Soul by Spirit tells the storyplot of slavery in antebellum America by leaving the natural cotton plantations and in to the slave market itself, the heart of the home slave trade. Acquiring us inside the New Orleans slave marketplace, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 males, women, and kids were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the figures of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, customers, and slaves, negotiating sales that could alter the life span of each. What emerges isn’t just the brutal economics of trading but the vast and unexpected interdependencies among the stars involved.