“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.
Denial
of the Founding Principles
Fitzhugh respected the Founding Fathers, yet thought their
republican experiment to be deeply flawed. He took great issue with the
Declaration of Independence, especially the phrase “all men are created equal.”
It and similar 18th and 19th century documents were
based on lofty, abstract principles instead of proven nature. It was obvious to
Fitzhugh that people were not born equal. Some people were obviously smarter,
industrious, or stronger. Men were superior to women, whites superior to other
races. “Their natural inequalities beget inequalities of rights.”[2]
Fitzhugh
thought it a great mistake to base American government on the principles of 17th
century English philosopher John Locke. Locke had insisted that man must
consent to be governed, that he had the natural right to be a free creature. Fitzhugh saw this as too individualistic and too
unrealistic. He insisted that people naturally submitted themselves to other
authorities without consensual thought, that government would always be and had
to be coercive to keep society stable.[3]
The Founding Fathers were incorrect that government got its power from the
governed. If this was the case there would be anarchy. In reality, even the
most democratic societies restricted voting power to a qualified minority
(usually elite white males) rather than all people.[4]
In general, Fitzhugh disregarded Locke, capitalist Adam Smith, and
other Enlightenment and modern philosophers as dangerously abstract in their
ideas. To him the greatest philosophers and thinkers were the ancients. Aristotle, not
Locke, had the proper grasp on “the origin of society,” of hierarchical order
rather than free society.[5]
Aristotle understood that not all people were equal, and that it was natural
that some should be masters and others slaves. After the ancient Greek Fitzhugh
most invoked Moses, whom he considered the greatest political statesman in
history. A firm believer in the Bible, Fitzhugh pointed out that Moses got his
law directly from the mouth of God. As the law allowed for slavery, he
concluded that it was God-ordained and necessary for human government. Fitzhugh
insisted that Moses would be against free society capitalism and more approving
of a slave system that provided security for the poor.[6]
George
Fitzhugh was thus certainly a conservative, yet he was not an American conservative (more on this
later).
The
Anti-Capitalist
In
defending slavery, Fitzhugh attacked the North’s economic mode, which was free
labor capitalism, and capitalism in the industrial age. To him free labor
society was a falsehood. His arguments in this area were shared by many other
slaveholders who sought to defend their system as a moral good. He argued that
a free labor society did nothing for the lower classes. It only allowed the
most cunning, industrious, and advantaged men to succeed, reaping profits off
the work of others without providing any security. Northern capitalists were
wealthier than Southerners because they could rely on “unrequited labor.” While
masters had to feed, clothe and shelter their slaves, capitalists could extract
labor from the working-class and then leave them to provide for themselves on low
wages and whatever time they had left. Fitzhugh identified four classes of
people in Northern society:
“Throwing
the negro slaves out of the account, and society is divided in Christendom into
four classes: The rich, or independent respectable people, who live well and
labor not at all; the professional and skillful respectable people, who do a
little light work, for enormous wages; the poor hard-working people, who support
everybody, and starve themselves; and the poor thieves, swindlers and sturdy
beggars, who live like gentlemen, without labor, on the labor of other people.”[7]
Fitzhugh’s
criticisms of capitalism are remarkably like that of the Socialists of the time.
These critics charged that the industrial drive in free societies was causing real
working-class problems. They insisted that men were enslaved to wages and
working more for less was also expressed by Marxists, Anarchists, and other
socialist off-shoots around the world. For example, he wrote that laissez-faire capitalism, “A system of unmitigated selfishness
pervades and distinguishes all departments of ethical, political, and economic science.”[8]
Fitzhugh was aware of these similarities. He stated the Socialists had properly
diagnosed free labor capitalism as the source of society’s woes. However, their
cure was too extreme and moved in the wrong direction. They sought to do away
with land ownership, religion, and other long-running institutions.[9]
Fitzhugh believed that somebody had to own land and property, to incentivize
its maintenance through personal interest, but to do so in a way that allowed
the less fortunate to access it as well.
