Soul by Soul, written by Walter Johnson, is an account of life in the New Orleans slave market in the years before the Civil War that leaps from disengaged historical judgment to social and psychological conjecture about the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. The book traces the human history of the slave trade in the United States.
             The central notion of the book is the slave pen; a sort of jail modified for the peculiar needs of the trade and located in downtown New Orleans. Outside the pen, slaves were publicly displayed, dressed in blue suits and calico dresses in the hopes of attracting buyers. Within its confines, slavery was privately negotiated and, according to Johnson, not merely in financial terms. By placing enslaved African Americans at the center of analysis, Johnson shifts the scholarly focus on the slave market from aggregate numerical measures to the chilling day-to-day commerce in human beings. "In the slave pens, writes Johnson, "the yet-unmade history of antebellum slavery could be daily viewed in the freeze-frame view of a single transaction on its leading edge – a trader, a buyer, and a slave making a bargain that would change the life of each." Chains, in a manner of speaking, were always in the process of being imagined and reimagined, manacles broken and reattached in a three-way chattel dance among seller, master, and slave.
             I think what really sets the book apart is when Johnson begins by asserting the importance of seeing the moment of sale through the eyes of the people who were sold and not just through the eyes of the slave owners and traders. Far from the image of the "slave auctions" that figured so prominently in abolitionists accounts, the slave markets cloaked their transactions in civility as they clothed slaves to reflect buyers' desire. Traders displayed enslaved African Americans for inspection in genteel showrooms, set apart from the slave pens in
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