Walter Johnson Slaves And The Commerce Of The Slave Trade Summary

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“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 …show more content…

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

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