“Slavery and freedom are incommensurable qualities, the difference between them an existential matter touching the dignity and worth of human life. People suffer, certainly, in freedom as well as in slavery (and, for that matter, in every known condition of human existence). But that unquestionable truth does not license anyone to tote up the suffering of one–in dollars of gold, calories of food, or pounds of flesh–and weigh it against the suffering of the other, in order to determine in which state people are better off. Nor should historians deceive themselves that they can tiptoe around the impropriety of the question by distinguishing the ‘material’ from the ‘moral’ or ‘psychological’ dimension of slavery and freedom. If human beings were vegetables, it would be proper to conclude that they are best off materially when most amply and efficiently provided with what they require for vegetation. But human beings are not vegetables, and their material and moral needs overlap to a degree that makes nonsense of any effort to measure the one in the absence of the other. What mechanistic and unimaginative scholars would probably call the moral or psychological dimension of freedom consists in no small part of exercising discretion in the manner of satisfying material needs. Was Frederick Douglass stating a moral or a material objection to slavery when he condemned the monotonous slave diet of ash cake and fat meat and justified the slaves’ unauthorized forays into their owners’ pantries and smokehouses?”
–Fields, Barbara Jeanne. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century, pp. 192-193. First Edition. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984.
