George Fitzhugh

For the Chancellor of Cambridge University and Dean of Lincoln, see George Fitzhugh (priest).

George Fitzhugh
George Fitzhugh in 1855
Personal details
Born	(1806-11-04)4 November 1806 Prince William County, Virginia, U.S.
Died	Huntsville, Texas, U.S.
Nationality	American
Political party	Democratic Party
Spouse(s)	Mary Metcalf Brockenbrough
Relations	George Fitzhugh (father), Lucy Stuart Fitzhugh (mother)
Children	Robert Hunter Fitzhugh (1836-1919) Augusta Fitzhugh Woodall (1839-1908) Mariella Foster Rev. George Stuart Fitzhugh (1844-1925)
Profession	Judge, writer

George Fitzhugh (4 November 1806 – 30 July 1881) was an American polemicist and pioneer sociologist in the antebellum era. He argued that the negro "is but a grown up child" who needs the economic and social protections of slavery. Fitzhugh decried capitalism as spawning "a war of the rich with the poor, and the poor with one another" – rendering 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.

Fitzhugh practiced law and was a painter for years, 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 titled "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 1860 Fitzhugh stated that "It is a libel on white men to say they are unfit for slavery" and suggested that if Yankees were caught young they could be trained, domesticated and civilized to make "faithful and valuable servants". Writing in the Richmond Inquirer on 15 December 1855, Fitzhugh proclaimed: "The principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion", "Nature has made the weak in mind or body slaves ... The wise and virtuous, the strong in body and mind, are born to command", and "The Declaration of Independence is exuberantly false, and aborescently fallacious."

Life

George Fitzhugh was born on November 4, 1806, to George Fitzhugh Sr. (a surgeon/physician) and Lucy Stuart. 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" known for a vast collection of bats in its attic that he inherited through his wife's family. 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. Walker County, Texas.

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 free labor and free markets enriched the strong while crushing the weak. What society needed, he wrote, was slavery, not just for blacks, but for whites as well. "Slavery," he wrote, "is a form, and the very best form, of socialism." "Socialism," he continued:

Proposes to do away with free competition; to afford protection and support at all times to the laboring class; to bring about, at least, a qualified community of property, and to associate labor. All these purposes, slavery fully land perfectly attains. [...] Socialism is already slavery in all save the master... Our only quarrel with Socialism is, that it will not honestly admit that it owes its recent revival to the failure of universal liberty, and is seeking to bring about slavery again in some form.

Fitzhugh believed that slavery reduced the pressure on the poor and lower classes; in other words, he advocated slavery for poor whites as well as blacks. He also strongly opposed the racial doctrines of the time.

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! was a sharp criticism of the system of "wage-slavery" found in the north. Fitzhugh's ideas were based on his view that the "negro slaves of the South" were considerably more free than those trapped by the oppression of capitalist exploitation. His idea to rectify social inequality created by capitalism was to institute a system of universal slavery, based on his belief that "nineteen out of every twenty individuals have... a natural and inalienable right to be slaves." 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.'

Fitzhugh's ideas in Cannibals All!, while often used in the defense of anti-abolition, have a more socially egalitarian undertone which attempted to remedy inequalities in "Property of man." His ideas of reform could be seen in terms of a non-Marxist socialist ideology. The extremes advocated by Fitzhugh's writing led even some of his allies to denounce his bold claims.

Cannibals All! garnered more attention in the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, than any other book. 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.

Works

Major publications

• Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society. Richmond: A. Morris Publisher (1854).
• Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters. Richmond: A. Morris Publisher (1857).

