“All concur that free society is a failure. We slaveholders say
you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the best and most common form
of Socialism.”- George Fitzhugh[1]
The likening of southern slaveholding ideology to socialism seems
anathema to us today. The former is associated with conservatism and the latter
with leftism. But it must be remembered that not all socialism is Marxism.
Still, the states that would make up the Confederacy never thought to have the
government control the economic means of production. Yet in the years leading
up the Civil War, one Virginian intellectual insisted that there were
commonalities between socialism and slaveholding ideology. This man was George
Fitzhugh, a small slaveholder and lawyer in Port Royal, Virginia. He sought to
prove the legitimacy of slavery and furthermore to show that it was a moral
good for the betterment of the lower classes.
Southerners often defended slavery on the grounds that it was a
benign institution, that it uplifted blacks towards white civilization. A
common counter-argument of the abolitionists was that if slavery was so good,
then why were impoverished whites not put into it? Unlike other pro-slavery
advocates, Fitzhugh took their arguments to their logical conclusion, that
there was nothing wrong with enslaving whites. This was a radical suggestion,
though Fitzhugh did argue that the enslavement of whites would be much
different than the enslavement of blacks. However, he considered slavery of any
kind to be a better alternative to “free society” capitalism, especially in
industrializing countries. It should also be noted that many of his arguments
were not unheard of among Southerners in general. He merely took them a little
further. Most of his ideas expressed here are taken from his two major works, Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All (1857). Both attacked free
capitalist society and both defended the Southern way of life as the most
natural and benevolent.