Fitzhugh
argued that a system of slavery, or at least Medieval-style feudalism, was in
fact the most benevolent system towards the poor. While not free in an
independent sense, laborers were free from having to worry about food, shelter,
and clothing. By owning capital in human labor, masters were obligated to care
for their charges’ well-being or risk financial ruin. Fitzhugh also countered
the charge that masters were indolent leeches. He claimed they exerted much
energy managing the finances of their estates and distributing necessities to
the slaves.[10]
Fitzhugh
constantly invoked the image of an impoverished lower class in Britain. He saw
the squalid working and living conditions, and the thousands of vagrants, the
“pauper banditti,” roaming the country in search of stable work. He attributed
the cause of this to free society. Hundreds of thousands of British subjects
had been tied to the lands of the aristocracy and gentry. Once “freed” of the
mastery of the upper-classes, they found themselves cast adrift, having to work
harder for less.[11]
He claimed this was happening in the Northern states and would occur over all
of America if slavery was abolished.
 |
| This cartoon claims to compare a harmonious and prosperous southern plantation with a destitute Northern working-class family, visited by a fat capitalist. |
Universal
Slavery
Where
Fitzhugh was most radical was his insistence that the enslavement of whites was
no evil. He pointed out that slavery had been practiced by all and on all
throughout history. It was based on class, not race. Saying that whites could
not be justly enslaved was a falsehood that ironically led to their enslavement
to capitalist masters. In fact, slavery existed in many forms often
unacknowledged. Wives were slaves to husbands, children to fathers, and the
governed to the government. Fitzhugh criticized other pro-slavery advocates for
seeing white enslavement as an evil. By saying it was evil, they indirectly
labeled slavery as a whole evil.
As
for abolitionists, their attacks on slavery were borne from their
familiarity with the evils of capitalism. They were
used to the tyrannical power of capitalists over their workers, a power not yet
tempered by slavery, and ignorantly assumed slave-owners were practicing the
same ills.[12]
Like the Socialists, with whom Fitzhugh often lumped abolitionists as part of
the same radical movement, they saw real societal problems and went after
unproven and dangerous solutions. He noted that prominent Northerners
criticized their own society while prominent Southerners did not do the same
with theirs. To him this proved that free society was in fact the flawed one,
as it was criticized even by those living within it. Slavery was the solution
to capitalism’s woes.
When
he spoke of white enslavement, Fitzhugh was not advocating racial equality
within slavery. Like others of his time, he claimed
blacks were too much like children to thrive in a democratic society. In a free
capitalistic society they would be severely outclassed by the more industrious
whites and unable to survive. If anything, blacks in southern society were
pampered and much more well-off than ragged white laborers in the North and
England.[13]
The enslavement of whites would be much softer and more protective. Fitzhugh
probably envisioned a system of serfdom rather than chattel slavery, in which
poor whites would work for the benefit of their lords in return for security
and the ability to enjoy life.[14]
“Slavery insurance never fails, and covers all losses and all misfortunes”[15]
Free
Trade Woes
Fitzhugh
was not entirely focused on slavery. He also wrote much on free trade. He felt
that free trade came to the detriment of the South. It encouraged states to
produce certain goods to be shipped elsewhere. Free
trade had made the South exclusively agricultural. It only focused on producing
what the North and other nations would buy, at the expense of self-sufficiency
and internal development. It would produce cotton and other goods and sell them
for a good profit, but then these goods would be processed in Northern and
foreign plants and these regions would reap even greater profits. The South
needed to stop trading away all its potential wealth and focus on developing internal
industry, or else it would be poorer and more dependent on the North. It needed
to recognize that it could make the North feel its own dependency on Southern
wealth.[16]
Fitzhugh also lamented that an agricultural society saw less
demand and need for education. He saw the improper education of poor Southern whites
as the most legitimate criticism coming from abolitionists. However, he refused
to see slavery as the primary cause. Instead it was free trade which encouraged
Southerners to maintain their exclusively agricultural society. If other forms
of business were grown, than there would be more incentive to fund public
schools and train whites.[17]
Fitzhugh’s
Decline
When reading Fitzhugh’s description of
slavery, one wonders what his slaveholding life was like. How could he overlook
all the abuses entrenched within southern slavery? He thought that over-beating
and the separation of families through sale were rare circumstances when that
was far from the case. Perhaps he himself was a benevolent slave-master. His
father had to sell his plantation and Fitzhugh grew up in comparatively modest
circumstances. His descriptions of slave-masters painstakingly seeing to the
care of their black charges likely applied to himself, as he also labored to help
freedmen after the Civil War. Furthermore he lived in Port Royal in Northern Virginia.