Articles

• "Slavery and Freedom," Southern Quarterly Review, Vol. I (1856)
• "Centralization and Socialism," DeBow's Review, Vol. XX (1856)
• "The Counter Current, or Slavery Principles," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXI (1856)
• "The Conservative Principle; or, Social Evils and Their Remedies," Part II, DeBow's Review, Vol. XXII (1857)
• "The Middle Passage; or, Suffering of Slave and Free Immigrants," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXII (1857)
• "The War upon Society—Socialism," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXII (1857)
• "Black Republicanism in Athens," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIII (1857)
• "The Politics and Economics of Aristotle and Mr. Calhoun," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIII (1857)
• "Southern Thought—Its New and Important Manifestations," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIII (1857)
• "Southern Thought Again," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIII (1857)
• "Wealth of the North and the South," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIII (1857)
• "Private and Public Luxury," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIV (1858)
• "The White Slave Trade," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIV (1858)
• "Public Lands of Rome and America," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIV (1858)
• "Washington City," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIV (1858)
• "Reaction and the Administration," Part II, DeBow's Review, Vol. XXV (1858)
• "The Atlantic Telegraph—Ancient Art and Modern Progress," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXV (1858)
• "Acquisition of Mexico—Filibustering", DeBow's Review, Vol. XXV (1858)
• "Origin of Civilization—What is Property?—Which is the Best Slave Race," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXV (1858)
• "Old Churchies, Ministers and Families of Virginia," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVI (1859)
• "The Administration and the Slave Trade," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVI (1859)
• "The Valleys of Virginia — The Rappahannock," Part II, DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVI (1859)
• "The Old Dominion — Valley of Rappahannock," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVI (1859)
• "Ancient Families of Virginia, Maryland," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVI (1859)
• "Uniform Postage, Railroads, Telegraphs, Fashions," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVI (1859)
• "Samuel Nott, of Massachusetts, on 'European Experiments with Serfdom'," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVII (1859)
• "Law Reports—Multiplicity of Law-Books," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVII (1859)
• "Trade and Panics," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVII (1859)
• "Entails and Primogeniture," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVII (1859)
• "The Northern Neck of Virginia," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVII (1859)
• "Missionary Failures," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVII (1859)
• "Life and Liberty in America," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVII (1859)
• "Bayard Taylor's Travels in Greece and Russia," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVII (1859)
• "Modern Agriculture," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVII (1859)
• "Disunion within the Union," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVIII (1860)
• "Ancient and Modern Art and Literature," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVIII (1860)
• "Slavery Aggressions," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVIII (1860)
• "Love of Danger and Love of War," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVIII (1860)
• "The English Reviews," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVIII (1860)
• "Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith etc.," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVIII (1860)
• "Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVIII (1860)
• "Popular Institutions," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVIII (1860)
• "Make Home Attractive," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVIII (1860)
• "Milton and Macaulay," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXVIII (1860)
• "Modern Civilization," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIX (1860)
• "Frederick the Great, by Thomas Carlyle," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIX (1860)
• "The Declaration of Independence and the Republican Party," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIX (1860)
• "Family History, and the Philosophy of Names," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIX (1860)
• "German Literature," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIX (1860)
• "The Siege of Ismail," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIX (1860)
• "Milton, Byron, and Southy," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIX (1860)
• "Small Nations," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIX (1860)
• "Mr. Bancroft's History and the 'Inner Light'," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIX (1860)
• "The Domain of Fashion," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIX (1860)
• "Blackwood," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXIX (1860)
• "Horace Greely and his Lost Book," Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. XXX (1860)
• "Cuba: The March of Empire and the Course of Trade," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXX (1861)
• "Chotank, Alexandria—A Dive into Herculaneum," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXX (1861)
• "The Message, the Constitution and the Times," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXX (1861)
• "The Republic of New York," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXX (1861)
• "The Pioneers, Preachers, and People of the Mississippi Valley," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXX (1861)
• "One Idea," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXX (1861)
• "Wealth and Poverty—Luxury and Economy," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXX (1861)
• "The Black and White Races of Men," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXX (1861)
• "The Huguenots of the South," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXX (1861)
• "The False and the True Political Economy," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXX (1861)
• "Reminiscences of an Officer of Zuaves," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXX (1861)
• "The Times and the War," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXXI (1861)
• "Hayti and the Monroe Doctrine," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXXI (1861)
• "The Women of the South," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXXI (1861)
• "Superiority of Southern Races—Review of Count de Gobineau's Work," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXXI (1861)
• "Reflections on the Conduct of the War," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXXI (1861)
• "Society, Labor, Capital, Etc.," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXXII (1862)
• "Conduct of the War," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXXII (1862)
• "History of the Origin of Representative Government in Europe, by M. Guizot," DeBow's Review, Vol. XXXII (1862)
• "Conduct of the War and Reflections on the Times," De Bow's Review, Vol. XXXIII (1862)
• "Antinomic Pathology," Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. XXXVII (1863)
• "Eastern Shore of Virginia," De Bow's Review, Vol. XXXIV (1864)
• "The Uses and Morality of War and Peace," DeBow's Review, Vol. I (1866)
• "Virginia—Her Past, Present, and Future," DeBow's Review, Vol. I (1866)
• "Liberty and Civilization," DeBow's Review, Vol. I (1866)
• "Pecuniary Independence—What Is It?," DeBow's Review, Vol. I (1866)
• "What's to Be Done with the Negroes?," DeBow's Review, Vol. I (1866)
• "Home Education and the Home Circle," DeBow's Review, Vol. II (1866)
• "Shall the Spartan Virtues of the South Survive the War?," DeBow's Review, Vol. II (1866)
• "Terribly in Earnest," DeBow's Review, Vol. II (1866)
• "Commerce, War, and Civilization," DeBow's Review, Vol. II (1866)
• "Old Maids and Old Bachelors," DeBow's Review, Vol. II (1866)
• "Camp Lee and the Freedmen's Bureau," DeBow's Review, Vol. II (1866)
• "National Debt a National Blessing," DeBow's Review, Vol. II (1866)
• "Thad. Stevens's Conscience—The Rump Parliament," DeBow's Review, Vol. II (1866)
• "The Freedmen," DeBow's Review, Vol. II (1866)
• "Impending Fate of the Country," DeBow's Review, Vol. II (1866)
• "John Stuart Mill on Political Economy," DeBow's Review, Vol. III (1867)
• "Excess of Population and Increase of Crime and Pauperism," DeBow's Review, Vol. III (1867)
• "Our Trip to the Country—Virginia," DeBow's Review, Vol. III (1867)
• "Monarchy in America," DeBow's Review, Vol. III (1867)
• "Exodus from the South," DeBow's Review, Vol. III (1867)
• "Liberty versus Government," DeBow's Review, Vol. III (1867)
• "Moral Philosophies," DeBow's Review, Vol. III (1867)
• "The Negro Imbroglio—Farms for the Freedmen," DeBow's Review, Vol. III (1867)
• "Still Life in the Country," DeBow's Review, Vol. III (1867)
• "Revolutions of '76 and '61 Contrasted," DeBow's Review, Vol. IV (1867)
• "The Poor House System," DeBow's Review, Vol. IV (1867)
• "Mandeville's Fable of the Bees," DeBow's Review, Vol. IV (1867)
• "Cui Bono?—The Negro Vote," DeBow's Review, Vol. IV (1867)
• "Land Monopoly—Savage Nature," DeBow's Review, Vol. IV (1867)
• "The Return of Good Feeling," DeBow's Review, Vol. IV (1867)
• "Land Monopoly," Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. IV (1869)
• "The Great Central Belt of Trade and Commerce The Southern Magazine, Vol. IV (1872)

