George Fitzhugh (November 4, 1806 – July 30, 1881) was an American social theorist who published racial and pro-slavery social theories in the pre-Civil War era. He argued that the negro was "but a grown up child" needing the economic and social protections of slavery. Fitzhugh favorably contrasted slavery in the American South with capitalism in the Northern United States, decrying the latter as "a war of the rich with the poor, and the poor with one another", which rendered free blacks "far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition." Slavery, he contended, ensured that blacks would be economically secure and morally civilized. Some historians consider Fitzhugh's worldview to be proto-fascist in its rejection of liberal values, defense of slavery, and perspectives toward race.
Fitzhugh practiced law but attracted both fame and infamy when he published two sociological tracts for the South. He was a leading pro-slavery intellectual and spoke for many of the Southern plantation owners. Before printing books, Fitzhugh tried his hand at a pamphlet, "Slavery Justified" (1849). His first book, Sociology for the South (1854) was not as widely known as his second book, Cannibals All! (1857). Sociology for the South is the first known English-language book to include the term "sociology" in its title.
Fitzhugh differed from nearly all of his southern contemporaries by advocating a slavery that crossed racial boundaries. In Sociology for the South, Fitzhugh proclaimed, "Men are not 'born entitled to equal rights!' It would be far nearer the truth to say, 'that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them,' – and the riding does them good."; and that the Declaration of Independence "deserves the tumid yet appropriate epithets which Major Lee somewhere applies to the writings of Mr. Jefferson, it is, 'exhuberantly false, and arborescently fallacious.'"
Contents
Life
George Fitzhugh was born on November 10, 1806, to George Fitzhugh Sr. (a surgeon/physician) and Lucy (née Stuart) Fitzhugh. He was born in Prince William County, Virginia. His family moved to Alexandria, Virginia, when he was six. He attended public school though his career was built on self-education. He married Mary Metcalf Brockenbrough in 1829 and moved to Port Royal, Virginia. There he began his own law business. Fitzhugh took up residence in a "rickety old mansion" that he inherited through his wife's family, known for a vast collection of bats in its attic. He was something of a recluse in this home for most of his life and rarely travelled away from it for extended periods of time, spending most of his days there engaged in unguided reading from a vast library of books and pamphlets.
Of the writers in his library, Fitzhugh's beliefs were most heavily influenced by Thomas Carlyle, whom he read frequently and referenced in many of his works. Atypical for a slavery advocate, Fitzhugh also subscribed to and regularly read abolitionist pamphlets such as The Liberator. He made only one major visit to other parts of the nation in the entire antebellum period – an 1855 journey to the north where he met and argued with abolitionists Gerrit Smith and Wendell Phillips.
Never politically active in his own right, Fitzhugh managed to find the company of well known political figures in his day. In addition to the two abolitionists, Fitzhugh was an acquaintance of several public officials. In 1857 Fitzhugh served as a law clerk in Washington, D.C. under Attorney General Jeremiah Sullivan Black. He gained fairly wide circulation in print, writing articles for several Virginia newspapers and for the widely circulated Southern magazine DeBow's Review.
After moving to Richmond, Virginia, in 1862 he began to work in the Treasury of the Confederacy. After the Civil War, Fitzhugh spent a short time judging for the Freedmen's Court and then retiring to Kentucky after his wife's death in 1877. He later moved to his daughter's residence in Huntsville, Texas, where he died on July 30, 1881. He is buried in a grave in Oakwood Cemetery, Huntsville, where his daughter, Mariella Fitzhugh Foster and her husband Capt. Marcellus Aurelius Foster are also buried.
Writings
Sociology for the South
Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society (1854) was George Fitzhugh's most powerful attack on the philosophical foundations of free society. In it, he took on not only Adam Smith, the foundational thinker of capitalism, but also John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and the entire liberal tradition. He argued that the transition away from feudalism and the adoption of liberal values like freedom and equality had been detrimental to workers and to society as a whole, and that the liberal experiment had failed and a return to a pre-liberal mode of society was necessary:
Liberty and equality are new things under the sun. The free states of antiquity abounded with slaves. The feudal system that supplanted Roman institutionally changed the form of slavery, but brought with it neither liberty nor equality. France and the Northern States of our Union have alone fully and fairly tried the experiment of a social organization founded upon universal liberty and equality of rights. England has only approximated to this condition in her commercial and manufacturing cities. The examples of small communities in Europe are not fit exponents of the working of the system. In France and in our Northern States the experiment has already failed, if we are to form our opinions from the discontent of the masses, or to believe the evidence of the Socialists, Communists, Anti-Renters, and a thousand other agrarian sects that have arisen in these countries, and threaten to subvert the whole social fabric. The leaders of these sects, at least in France, comprise within their ranks the greater number of the most cultivated and profound minds in the nation, who have made government their study. Add to the evidence of these social philosophers, who, watching closely the working of the system have proclaimed to the world its total failure, the condition of the working classes, and we have conclusive proof that liberty and equality have not conduced to enhance the comfort or the happiness of the people. Crime and pauperism have increased. Riots, trades unions, strikes for higher wages, discontent breaking out into revolution, are things of daily occurrence, and show that the poor see and feel quite as clearly as the philosophers, that their condition is far worse under the new than under the old order of things. Radicalism and Chartism in England owe their birth to the free and equal institutions of her commercial and manufacturing districts, and are little heard of in the quiet farming districts, where remnants of feudalism still exist in the relation of landlord and tenant, and in the laws of entail and primogeniture.
