I wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.

Much has been said about American slavery, but I think that we do not even yet realize what slavery is. If I were seriously to propose to Congress to make mankind into sausages, I have no doubt that most of the members would smile at my proposition, and if any believed me to be in earnest, they would think that I proposed something much worse than Congress had ever done. But if any of them will tell me that to make a man into a sausage would be much worse—would be any worse—than to make him into a slave—than it was to enact the Fugitive Slave Law, I will accuse him of foolishness, of intellectual incapacity, of making a distinction without a difference. The one is just as sensible a proposition as the other. ("Slavery in Massachusetts")

Basic set up:

In this essay, Henry David Thoreau lays out why he's against the Fugitive Slave Act that had been passed in 1850. The law allowed for the capture of slaves found in the north, who would then be returned to their masters in the south.

Thoreau didn't like slavery very much. Who in their right minds would? And he especially didn't like this horrible, evil law that had been passed by Congress in 1850, which mandated that captured slaves who had escaped to the north be returned to their masters.

Thoreau's anti-slavery views and his criticism of both slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act in the excerpt above reflect the American Romantics' preoccupation with democracy and freedom. Thoreau, like a number of his buddies, believed that we should all be free, regardless of our skin color. Good on you, Thoreau.

Thoreau makes a pretty heavy political point in this essay, but he makes it in a funny way. He's saying that forcing someone into slavery is as ridiculous as turning someone into a sausage.

Yeah, it's funny. But Thoreau's broader point is that slavery is not only unjust, it's absurd. It's as absurd as turning people into Hot Links. We should aspire to give people freedom, instead of turning them into slaves (or sausages, for that matter).