“The early chapters explore the radically incommensurable views taken by slaves and slaveholders of the relation of the slave trade to the broader system of slavery and follow this philosophical difference through the practical contests that defined the history of the slave trade: the efforts of slaveholders to coax or coerce their resistant slaves into the trade, the strategies the traders used to get their slaves to market, the slaves’ efforts to make common cause with their fellow slaves and to resist the traders. The subsequent chapters of the book treat the contested bargains made by traders, buyers, and slaves in the showrooms and auction houses.” (16)Slave traders were "everywhere" in antebellum New Orleans, and Johnson sketches them
