Henry David Thoreau -- On Slavery

Consider the following quotation from Thoreau’s Walden in connection with Douglass’s Narrative:

“I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery; there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south.  It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”

• Would Douglass agree?
• Are there conceptual and thematic similarities between Thoreau’s Walden and Douglass’s Narrative?
• Do Douglass’s escape to freedom and Thoreau’s transcendence at Walden Pond suggest connections between abolitionism and transcendentalism?