With a capital of about sixty dollars in the shape of a good-natured old ox, attached to the end of a stout rope, New Bedford did the work of ten or twelve thousand dollars, represented in the bones and muscles of slaves, and did it far better.
Douglass illustrates the economic superiority of free labor and technology in the North by comparing its output to the immense human cost of slave labor in the South.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political convictions.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.