Miscellania

• 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. New York: Capricorn Books (1960).

References

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Further reading

• Adler, Mortimer J. (1969). The Negro in American History, Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corp.
• Cayton, Andrew; Elisabeth Israels Perry, Linda Reed & Allan M. Winkler (2002). America: Pathways To The Present. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
• Eaton, Clement (1940). The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Franklin, John Hope (2002). The Militant South, 1800–1861, University of Illinois Press.
• Genovese, Eugene D. (1967). The Political Economy of Slavery, Vintage Books.
• Genovese, Eugene D. (1969). The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, Pantheon Books [Wesleyan University Press, 1988].
• Genovese, Eugene D. (1995). The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War, University of Missouri Press.
• Hofstadter, Richard (1973). The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made it. New York: Vintage Books.
• Kirkpatrick, Mary Alice (2004). "George Fitzhugh, 1806–1881". Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina.
• McCardell, John (1979). The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
• O'Brien, Michael (2010). Conjectures of order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press.
• Ross, Dorothy (1991). The Origins of American Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Perry, Lewis and Fellman, Michael (1979). Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, Louisiana State University Press.
• Pole, J. R. (1978). The Pursuit of Equality in American History, University of California Press.
• Saunders Jr., Robert (2000). "George Fitzhugh." In: Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ABC-Clio.
• Schermerhorn, Calvin (2016). "George Fitzhugh (1806–1881)" In: Encyclopedia Virginia.
• Scott, Anne Firor (1970). The Southern Lady: from Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930, University of Chicago Press.
• Snay, Mitchell (1989). "American Thought and Southern Distinctiveness: The Southern Clergy and the Sanctification of Slaves," Civil War History 35 (4), pp. 117–128.
• Tyler, Alice Felt (1944). Freedom's Ferment; Phases of American Social History to 1860, The University of Minnesota Press.
• Wilson, Edmund (1962). Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of The American Civil War, Oxford University Press.
• Wyatt-Brown, Bertram (1982). "Modernizing Southern Slavery: The Proslavery Argument Reinterpreted." In: J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (eds.), Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in honor of C. Vann Woodward. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

External links

• Works by George Fitzhugh at Project Gutenberg
• Works by George Fitzhugh at Hathi Trust
• Fitzhugh, George, by Mark C. Henrie
• George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) Encyclopedia of Virginia website. Contributed by Calvin Schermerhorn and the Dictionary of Virginia Biography
• George Fitzhugh, 1806–1881, by Eugene D. Genovese
• George Fitzhugh (1804–1881), by Anne G. Jones
• George Fitzhugh, Sui Generi by C. Vann Woodward
• Oakwood Cemetery, Walker County Historical Society website accessed on Aug. 27, 2017.
• Proslavery and Modernity in the Late Antebellum South
• Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society