Slavery in this region was neither as widespread nor vicious as that in the
Deep South’s cotton belt. He rarely left his home, failing to witness much of
slavery’s crueler aspects firsthand and instead relying on articles he read.[18]
Fitzhugh’s slaves obviously did not want
to stay dependent on their master. During the Civil War, they grabbed their
freedom as soon as Union forces occupied Port Royal in 1862. Fitzhugh fled and
spent the remainder of the war as a clerk in the Confederate treasury
department. Showing that he was earnest in his benevolent view of slavery, he
actually worked in the freedman’s bureau after the war, helping ex-slaves find
their footing while wishing they could be returned to the security of their
former status.[19]
 |
| Union soldiers at Port Royal, Fitzhugh's home town. This important coastal port in Virginia was seized just three days after the war began and was never recovered by the Confederacy. |
With slavery destroyed by the Civil War and
Reconstruction, Fitzhugh’s star faded. Like other ex-Confederates he spent much of his remaining life trying to defend a perished social order. For a few years he maintained
his anti-capitalist fervor. He advocated a new caste system to combat
exploitative capitalism, with blacks at the bottom laboring for rich and poor
whites alike. He eagerly predicted and awaited the abolition of capitalism in
the North, which he thought would give him the satisfaction of revenge.
However, he gradually came to support free labor capitalism, arguing that the
vast unclaimed lands in the West enabled poorer whites to escape exploitation
and create more freedom for themselves. Also, reflecting racial attitudes in
the Reconstruction-era South, he grew more virulent in his views on blacks.
Slavery had been discredited by Northern victory and capitalism while free labor
showed no signs of slowing down. With his cherished vision of benevolent
slavery destroyed, Fitzhugh lost his right to prominence.[20]
Socialist,
Conservative, What Was He?
Various authors have tried to label Fitzhugh a conservative or
socialist. Both terms are inadequate. I would argue that he was more of the
former than the latter, but not in the way that Americans today define
conservatism. A comparison can be drawn between Fitzhugh and Abraham Lincoln. In one of his 1850s speeches, Lincoln
declared himself a conservative in that he sought to conserve the classical
liberal values of the Founding Fathers, though anti-slavery ideas were radical in Southern society. In one of his debates with Stephen Douglass he stated that all men should be free
and all should own what he has made through his labor. No other had the right
to take the fruits of a man’s labor. Lincoln further believed in equality for
whites, and at least social equality for blacks guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence. He considered himself
conservative in preserving the values of the Founding Fathers.[21]
Fitzhugh, on the other hand, was conserving ancient values birthed
by Mosaic law and Greco- Roman society. He believed mankind was best served if
arranged into a hierarchical society where the superior were aristocrats and
tradesmen and the inferiors lived in what he saw as secure serfdom. As stated
earlier, he saw the abolition of slavery and feudalism across the West as the
cause of modern society’s woes. In addition to his example of Britain, he
focused on France’s tumultuous history. The end of feudalism led to the
catastrophic French Revolution and its resultant bloodbath. Even after Napoleon
and the Revolution were deposed, France suffered decades of social unrest due
to the millions of landless poor. At the time of Fitzhugh’s writing, Napoleon
III had ended the unrest by seizing the rich’s grain wealth and redistributing
it among the poor. He called this socialism, and then stated that socialism was
in fact slavery, a system in which the wealthy provided for the needs of the
poor in exchange for their labor.[22]
Some of today’s conservatives like to point at Fitzhugh’s
arguments as a firm example of the link between socialism and slavery. While
socialist and communist nations over the last century have indeed enslaved millions of their own citizens, Fitzhugh’s ideology doesn’t quite hit
the socialist mark. He wanted the majority of people to be placed in a dependent
state, but never advocated government control of the economy, only its
enforcement. The government would support the rule of the slaveholders, but the
slaveholders themselves would have the independence to make their own choices.
What he really advocated was a non-monarchical aristocracy. There would be the
slave-holders, the white serfs, the black slaves, and also non-slaveholders who
were qualified to live independently. The closest link between Fitzhugh’s ideas
and socialism is that the poor need a guaranteed social safety net provided by
the elites, and that independence in fact leads to ruthless competition and the
survival of the fittest.
