When Douglass writes about how the masters tricked people into being “slaves to rum,” he echoes points made by Harriet Jacobs about the lies white people would tell enslaved black people, in order to make them content with slavery. In particular, Jacobs says a slaveholder once told her that a woman she knew who escaped to the North was starving, and so miserable that she’d begged to be taken back to her former master. Jacobs says she visited the woman later, however, and found out that the story was a lie, a device used–like alcohol during Christmas–to make black people think slavery was better than freedom.
The idea of using excess to make an enslaved person disgusted with the thing they want is paralleled in a short story by Charles Chesnutt called “Dave’s Neckliss.” In this story, a hardworking and honest black man who is wrongfully accused of stealing a ham is forced to wear one around his neck at all times. As a result of this excessive exposure to thing he supposedly craved, his reputation suffers, he struggles in various ways and he eventually loses his mind.