Walter Johnson wrote Soul by Soul, Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market in 1999. The book contains 283 pages and was part of our required reading for American History 132. Johnson takes a unique approach to discussing and describing the slave trade in New Orleans. He doesn’t focus on famous people or try to tell a story, instead, he looks at the slave trade from three different perspectives; the slave trader, the buyer, and the slave. Johnson uses slave narratives, court records and bills of sales along with letters that were written by slaveholders to help with telling of the slave trade in the lower South. Johnson described the slave market and slave pen as a place to trade in fantasy. The seller and buyer were both looking for
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They were also required to say that they were not prone to running away and occasionally state that they possessed skills they didn’t really have. The slave had the most to lose and sometimes the most to gain. A clever slave could seek out a particular buyer and appeal to the qualities that buyer was looking for to make a better placement for himself. Others while lying to satisfy the trader had to worry about meeting the expectations of a new master when they got to their new home. “When a Negro was put on the block he had to help sell himself by telling what he could do. If he refused to praise himself and acted sullen, he was sure to be stripped and given thirty lashes. Frequently a man was compelled to exaggerate his accomplishments, and when his buyer found out that he could not do what he said he could he would be beaten unmercifully. It was pretty sure a thrashing either way.” …show more content…
The entire O’Hara family surrounded her bed and told her how important she was to them. Reflecting on the time this movie was made it fits into the patriarchy view of slaveholders in the South. Gone with the Wind is the ideal fantasy of slaveholders, everyone is happy and lives together like a family and the older slaves are comforted in their advanced years and taken care of. Books such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Uncle Tom’s Cabin with their descriptive language and dialogue held my interest and I quickly devoured these books and have reread them on several occasions. I do not see myself ever rereading this book or recommending it to
They were also required to say that they were not prone to running away and occasionally state that they possessed skills they didn’t really have. The slave had the most to lose and sometimes the most to gain. A clever slave could seek out a particular buyer and appeal to the qualities that buyer was looking for to make a better placement for himself. Others while lying to satisfy the trader had to worry about meeting the expectations of a new master when they got to their new home. “When a Negro was put on the block he had to help sell himself by telling what he could do. If he refused to praise himself and acted sullen, he was sure to be stripped and given thirty lashes. Frequently a man was compelled to exaggerate his accomplishments, and when his buyer found out that he could not do what he said he could he would be beaten unmercifully. It was pretty sure a thrashing either way.” …show more content…
The entire O’Hara family surrounded her bed and told her how important she was to them. Reflecting on the time this movie was made it fits into the patriarchy view of slaveholders in the South. Gone with the Wind is the ideal fantasy of slaveholders, everyone is happy and lives together like a family and the older slaves are comforted in their advanced years and taken care of. Books such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Uncle Tom’s Cabin with their descriptive language and dialogue held my interest and I quickly devoured these books and have reread them on several occasions. I do not see myself ever rereading this book or recommending it to