In
the end Fitzhugh’s legacy has been that of a unique thinker, if not a real
shaper of southern policy. In fact, he garnered much more attention in the
North. Some historians suggest that his criticisms of northern society hit upon
some real truths and issues, sparking a rush by industrialists to oppose his
arguments. However, his views could never gain full acceptance in the South.
Poor Southerners were too proud to allow themselves to be pushed into serfdom,
much less categorized as slaves. For them, slavery was an affirmation of their
liberty. No matter how destitute their circumstances may be, they felt a keen
awareness of their liberty when comparing their lot to that of the destitute black
slaves. Slavery also freed whites from performing the most menial jobs. In
fact, even Fitzhugh’s schema had most whites enjoying a privileged, if poorer,
position. He likely saw the comfortable white poor as an example of slavery’s
benignity.[23]
In
the end Fitzhugh was somehow both well-informed and terribly mistaken. His entire
slaveholding ideology was predicated on a false view of the South. This incorrect,
rosy view casts doubts on his criticisms of free labor capitalist societies,
whether or not one agrees with him on this point. Importantly Fitzhugh’s
writings show that Southerners felt a moral need to justify slavery and explain
why it might be better than the Northern alternative. It also shows that there
can be incredible overlap between ideologies whose adherents would detest each
other, in this case socialism and ante-bellum slaveholding. People past and
present often see the same problems that need to be addressed, yet often come
up with radically different solutions.
Bibliography
Ericson, David. The
Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum
America. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Fitzhugh, George. Sociology
for the South, or The Failure of Free Society. Richmond: A. Morris, 1854.
-
Cannibals All, or Slaves Without
Masters.
Richmond: A. Morris, 1857.
Lincoln,
Abraham. “Cooper Union Address.” New York, NY, February 27, 1860.
-
“Lincoln-Douglass
First Debate.” Ottawa, IL, August 21, 1858.
Monroe, Dan, and Tap, Bruce. Shapers of the Great Debate on the Civil
War: A Biographical Dictionary. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005.
Schneider, Thomas E. Lincoln's
Defense of Politics: The Public Man and His Opponents in the Crisis over
Slavery. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005.
Wiener, Jonathan M. "Coming to Terms with Capitalism:
The Postwar Thought of George Fitzhugh." The Virginia Magazine of
History and Biography 87, no. 4 (1979): 438-47.
[1] George
Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or The
Failure of Free Society, (Richmond: A. Morris , 1854) 72.
[2] Fitzhugh, 1854, 177-178.
[3] Thomas E. Schneider, Lincoln's Defense of Politics: The Public Man and His Opponents in the
Crisis over Slavery (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 74-75.
[4] George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All, or Slaves Without Masters,
(Richmond: A. Morris, 1857), 353-354.
[5] Fitzhugh, xxii.
[6] Fitzhugh, 1857, 40-41.
[7] Fitzhugh, 1857, 27.
[8] Fitzhugh, 1857, 79-80.
[9] Fitzhugh, 1857, 33-37.
[10] Fitzhugh, 1857, 44-45.
[11] Fitzhugh, 1854, 59; Fitzhugh,
1857, 159.
[12] Fitzhugh, 1857, 130.
[13] Fitzhugh, 1854, 83-84.
[14] Fitzhugh, 1854, 94-95.
[15] Fitzhugh, 1854, 168.
[16] Fitzhugh, 1854, 149-151.
[17] Fitzhugh, 1854, 156-157.
[18] Dan Monroe and Bruce Tap, Shapers
of the Great Debate on the Civil War: A Biographical Dictionary, (Santa
Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 105-107.
[19] Monroe, 107-108.
[20] Jonathan
M. Wiener, "Coming to Terms with Capitalism: The Postwar Thought of George
Fitzhugh," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 87,
no. 4 (1979), 438-47.
[21] Abraham
Lincoln, “Cooper Union Address,” New York, NY, February 27, 1860, http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm;
Abraham Lincoln, “Lincoln-Douglass First Debate,” Ottawa, IL, August 21, 1858. https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate1.htm
[22] Fitzhugh, 1854, 40-45.
[23] David Ericson, The Debate
over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America. New York: New York University Press, 2000), 117;
also look at Steven Hahn’s Roots of
Southern Populism and Chandra Manning’s What
This Cruel War Was Over to look at how poor Southern whites benefited off
of slavery.
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