of the soul.”

Johnson’s book represents antebellum slavery in terms of the Christian faith within which it flourished. Though there is a distinct absence of religion in his history, this gap is a notable one. The slave market is figured as the sight of a deal with the devil, the cotton fields as Hephaestus’ forge. Similarly, the narratives of slave drivers are cast in Luciferian light.

“A slaveholder’s desire made material in the shape of a little girl.”

In this poignant yet factual citation, Johnson is attentive to the transformative magic implicit in the slave trade. The whims of buyers are miraculously conjured in the human beings who found themselves in the slave pens. Johnson’s prose is evocative of the dissociation of such events, as well as the naivety and infantile urges indulged in by buyers.

“They bought slaves to make themselves frugal, independent, socially acceptable, or even fully white; they acted in accordance with the necessities of the business or the exigencies of their households; they covered the contingency of their own identities in the capricious promises of paternalism, buying on behalf of the bought; they obscured the dependency of these fantasies with the brutality of their mastery.”

In this powerful quotation, Johnson emphasizes the absolute dependency of masters on their slaves. In outsourcing their inferiority, they had also outsourced their own identities, value, and social standing. Johnson clarifies master and slave are mutually subjugated. This does not diminish the reality of slaves’ suffering, but Johnson shows that slavery was founded on fantasy, however tempting that fantasy might have appeared to those who entertained it.

“The traders had to be […] ready to spin unruly evidence of slaves’ inward feelings back into the comforting conventions of proslavery rhetoric.”

If the slave trade was founded on collusion, then slave traders were the illusionists. Johnson frequently portrays slave traders as charlatans, deserving of their poor reputation, even among whites. Johnson also shows in this quotation how the very being of slaves was a threat to those who dominated them. The violence perpetrated against slaves was, Johnson implies, commensurate with the effort required to ignore their human dignity.

“As the historian Barbara Jeanne Fields puts it, race was a particularly toxic ‘byproduct’ of the southern code of production in the ‘age of Revolution.’”

Johnson concurs with Fields’ case for ideology as a product of economics. Fields seems to imply that racism gained credence due to the economic advantages of exploiting black people’s labor. These unconscious origins do not of course legitimize the conscious (though mad) implementation of slavery, but Field’s insight does show how economics can masquerade as objective truth.

“They suggested that slaves’ skin color could be read as a sign of a deeper set of racial qualities.”

In order to provide evidence for their self-vindicating views, slaveholders invented their own version of slaves’ interiority. Not only did they inflict their interpretation of reality, but in a flourish of performative mastery, slaveholders advertised their slaves’ inner lives on the billboards used to sell them. This is a clear example of Johnson’s view that it was not dehumanization but paradoxically the recognition of slaves’ humanity that is most ethically troubling in slavery.

“[B]uyers thought they could read slaves’ backs as in codings of their history.”

The crude manner in which slave buyers deemed themselves worthy and efficacious readers of slaves’ subjectivity lends weight to Important Quote #1, in which Brown argues for the absolute representability of slavery, the impossibility of signifying the internal experiences of such a huge and diverse group of people in relation to the activities of the slaveholding South.

“Gazing, touching, stripping, and analyzing aloud, the buyers read slaves’ bodies as if they were coded versions of their own imagined needs.”

Slave buyers’ illiteracy in the interior worlds of the people before them facilitated slavery. In their narcissism, slave buyers cocooned themselves in a fiction of their own making. The prurience with which they undertook physical examination of slaves is indicative of the buyers’ projection of desire onto slaves.

“The traders […] charged their slaves with enacting the slave buyers’ fantasies.”

For Johnson, slave buyers fashioned their social selves “out of” slaves, as though another person could be an appendage to one’s persona that conferred social status. Johnson argues that the slaves themselves were forced to perform their ascribed role in the societal fiction. Throughout the South, a concubine slave was referred to as a “fancy,” the liberalization of a verb that denotes whimsical wishing.

“Each step in commodification was also a step in perception.”

Alongside his presentation of the slave pen as a kind of theater, Johnson also suggests that it was a form of peepshow. Beyond the prison windows from which potential buyers could view the human wares, Johnson’s descriptions of physical examinations of slaves conducted by buyers clearly intimate that they were driven by prurient interest. Johnson discusses the play of gazes during the negotiation of a purchase, the investment of the buyer’s desire in the slave, and the slaveholders’ belief in their reading of the human beings that they transformed into slaves.

“The slave market, the central symbol of slavery’s inexorable brutality, in a history of opposition and manipulation.”

The slave pen is symbolic of all the human rights abuses inflicted upon slaves in the antebellum South. It is one locus in which the ever elusive entirety of slavery can be penned, just as the slaves were. This is partly because many slaveholders’ records and slave narratives pertain to the point of sale. Yet this purpose-designed building is also redolent with the ideology of slavery. Resembling a pen for livestock, it highlights the similarity between categories like “mulatto” with “mule,” or workhorse. The identities and language pinned to slaves in the pens were essential to the explicit, knowing, and systematic subordination of one group of people by another.

“The histories of domination and resistance are inextricably intertwined.”

Johnson makes clear his position that slave buyers’ identities were merged with those of their slaves. For Johnson, masters and slaves shared an identity in that slaves took their masters’ surnames, and in the out-of-wedlock children born to enslaved “fancies.” Yet most profoundly, the power that masters wielded over their slaves was invested in the slaves themselves. Without their slaves, masters lost their superiority and hence reacted violently to slaves’ failure to realize their fantasies.

“In the interstices of slavery, in moments stolen from their owners’ demands or the wretchedness of their own situation, those sold by the traders rebuilt themselves and their communities in the shadow of the slave market.”

Johnson envisions slave life at the margins, in the shadows, and in secret. If slavery was a system of signs designed to disempower the enslaved, then life itself was of necessity pushed to the fringes of such a system. Johnson is careful to record this alternate, subversive system of communication and community. Despite being silenced, the narratives of slaves’ lives continued.

“The extent to which the culture of the slave pens was a part of the wider public culture of the slaveholding South.”

Johnson intimates that the slave pen functions as a metaphor for the culture of the antebellum South. The slave pen was a place in which people were dehumanized and reconstituted in the shape of a fantasy. The slave pen made animals of people and used them to deify the profiteers. Johnson shows that both slave and master were implicated in a toxic system of social and economic exchange.

“The extremity of the violence with which slaveholders responded to disappointment suggests the intimacy of their dependence upon their slaves.”

Together with Important Quote #19, this quotation defines Johnson’s argument for the reciprocity between slaveholder and slave. As Johnson points out at the close of the book, slaveholders lost their identities after the slave markets were shut. The extent of the violence is for Johnson correlative with the extent of slaveholders’ paradoxical dependence on the very slaves they produced and sold.

“By the time of the Civil War, southern slaves had a common culture that stretched from Maryland to Texas, a spirited mirror image of the pattern traced by the trade in their bodies.”

Johnson links the body and features of the individual slave, fashioned through labor and migration, with the collective body of slaves. Though the physical bodies of individual slaves were often destroyed through slavery, the collective body of slavery was huge and far-reaching. Johnson appears to suggest that this network of slaves exerted its own subversive power.

“The chattel principle.” 

J. W. C. Pennington argues that the slave trade was at the center of the abolitionist critique of slavery. The dehumanization of slaves by the slaveholders was incompatible with the Christian faith. Yet as Johnson argues, abolitionists may have seized upon the slaveholder as yet another scapegoat for the sins of society. Nonetheless, it was the practice of penning human beings that abolitionists seized on and which contributed to the closure of the slave markets and the dispossession of slaveholders.