Soul By Soul: The Slave Market

The impact of the physical slave market on the enslaved is often underestimated. The slave market was arguably the greatest form of control that a slave master had in his arsenal because it enabled the individual to diminish the slave to subhuman form. As stated by Walter Johnson, “That threat, with its imagery of outsized power and bodily dematerialization suffused the daily life of the enslaved.” Thus, the enormous effects of the slave market were carried by slaves for the rest of their lives. Yet, more went on inside the slave market than merely shuffling individuals through and selling to the highest bidder, which is often the simplified understanding that the majority of society maintains. More specifically, the focus here is how …show more content…
Black individuals and families were coerced and manipulated through a unique combination of torture and discipline which Johnson refers to as “paternalism” and the entire Southern economy was propped up on a foundation that any and all slaves could be assigned a monetary value. Furthermore, slaves were taught to understand that at any moment they could be sold as quickly as they were purchased. The purchasing of slaves held the potential to move up the social ladder for white males which brought social recognition (e.g., judgment by other slaveholders) and honor through slave making. Thus, the slave market demonstrates the vast complexity of what Theodore Dwight Weld in American Slavery as It Is (1839) termed “peculiar …show more content…
This understanding was most clearly demonstrated through the concept of the chattel principle in which slaves were considered living property and this was forced into them not only by the whip but also psychologically. For example, Maria Perkins pled to her enslaved husband to find someone to buy her because she was facing a possible trade to a new slaveholder saying, “I want you to tell dr Hamelton or your master if either will buy me they can attend to it know and then I can go after wards” demonstrating not only the terror of the slave pens and the imbued understanding of one’s body as a mere object. According to Johnson, since slaves were considered chattel property they were forced to undergo inspections or even perform for buyers and sellers inside the slave markets. However, the evidence for this assertion is lacking given the available resources, but Ely does articulate how there were “as many as forty enslaved men handcuffed to either side of a long chain, women and children walking unmanacled, ailing slaves in wagons” with the rest of the slave trading crew in tow. These accounts undoubtedly illustrate the horrid conditions of the slave trade and how they were treated as commodified living property. Yet, another important aspect of the triangular relationship were the