Walter Johnson > Quotes

“My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”
― Walter Johnson, Steve Jobs: In His Own Words - 100 Quotes from Steve Jobs

“Before they entered the slave market or inspected a slave, many slaveholders had well-developed ideas about what they would find there. these ideas had less to do with the real people they would meet in the market, however, than they did with the slaveholder’s themselves, about the type of people they would become by buying slaves. As they talked about and wrote about buying slaves, slaveholders mapped a world made of slavery. They dreamed of people arrayed in meaningful order by their value as property, of fields full of productive hands and a slave quarter that reproduced itself, of well ordered households and of mansions where services were swift and polished. They dreamed of beating and healing and sleeping with slaves; sometimes they even dreamed that their slaves would love them. They imagined who they could be by thinking about whom they could buy.”
― Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

“The vitality associated with blackness might cancel out the vulnerability associated with
femininity in the search for a field hand, while a "bright disposition" might lighten a dark-skinned woman in the search for a domestic servant; a "rough" face might darken a light-skinned man, while "effeminacy" might lighten a dark-skinned one; an outwardly dull demeanor and the presence of wife and child might make a light-skinned man seem less likely to run away; and so on. In the slave market, buyers produced "whiteness" and "blackness" by disaggregating human bodies and recomposing them as racialized slaves.”
― Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

“One man had been completely submerged in the boiling liquid which inundated the cabin, and in his removal to the deck, the skin had separated from the entire surface of his body. The unfortunate wretch was literally boiled alive, yet although his flesh parted from his bones, and his agonies were most intense, he survived and retained all his consciousness for several hours.”
― Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom

“Solomon Northup, who had been kidnapped from New York, taken to Virginia, and then sold to Louisiana, told no one his story, for fear that he “would be taken farther on, into some by-place, over the Texas border, perhaps, and sold.”
― Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom

“South. In southern courtrooms and medical journals, slaves' misbehavior was often attributed to an inward disposition of character, which meant that there was something invariably, inevitably, perhaps biologically "bad" about the slave. Jim, for instance, was said to have "the habit" and "the character" of "taking his master's horses out at night and riding them without leave."29 This line of thinking was reflected in redhibition law, which defined the commission of murder, rape, theft, or "the habit of running away" as evidence of a "vice of character." Slave "character" was likewise treated as an immutable fact by physician Samuel Cartwright, who held that running away and "rascality" were the misidentified symptoms of mental diseases with physiological cures-the most notable of which was getting slaves to work harder so that they would breathe harder so that their brains would get more oxygen.3°”
― Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

“But the reformers were right: the bovine digestive system is an extraordinarily efficient mechanism for converting grass, fodder, and even forage into fertilizer.15 Their shit-savings were a form of liquid capital.”
― Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom

“Occasionally, however, when chided by their slaves or others, slaveholders did act in concert with the better selves of their paternalist rhetoric. William Green's mother convinced her owner ("she having nursed him when a child") to sell her son in the neighborhood rather than to a slave trader.”
― Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

“One of the things about people who have little left to lose, of course, is that they have everything to gain. On August 9, 2014, the disinherited of St. Louis rose again to take control of their history. When the time came, they were ready--subjects of a history of serial dispossession and imperial violence so profound that it has been built into the very fabric and common sense of the city, yes, but also legatees of a history of Black radicalism and direct action as measurelessly implacable as the flow of the rivers. And still they rise.”
― Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

“Viewed from St. Louis, the history of capitalism in the United States seems to have as much to do with eviction and extraction as with exploitation and production. History in St. Louis unfolded at the juncture of racism and real estate, of the violent management of the population and the speculative valuation of property. The first to be forced out were Native Americans, who were pushed west and killed off by settlers and the US military. But in St. Louis the practices of removal and containment that developed out of the history of empire in the West were generalized into mechanisms for the dispossession and management of Black people within the city limits. And because removal is fundamentally about controlling the future, about determining what sorts of people will be allowed to live in what sorts of places, it is always concerned with the control of gender, sexuality, and reproduction; often women and children are singled out for particular sanction and targeted violence.”
― Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

“Some slaves, however, were "too white to keep." That was how Edmund was described by the man who had sold him from Tennessee. The man's hope was that such a sale would make it more difficult for Edmund to escape from slavery, but, as it was, New Orleans suited the slave well: within a day of arriving in the city, Edmund had slipped unnoticed onto a steamboat and disappeared. So, too, Robert, who boarded the steamboat that carried him away from slavery and New Orleans as a white man. "I should have thought he was of Spanish origin," remembered one of his fellow passengers, "he was a man of clear skin and dark complexion." But more than the way Robert looked, the other passengers remembered the way he acted: "he was very genteely dressed and of a very genteel deportment"; "he had more the appearance of a gentleman than a plebeian"; and, almost every witness noted, "usually seated himself at the first table, high up, and near the ladies." Robert, it turned out, had once”
― Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market