“What is freedom? It is the right to choose one’s own employment. Certainly it means that, if it means anything,” Douglass thundered in response to Union General Nathaniel P. Banks’s policy as military commander of Louisiana of extracting one year of forced agricultural labor from freedmen on behalf of the federal government. “And when any individual or combination of individuals, undertakes to decide for any man when he shall work, where he shall work, at what he shall work, and for what he shall work, he or they practically reduce him to slavery.”
https://reason.com/2019/05/01/america-doesnt-need-pete-buttigiegs-forced-labor-scheme/