In “The Selling of Joseph” (1700), Samuel Sewall reminds his audience of the Latin maxim, caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”), as he enjoins them to probe the correlation between the “easy rates” of commodities and the circumstances of their production. In his call on individuals to refuse the slave trade, Sewall prefigures the rhetoric of the first American Quakers who publicly opposed slavery from the mid-eighteenth century, although ownership of enslaved people was not unknown in American Quaker communities. As shown by Julie L. Holcomb, early Abolitionist Quakers refused to consume any slave-labor products, such as sugar and cotton. Scholars have shown that such radical abstention – which is congruent with some American Quakers’ rejection of non-essential commodities – was at odds with the increasingly plentiful consumer market in the Antebellum era. This paper analyzes the legacy of this early Abolitionist consumer rhetoric in Hannah Crafts’s autobiographical novel The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2002 [1857-1861]) and Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). The two narratives dramatize the implications of individual acts of consumption and engage in a broad ideological critique of consumerism, which aligns with the virtuous plainness preached by American Abolitionist Quakers. Crafts’s novel and Douglass’s autobiography depict enslavement as a condition for a varied market and make this correlation tangible from the point of view of the consumer.