war was a series of transactions, or exchanges, between the North and the South. These transactions involved over 1 million Americans who put their lives at risk for the liberation of the country’s slaves. These transactions were influenced by three paramount concepts: perspectives, values, and relative evaluations of costs and benefits. In the midst of this tumultuous period of time in American history, these concepts shaped not just the people themselves but the social, political, and economic transactions
During the antebellum period more than two million slaves were sold in interstate, local, and state-ordered sales. Yet historians have devoted surprisingly little attention to the seamy slave pens and slave yards where families routinely were torn apart and human beings were bartered, evaluated, examined, fondled, priced, and sold. There they became persons with a price. Soul by Soul by Walter Johnson tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and
There is no doubt that slavery was the engine of American economic growth. United States of America experienced an economical revolution during the slave era and slavery was one of the main factors that contributed to that. As slavers took African slaves for granted and used them to satisfy their economic purposes. Surely it will make sense. Slave labor benefited the economy in many ways, such as agriculture, construction, slave owners and slave trade. We will start with how the Atlantic slave
us home. For almost eight decades, enslaved African-Americans living in the Antebellum South, achieved their freedom in various ways—one being religion—before the demise of the institution of slavery. It was “freedom, rather than slavery, [that] proved the greatest force for conversion among African Americans in the South” (94). Starting with the Great Awakening and continuing long after the abolition of slavery, after decades of debate, scholars conceptualized the importance of religion for
referring to the history Antebellum America, the two things that shape our country are the expansion of slavery and the expansion of the Market Revolution. In the novel Soul by Soul, by Walter Johnson, the author exploits the effects of slavery on the people involved with slave trade in the south. It also shows the reader just how vital slavery is to the Market Revolution, and how the consumers culture, in turn, shaped personal identities. Both slavery and the Market Revolution shaped presidential campaigns
Throughout the essay, author Walter Johnson explicates and uniformly depicts the concept of slave pens throughout the antebellum south. In my preexisting knowledge about the slave trade and slave pens, not much is actually already there. By this, I mean I am not very knowledge on the idea of slave pens and slave trade. I know the trade was just that, the act of trading slaves starting with “men, women and eventually children” (372). Perhaps the prior education I have been provided ignores or basically
Enormous changes swept through nearly every facet of American society in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, and the institution of slavery was no exception to this rule. Prior to the Revolution, slavery existed in every American colony. The growing population of settlers was founded on and maintained by notions of inequality, in which indentured servants and slaves provided the necessary manpower for the development of a largely agricultural economy and the settlement
focus to contemporary conceptions of the antebellum South, Civil War, and reconstruction. Tara Revisited highlights that much of Southern history from the mentioned periods was romanticized and marketed through music, print media, and film. Clinton believes that
know it today, was shaped drastically by the Civil war. The Civil war acted as a second revolution in our country, pushing us closer to how society is now. Historians have wondered what caused the Civil War, was it a matter of slavery? Politics? Or another underlying issue? Historians such as James McPherson, William Gienapp, and Susan-Mary Grant have explored events that occurred before the Civil war and ultimately describe why the South succeeded. In McPherson’s “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism”
Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, by Walter Johnson, is an eye opening and heart wrenching description of nineteenth century New Orleans and the slave market that prospered there. This book is centered around the story of slave showrooms that held up to one hundred slaves at a time. That was the cite where appraisals, accountings, back-room dealings, and other activities took place. This book is broken down into seven chapters that deeply analyze and reflect the slave market during antebellum America