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.
Themes
The Bonds of Slavery
Johnson shows that slavery comprised more than the literal bonds that shackled together the slave coffles as they trudged toward the slave markets of the South. Slavery for Johnson is generative, with slaveholder and slave bonded together and productive of one another: “[T]he histories of domination and resistance are inextricably intertwined” (188).
It becomes clear from Johnson’s portrayal of antebellum slavery that an insidious aspect of the phenomenon was the way it lived in the mind: “Whether it was brutally lashed across their backs or lovingly implanted in their minds […] slaves were supposed to […] record their masters’ virtues, plans, and power” (213). Physical torture was a way of colonizing the mental life of the oppressed. The slave trade necessitated the systemic denial of slaves’ dignity and depth as human beings: “pervasive violence belies the influential claim that slaveholders were able to exact a sort of unwitting consent from their slaves, a ‘hegemony’” (206). This mental hegemony was essential to the perpetuation of slavery.
Bonds were also integral to antebellum slavery in a social sense. The purchase of people was made profitable not only by their labor, but by the social advancement slaveholding promised and symbolized. This idea was so encoded into the social fabric of the antebellum South that buying slaves became a way of forging friendships: “[S]lave buyers used the moment of purchase to refigure their relations with other slaveholders” (198). For slaves, enslavement meant the disruption of communities and the fracturing of families, in short, the breaking of social bonds.
As the slave trade wore on, a new generation was born into slavery, and slaves were left in wills: “Generation after generation, the Palfrey family was reproducing itself—linearly and laterally—in the slave market” (101). This contractual form of “bond” entailed a shocking substitution of humanity for mercenary transaction. Shakespeare’s Shylock strikes at the heart of the matter by punning on “bond” and demanding his “pound of flesh” as restitution for his money. Shylock makes audiences feel the queasiness of the pairing of social inequality with economic exchange. Slaveholders flagrantly denied such discomfort when they sold slaves to repay gambling and other debts, or bequeathed slaves in their wills. Social bonds had been converted into financial ones.
Categorization of Slaves’ Bodies
If physical chains were one form of yoke that oppressed antebellum slaves, sexuality and gender were also weaponized. The bizarre emphasis upon the categorization of slaves’ bodies was a systematic attempt to erase their inner lives. The strengths of enslaved people were used against them. Skills, abilities, and even physical characteristics were valued commercially. Sexuality was an important locus for control and domination in this society: “[A]n auction [was] a contest between white men played out on the body of an enslaved woman” (113).
If society is a body politic, its pressures are still worked out on the bodies of women in contemporary America, though in a far less violent form. New Orleans slave dealer Theophilus Freeman advertised his power through his relationship with a former slave of his, Sarah Connor, specifically in her “carefully displayed body” (114). The “frail and resistant bodies of their slaves” became vessels for slaveholders’ self-aggrandizing fantasies (116). Women’s reproductive abilities were exploited, as they were bought as “breeders” or midwives (144). The control and domination of slaveholders registered on the bodies of slaves, literally and symbolically.
Categorization of slaves’ bodies served to further dehumanize and divide the enslaved. Not only were children divided from mothers and families torn apart, but slaves were forced to group themselves into categories at the slave pensions. Slaveholders devised further forms of categorization: “negro, griff, and mulatto” (123). The commodification of skin color enforced the dissociation of surface from depth, or rather, slave traders invented categories to invest objectification with false meaning. This charade facilitated social role-playing. Being “‘a good judge of slaves’ was a noteworthy public identity” (137). In slave pens, the purpose of blackness was to highlight whiteness: “The violation of black bodies emphasized the inviolability of white ones” (149). Slaves were routinely forced to dissociate from their bodies to sustain societal fantasies.
The Role of Doublespeak in the Antebellum Slave Trade
Dissembling was verbal as well as physical in the antebellum slave trade. “Doublespeak” is a form of euphemistic communication that is deliberately obscure in order to remain in conformity with social regulations. Slaves in the pens were caught in a verbal double bind during sales negotiations: “If they told a displeasing truth, they might be immediately punished, if they told the traders lies, they might later be held accountable” (173). Yet through skillful diplomacy, slaves could sometimes manage their sale in their desired direction, and if buyers objectified them, slaves also sized buyers up. Yet doublespeak in the slave trade went deeper than verbal negotiations at the point of sale. The system of slavery ran on hypocrisy.
The barbaric acts that characterized antebellum slavery had to be rephrased in socially acceptable terms. Communication surrounding slavery was often indirect, employing qualifiers and euphemisms: “‘Generally supposed,’ ‘appeared to be’: [contemporary participants in the slave trade] drew true attention to the fact that they were speaking doubly, to the fact that there was a polite way of describing such things and another way of seeing them” (114). Slaveholders’ mistreatment of slaves “existed in a state of public erasure […] was unspeakable” (115). Johnson presents the structural domination of one group by another as a war waged through language: “In the contest over defining what it was that was happening, slaveholders had every advantage that considerable resources could support—state power, a monopoly on violence, and a well-developed propaganda network” (30).
