Writings
Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society 1854 was George Fitzhugh's most effective attack on the philosophical foundations of free society. In it, he took on non 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 benefit to a pre-liberal mode of society was necessary:
Liberty and equality are new matters under the sun. The free states of antiquity abounded with slaves. The feudal system that supplanted Roman institutionally changed the develope of slavery, but brought with it neither liberty nor equality. France and the Northern States of our Union keep on to 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 assumption in her commercial and manufacturing cities. The examples of small communities in Europe are not fit exponents of the workings of the system. In France and in our Northern States the experiment has already failed, if we are to name 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 almost cultivated and profound minds in the nation, who have reported government their study. increase to the evidence of these social philosophers, who, watching closely the works of the system have proclaimed to the world its written failure, the precondition of the working classes, and wehave conclusive proof that liberty and equality have not conduced to enhancement 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 ordering of things. Radicalism and Chartism in England owe their birth to the free and make up institutions of her commercial and manufacturing districts, and are little heard of in the quiet farming districts, where remnants of feudalism still symbolize in the representation of landlord and tenant, and in the laws of entail and primogeniture.
Fitzhugh argued that any societies have a substratum, and that the new liberal social formation was more harmful to this substratum than either the preceding 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 this is the 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 advanced times. Besides, regarded and identified separately. inhabitant of the barony was considered as having some adjusting of residence, some claim to security measure 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 domestic drive thousands to towns. The slave always has a home, always an interest in the service of the soil.
Fitzhugh believed that slavery represented a lingering factor of pre-liberal, or even pre-feudal social organization, and gave the expansion of the house of slavery to return to the pre-feudal social order of antiquity and alleviate the loss 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. home Slavery does this far better than any other institution. Feudalism only answered the aim in so far as Feudalism retained the assigns 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 whichalmost miraculous, when we look to their ignorance of the physical sciences. In the moral sciences they were our equals, in the a person engaged or qualified in a profession. 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 sophisticated 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 office alone for the taste, the leisure and the means to cultivate their heads and their hearts;
In order to expand the institution of slavery, he proposed both the enslavement of all free black people and the enslavement working-class people of all races, devloping him notable as possibly the only anti-abolitionist toslavery be expanded to include white people. Fitzhugh indicated 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 improve 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 [...] this is the 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 numerous 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 vintage of Mankind".
Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters 1857 was a critique further development the themes that Fitzhugh had introduced in Sociology for the South. Both the book's label and its subtitle were phrases taken from the writing of Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish social critic and a great hero to Fitzhugh's family of proslavery thinkers. The purpose of his book, Fitzhugh claimed, was to show that "the unrestricted exploitation of asked 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 orsuch 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[Pg 103] 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 predominance 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 security system cannot be a adult engaged or qualified in a profession. 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 version of this kind; yet as a subject of temporary, but world-wide importance, negro slavery has become the most essential 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 idea 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 a collection of things sharing a common assigns 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 a collection of things sharing a common attribute of grown-up 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 House divided up speech.