Douglass compares himself to an ox used for plowing while with Covey, suggesting that his only use was as brute strength (Ch. In chapter twenty, Douglass returns to Baltimore after his time with Covey where he performed field labor, generally considered the most basic of labor.

Douglass sees explaining this as an “important element in the overthrow of the slave system” (Ch.

If working-class people were able to bring about emancipation, Douglass reasons, it would bring a bout a more economically fair world for everyone, including white (and non-Black) workers. Douglass seeks to show that while cheap, slave labor is tremendously inefficient It also makes it so that free laborers must compete on the labor-market with people who essentially take no wages. Slave owners made profit off of the essentially free labor they used to cultivate their labor-intensive crops like cotton, tobacco and sugar. In chapter twenty, Douglass addresses this question and makes a sophisticated critique of the economics of slavery. Enslaved people were obviously aware of the theft perpetrated by owners and so be unsupportive of slavery, but why would working-class people in the South, people who didn’t own slaves, without slaves, support the institution of slavery? It’s obvious what the plantation owners are getting, but what is the working-class getting? Plantation owners were, in a sense, the wealthy elite of their day, owning the equivalent of multinational corporations working within global trade networks. Most people are not slave owners, though, even in the South. Greed motivates slave owners, whom he calls “robbers” (Ch. Douglass describes all the white people involved in slavery, not just owners, as so corrupted by the the physical, emotional and sexual depravity of slavery that it’s hard to imagine he thought moral arguments would change the minds of these pro-slavery advocates.ĭouglass reasons that all oppression is motivated by pride, power, and crucially, avarice (Ch. Throughout My Bondage, My Freedom, Frederick Douglass presents numerous philosophical and moral arguments against slavery.

My bondage and my freedom 1855