George Fitzhugh

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:

Every social structure must have its substratum. In free society this substratum, the weak, poor and ignorant, is borne down upon and oppressed with continually increasing weight by all above. We have solved the problem of relieving this substratum from the pressure from above. The slaves are the substratum, and the master's feelings and interests alike prevent him from bearing down upon and oppressing them. With us the pressure on society is like that of air or water, so equally diffused as not any where to be felt. With them it is the pressure of the enormous screw, never yielding, continually increasing. Free laborers are little better than trespassers on this earth given by God to all mankind. The birds of the air have nests, and the foxes have holes, but they have not where to lay their heads. They are driven to cities to dwell in damp and crowded cellars, and thousands are even forced to lie in the open air. This accounts for the rapid growth of Northern cities. The feudal Barons were more generous and hospitable and less tyrannical than the petty land-holders of modern times. Besides, each inhabitant of the barony was considered as having some right of residence, some claim to protection from the Lord of the Manor. A few of them escaped to the municipalities for purposes of trade, and to enjoy a larger liberty. Now penury and the want of a home drive thousands to towns. The slave always has a home, always an interest in the proceeds of the soil.

Fitzhugh believed that slavery represented a lingering element of pre-liberal, or even pre-feudal social organization, and proposed the expansion of the institution of slavery to return to a pre-feudal social order of antiquity and alleviate the supposed harm caused by liberalism and capitalism:

The competition among laborers to get employment begets an intestine war, more destructive than the war from above. There is but one remedy for this evil, so inherent in free society, and that is, to identify the interests of the weak and the strong, the poor and the rich. Domestic Slavery does this far better than any other institution. Feudalism only answered the purpose in so far as Feudalism retained the features of slavery. To it (slavery) Greece and Rome, Egypt and Judea, and all the other distinguished States of antiquity, were indebted for their great prosperity and high civilization; a prosperity and a civilization which appear almost miraculous, when we look to their ignorance of the physical sciences. In the moral sciences they were our equals, in the fine arts vastly our superiors. Their poetry, their painting, their sculpture, their drama, their elocution, and their architecture, are models which we imitate, but never equal. In the science of government and of morals, in pure metaphysics, and in all the walks of intellectual philosophy, we have been beating the air with our wings or revolving in circles, but have not advanced an inch. Kant is not ahead of Aristotle [...] But this high civilization and domestic slavery did not merely co-exist, they were cause and effect. Every scholar whose mind is at all imbued with ancient history and literature, sees that Greece and Rome were indebted to this institution alone for the taste, the leisure and the means to cultivate their heads and their hearts.

In order to expand the institution of slavery, Fitzhugh proposed both the enslavement of all free black people and the enslavement of working-class people of all races, making him notable as possibly the only anti-abolitionist to propose slavery be expanded to include white people. Fitzhugh referenced racist justifications for his proposal to re-enslave all free black people, stating that, "unlike the white man, they have no hope of changing and improving their condition whilst free", and that "every other form of government than that of slavery has signally failed in the case of the negro. He is an enemy to himself, and an intolerable pest and nuisance to society, where ever among the whites he is free [...] it is the right and duty of the State to enslave them, because experience has clearly proved that it is the only practicable mode of governing them." While he subscribed to many of the racist views towards black people which were common among anti-abolitionists at the time, he did criticize the racial pseudo-scientific theories proposed by Josiah C. Nott in his book The Types of Mankind.

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:

Whilst, as a general and abstract question, negro slavery has no other claims over other forms of slavery, except that from inferiority, or rather peculiarity, of race, almost all negroes require masters, whilst only the children, the women, the very weak, poor, and ignorant, &c., among the whites, need some protective and governing relation of this kind; yet as a subject of temporary, but world-wide importance, negro slavery has become the most necessary of all human institutions.

Fitzhugh also argued that the feudal system had its roots in slavery, and much like slavery, offered more favorable conditions to laborers than those found in liberal free-market capitalist economies:

During the decline of the Roman Empire, slavery became colonial or prædial. The slaves occupied the place of tenants or serfs, were "adscripti soli," and could only be sold with the farm. Many antiquarians consider the colonial slavery of the Romans as the true origin of the feudal system. This kind of slavery was universal in Europe till a few centuries since, and now prevails to a great extent. The serfs of Russia, Poland, Turkey, and Hungary, are happier and better provided for than the free laborers of Western Europe. They have homes, and lands to cultivate. They work but little, because their wants are few and simple. They are not over-worked and under-fed, as are the free laborers of Western Europe. Hence, they never rise in riots and insurrections, burn houses, commit strikes,—nor do they emigrate.

Cannibals All! continued Fitzhugh's criticisms of the foundational guiding principles of the American Revolution, including criticizing the validity of the notion of the consent of the governed:

We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." The women, the children, the negroes, and but few of the non-property holders were consulted, or consented to the Revolution, or the governments that ensued from its success. As to these, the new governments were self-elected despotisms, and the governing class self-elected despots. Those governments originated in force, and have been continued by force. All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force. The very term, government, implies that it is carried on against the consent of the governed. [...] The ancient republics were governed by a small class of adult male citizens, who assumed and exercised the government, without the consent of the governed. The South is governed just as those ancient republics were. In the county in which we live, there are eighteen thousand souls, and only twelve hundred voters.

Cannibals All! garnered more attention in the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, than any other book. Abraham Lincoln is said to have been more angered by George Fitzhugh than by any other pro-slavery writer, yet he unconsciously paraphrased Cannibals All! in his House Divided speech.

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):

Land Monopoly, or the private ownership of lands by the few, civilizes the landless, by making them quasi-slaves- that is, slaves to capital. 'The land owners, would not produce luxuries, fine houses, fine furniture, fine clothes and fine equipage for themselves; nay, they would live, as savages, on the barest necessaries of life, had they to support themselves by manual labor. But desiring the luxuries of life, they say to the landless, we will permit you to live on our lands and cultivate them, provided you will furnish us, not only with the necessaries, but also with whatever is beautiful or ornamental in architecture, in dress, furniture, equipage, etc., and with all the luxuries of the table. This is an inestimable blessing to the laboring landless millions, for it habituates them to labor, system, economy and provident habits, and leaves them, from the results of their own labor, after paying the taxes or' rents to the land owners, twice as much of the comforts and necessaries of life as the best conditioned savages enjoy. Thus begins civilization, and thus only can it begin. Where there is no slavery to capital there cannot possibly be any civilization.

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.