Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

Format: Paperback Language: English ISBN: 0674005392 ISBN13: 9780674005396 Release Date: January 1999 Publisher: Harvard University Press Length: 320 Pages Weight: 1.00 lbs. Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2" Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders' letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the