Soul by soul : life inside the antebellum slave market / Walter Johnson

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Contents: ch. 1. Chattel principle -- ch. 2. Between the prices -- ch. 3. Making a world out of slaves -- ch. 4. Turning people into products -- ch. 5. Reading bodies and marking race -- ch. 6. Acts of sale -- ch. 7. Life in the shadow of the slave market
Summary: "Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations to 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 these chilling transactions 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."--Jacket.

1999

19th century

Smithsonian Libraries

Topic: Slaves--Social conditions; Slave trade--History; African Americans--Social conditions; Slaveholders--History; Race relations; Social conditions