Fitzhugh's position was rooted in a kind of medievalism, widely popular in his day, and held up what he thought medieval society was as an ideal for America, as he clarified in 1858: "In the balmy days of royalty, of feudal nobility, and of Catholic rule, there were no poor in Europe". He argued in Sociology for the South that all societies have a substratum, and that the new liberal social order was more harmful to this substratum than either the previous feudal order or to slavery:
Cannibals All!
Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857) was a critique further developing the themes that Fitzhugh had introduced in Sociology for the South. Both the book's title and its subtitle were phrases taken from the writing of Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish social critic and a great hero to Fitzhugh's generation of proslavery thinkers. The aim of his book, Fitzhugh claimed, was to show that "the unrestricted exploitation of so-called free society is more oppressive to the laborer than domestic slavery."
Cannibals All! expanded on Fitzhugh's premise that "slavery to human masters" was "less intolerable" than the "slavery to capital" found in free societies, as well as expanding on his critiques of notions of liberty and equality more generally. In addressing Thomas Jefferson's notions of "natural rights", Fitzhugh stated:
We agree with Mr. Jefferson, that all men have natural and inalienable rights. To violate or disregard such rights, is to oppose the designs and plans of Providence, and cannot "come to good." The order and subordination observable in the physical, animal and human world, show that some are formed for higher, others for lower stations—the few to command, the many to obey. We conclude that about nineteen out of every twenty individuals have "a natural and inalienable right" to be taken care of and protected; to have guardians, trustees, husbands, or masters; in other words, they have a natural and inalienable right to be slaves. The one in twenty are as clearly born or educated, or some way fitted for command and liberty. Not to make them rulers or masters, is as great a violation of natural right, as not to make slaves of the mass. A very little individuality is useful and necessary to society,—much of it begets discord, chaos and anarchy.
Under this same context, Fitzhugh asserted that society was obligated to protect the weak by controlling and subjugating them. Fitzhugh wrote:
"It is the duty of society to protect the weak;" but protection cannot be efficient without the power of control; therefore, "It is the duty of society to enslave the weak."
Regarding the question of who should be free and who should be enslaved, Fitzhugh wrote:
Views
Socialism
Fitzhugh's stated position on socialism varies wildly between and even within his works. At times he is harshly critical of socialists of his time, linking them to abolitionism, stating in Sociology for the South:
We treat the Abolitionists and Socialists as identical, because they are notoriously the same people, employing the same arguments and bent on the same schemes. Abolition is the first step in Socialism: the former proposes to abolish negro slavery, the latter all kinds of slavery – religion, government, marriage, families, property – nay, human nature itself. Yet the former contains the germ of the latter, and very soon ripens into it; Abolition is Socialism in its infancy.
At other times he sympathized with socialist critiques of liberal free market economies, but argued that reverting to an older feudal or pre-feudal social model through the expansion of slavery was a more effective means to the end of addressing the destitution caused by capitalism, and that proposals by socialists were untested and went against human nature:
We entirely agree with the socialists, that free competition is the bane of modern society. We also agree with them, that it is right and necessary to establish in some modified degree, a community of property. We agree with them in the end they propose to attain, and only differ as to the means. [...] What madness and folly, at this late day, to form society for human beings regardless of human nature. Yet the Socialists are guilty of this folly, and gravely propose to change man's nature to fit him for their new institutions. How much more wise, prudent and philosophical it would be to recur to some old tried forms of society, especially as we shall presently show that such forms of society have existed, and do now exist, as will remove all the evils they complain of, and attain all the ends they propose.
After the Civil War however Fitzhugh shifted his position on capitalism and especially the monopolization of land, arguing that rather than being more oppressive to the laborer than slavery or serfdom, as he had formerly argued, the subjugation of the laborer through the monopolization of land had, in his view, a positive civilizing effect similar to that of slavery, stating in Land Monopoly – Savage Nature (1867):
Slavery in the abstract
George Fitzhugh was among a cadre of Southern intellectuals who advocated for a universal slavery which included the white race. Fitzhugh's contempt for wage labor and laissez-faire capitalism are themes which dominated his Failure of Free Society and Cannibals All! In these works, Fitzhugh argued free labor was a crueler system than slavery. The results of free labor alienated the working class and therefore, produced movements for socialism, abolitionism, and feminism. As a solution, Fitzhugh advocated for extending the paternalistic relationship of the plantation system to encompass lower class whites. Fitzhugh postulated slavery as a humane alternative for both black and white laborers that would rectify the evils in laissez-faire capitalism. Although the idea of universal slavery was unpopular, Fitzhugh advocated expanding the South's institution of slavery until 1867, when he conceded wage labor was an adequate replacement for slavery.
Authoritarianism
George Fitzhugh held many moderate and mainstream Southern opinions. Nonetheless, by the standards of his Antebellum contemporaries, many of Fitzhugh's ideas were radical. He conceived of violence and war as progressive forces that would heal society from its degeneration. Fitzhugh also attacked the legitimacy of representative institutions for their failure to protect slavery. Fitzhugh was a prolific reactionary who advocated anything necessary to preserve slavery such as military dictatorship. Fitzhugh differed from his peers in promoting absolute power at the expense of the slave master class' rights. While some historians argue that Fitzhugh's radicalism was a natural outgrowth of slavery, other historians point out Thomas Carlyle's salient impact on Fitzhugh's authoritarian sentiments. The authoritarian and forward looking qualities of Fitzhugh's rhetoric has been seen by some historians as proto-fascist or a type of fascist intellectualism.
Works
Books
(1854). Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society. Richmond: A. Morris.
(1857). Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters, A. Morris Publisher.
Other
A Controversy on Slavery Between George Fitzhugh and A. Hogeboom, Printed at the "Oneida Sachem" Office, 1857.
Ante-bellum: Writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on Slavery, Capricorn Books 1960.