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Frederick Douglass summed up the physical cost of being a slave in the starkest of terms: slaves "were worked in all weathers. It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of day than of the night." The slaveholder had only one desire, which was to work the slaves as hard as possible to clear the land and plant and harvest crops. "The longest days were too short for [the overseer], and the shortest nights too long for him," Douglass wrote.

But the psychic toll weighed even more heavily on Douglass: "I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me, and behold a man transformed into a brute!" The transatlantic slave trade and its subsequent evolution in the history of the United States was a spiritual and social holocaust for African Americans.

American sociologists have been keen to assess how the slave system and its outgrowth—Jim Crow laws and the sharecropping system of the deep South—affected the behavior of African Americans. From W.E.B. DuBois's late-nineteenth-century studies of the Negro family, to the 1930s writings of E. Franklin Frazier and Charles Johnson, to the 1960s Moynihan Report, many thinkers have pondered the link between agrarian slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the struggles of African Americans in modern, urban America. The sociological debate has been accompanied by fierce debates within American historiography about the slave family, personality, culture, and community.

American slavery has also inspired theological reflection. This tradition began in the eighteenth century with The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). The stream wound through the nineteenth-century writings of Douglass and Francis Grimke into the twentieth century in Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) and Deep River: Reflections on the Religious Insight of Certain of the Negro Spirituals (1955), Joseph R. Washington's Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United States (1964), and James H. Cone's ingenious Black Nationalist theology in God of the Oppressed (1975). The theologians have tried to ascertain meaning from the horrors of slavery and determine how theology helps those oppressed by slavery to gain civic and personal freedom.

Three recent books from the disciplines of history, sociology, and theology continue the exploration of American slavery and its consequences. These inquiries make the reader aware that no American can face the future without facing the history of our country-a history scarred by conquest and chattel slavery. At the same time, these books offer specific challenges to African American intellectuals, Christian and non-Christian, to judge what type of faith they should place in this country's civic and religious institutions.

Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market is a richly textured history of human trade in the antebellum South, covering a period during which some two million slave sales were meticulously recorded. Johnson's haunting study centers on New Orleans, the site of North America's largest slave market. Unlike Eugene Genevose, whose Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made emphasizes slaves' failure to act out against the slaveholders' hegemonic paternalism, Johnson looks at the roles played by slaves, traders, and slaveholders in the nasty enterprise of selling life. For the slave trade to work, everyone involved had to accept the terms of business.

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