Walter Johnson Slaves And The Commerce Of The Slave Trade Summary

“Slaves and the “Commerce” of the Slave Trade” is an excerpt from the book Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market written by Walter Johnson in 1999. Walter Johnson focuses on the emergence of the inhumane slave trade and its impact on the slavery in his essay. He “explores “the making of the antebellum south” through “the daily history of the slave pens” in the largest North American slave market” (Leigh, Pg.1). Johnson not only offers slaveholders’ perspective of slave trade but also gives an utter importance to slaves’ narratives to this ferocious practice in the essay. Johnson believes that the brutal institution of slavery and the struggle of enslaved African American was most evident in the slave market and it played a crucial role in

the spatial expansion of slavery.
Johnson begins the essay by highlighting the factor that contributed to the reemergence of the dying slavery; the cotton boom or the establishment of “The Cotton Kingdom”.

Although the Atlantic slave trade had already been abolished in 1807, the thriving cotton economy fueled and amplified the interstate slave trade. Johnson also affirms the fact that over a half million of slaves were relocated to the southwest through slave trade who “transformed the depopulated forests of the deep South into the richest staple-producing region of the world.” Johnson states that this inhuman trafficking of slaves exterminated the slave communities and the family. He also mentions that the slave trade forced slaves to commodify themselves which is very emotive. Johnson believes that, despite the extreme measures slaveholders took to justify slavery and ensure its perpetuation, the slave pens where slave trade occurred provided an extremely transparent “nature of slavery- a person with price.” He references the narratives of former slave Pennington “You cannot constitute slavery without the chattel principle- and with the chattel principle you cannot save it from these results” to

establish the point that the slave trade is the root of slavery and that without chattel principle slavery cannot be formed. He also relies on the narratives of other former slaves like Charles Ball, William Wells Brown, Solomon Northup, and John Brown all of whom “put the slave trade at the center of their account of what slavery was and what was wrong with it” to demonstrate that slave trade was the most significant component of the slavery. Johnson also emphasizes that white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Fredrika Bremer, Charles Weld, and Frederick Law Olmsted did not go the cotton field, and legislative chamber to see slavery, but rather went to the slave markets because it provided them imperative knowledge on the nature of slavery that was extremely important to defeat slavery. He also stresses the fact that that the shutdown of the slave pens in 1864 gave way to the abolishment of slavery in 1865.
Johnson also recognizes that slave market was not always the way historians studied slavery. He sources Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery as It Is (1839) that emphasizes on physical abuses, southern newspapers, and runaway advertisement to shed light on slavery. However, he believes that slave trade provided “an entirely different account of relation between master and slave. “Johnson uses evocative language to describe the bitter ironies of slave market where enslaved African Americans were “alienated… from their own bodies” and forced “to perform their own commodification”” (Wolff Pg. 1). Throughout the essay, Johnson presents various examples that demonstrates the interdependence of slavery and the slave market to persuade the audience that slavery was most apparent in the slave markets. He acknowledges former slaves narratives and gives them an utter importance to draw the conclusion that the slave market is the focal point to understand the brutal institution of slavery and its expansion. By centralizing the slave trade and analyzing it’s meaning to both the slaveholders’ and slaves, Johnson establishes that it is the most important aspect of slavery in his essay.