Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

== Summary ==
This
book tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the
cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic
slave trade. Johnson depicts
the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class-consciousness,
racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the
centrality of the “peculiar institution” in the lives of slaves and
slaveholders alike. Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders’
letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial
documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power
that occurred in the market’s slave coffles and showrooms. Johnson thus tells
the story of the slave trade from three perspectives (traders, buyers, and
slaves), moving away from the demographic map and assesses how the asymmetric
information, expectations and power and how each shaped the final outcome. “In
the slave market,” Johnson argues, “the central tension of antebellum slavery
was daily played out as slaveholders invested their money and their hopes in
people whom they could never fully commodify.” (16) Traders packaged their
slaves by “feeding them up,” dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but
they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable
commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts,
seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn,
these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize,
sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage. In emphasizing the
everyday life of the trade (the arrow on the map), Johnson thus shows how
contingent the process was; slavery was being pulled apart at the seams even as
it unfolded and expanded across the Atlantic and in the American South. 
Example: Physical
examination of slaves in the slave market – size, skin color, scars, physical
carriage – were made meaningful (knowledge) through medical, managerial, and
sexual concerns. “In the slave market, the racial ideologies by which
slaveholders organized their society were put to work doing the hard work of
differentiating commodities and negotiating prices.” 
See also: Eugene Genovese, Walter Johnson (2), Leslie Harris,