The slave market was rooted in every aspect of the antebellum South, from fields to farms to auction blocks and white households. It even influenced common consciences about what slave owners should think of their slaves and the rhetoric they used when talking about slavery in general. Slave owners began to adopt a paternalistic ideology to the extent that they began to view the monitoring of slaves and their buying and selling as a benefit to slaves who could not care for themselves. The slave market therefore influenced slave owners' perceptions of themselves, leading them to internalize their cultural environment. It also played on ideas of chivalry, nobility, patriarchy and honor: the concepts risked being altered with each sale of a slave on the market. Directly because of this, slave bodies became a site of cultural understanding as the social values ​​of buyers and sellers began to be created and learned based on slave sales, advertising for the sale of slaves and the overall commodification of life caused by slavery. and the culture that slave owners used and were a part of helped minimize over-reliance on slaves. Slave owners went so far as to tie rhetoric and a kind of social coding to the very idea of ​​freedom dependent on slavery. All this meant that everyday life itself “banked” on the body of the black slave. Much of the identity of white slave owners developed through their relationships with slaves and how they interacted with other slave owners. Some even convinced themselves that buying slaves was justified because it was a matter of “saving” them from the terrors of the market. In many ways, white men became full members of Southern society through the purchase of slaves who could provide their jobs, but rather a society that no longer knew any other way of life. . The balance of power began to shift as the antebellum South's dependence on free labor economically tied its existence to the abhorrent practice of slave ownership. Slavery was in many ways a dream come true for Southern culture in its ability to solve the problem of finding labor and keeping costs low, but this inhumane practice became the downfall of the antebellum South to the extent that its practice became so common in its culture that it became more of an economic dependency. Their entire economy was seemingly tied to this need for free labor, with the perception that slavery was here to stay, shamefully allowing the horrific and inhumane nature of slavery to transcend societal values ​​to the point where it was widely accepted. This culture of acceptance marked the fall of the antebellum South..