Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

Slaves bore the burden of that which society was unconscious of, or disavowed. In the play of social life, slaves enacted the fantasies and dreams of their masters: “[Slaveholder] John Knight was buying a fantasy” (87). Slaves formed an integral part of the “pleasing tableau” (92) of dinner parties and domestic life. The ethical grotesqueness of slavery may have been consciously denied by its practitioners but seems to have found expression in the inflated fantasies applied to slaves. If asleep to the unethical nature of slavery, masters dreamed of slaves. Johnson shows that these dreams were not only economic but also social and distinctly whimsical, as in Miriam Hilliard’s poem (78). Hilliard’s desire is unbounded and hence self-perpetuating, the slave merely the carrier of that desire.

Slaves also carried meaning, as signs of their owners’ social standing and whiteness: “[T]he mark of distinction embodied in their slaves was unmistakable” (92). If slavery made living in a fantasy world possible, it enabled masters to outsource the undesirable to their slaves. A sense of inferiority was one such source of trouble that was satisfyingly disposed of via slavery: “[T]he market in slaves held the promise that non-slaveholders could buy their way into the masterclass” (80). Scapegoating one population of people facilitated the upward mobility of antebellum slaveholders: “[T]hey narrated their upward progress through the slave market” (88). In this way, subjugation and dehumanization were reframed as “prudence” (83). If paternalism saw an opportunity in slavery for social progress, then so did the underclass of women who outsourced their inferior social position to slaves. Kitty Hamilton is one woman who weaponized slavery against patriarchy, furthering her own interests by subjugating others (97).

The alchemical transformation of people into products was in part linguistic. Slave trader David Wise referred to Clarissa, a slave, not as “she,” but as “it,” which “revealed in a word what his business was about: turning people into prices” (118). A key phase in this process was the division of families, with slaves routinely sold “according to sex-specific demand rather than according to family ties” (122). This erasure of the social context of slaves, even very young children, facilitated the dismantling of their identity and dehumanization by the colonialists. The loss of a social context and history isolated and disempowered the individual and served to extricate the slave from his or her personhood in the minds of the oppressors. Finally, the breaking down of the family unit, much like the “breaking” of a slave, was an exercise in mastery, an enactment of power. This performance of power was of course necessary precisely because the oppressors were not truly superior.

The slave trade was riddled with social performativity: “Slaves were expected to act carefully scripted roles” (129). It was not only the slaves who were required to perform their saleable qualities for buyers, who peeked through the windows in the slave pens: “The traders’ stories, redolent with a comforting commonplaces of slaveholding culture, guided the buyers’ eyes to what they were supposed to see” (128). The buyers too were embroiled in the theater, engaging in the slave trade in order to create the impression of wealth and power. They were “constructing themselves out of slaves” (88). Both slave masters and slaves were consciously engaged in fashioning themselves through the slave trade: “[T]he traders’ packaging created slaves who did not previously exist out of the pieces of people who formerly did” (129).