A vocal slavery advocate, George Fitzhugh's first publication was a pamphlet titled Slavery Justified (1849), a text reprinted as an appendix in his 1854 Sociology for the South; or, The Failure of Free Society. During an 1855 visit to Boston, Massachusetts and New Haven, Connecticut, Fitzhugh gave public lectures and engaged in lively debates with northern abolitionists on slavery. Yet he remained convinced that slavery was a rightful, necessary form of labor and that southern blacks should stay enslaved. Fitzhugh likewise considered the North's failure to address the charges he and others had leveled, primarily regarding the breakdown of northern social and economic systems, as an admission of guilt or a concession revealing the "truth" of proslavery arguments.

The Richmond publisher A. Morris printed Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters in 1857. Endeavoring in the preface "to treat the subjects of Liberty and Slavery in a more rigidly analytical manner," Fitzhugh charts productive classical and historical accounts of slavery and cites the Bible as evidence. Referencing the French proletariat, various Gypsy peoples, and the Irish peasantry as groups oppressed under capitalism, Fitzhugh likewise presents the poor working and factory class conditions in England as evidence that the southern institution of slavery, modeled after a pre-capitalist, feudal society, is economically justifiable. Furthermore, he argues capitalism, as practiced in Europe and the North, produces a form of moral cannibalism, replicating the master/slave dichotomy by turning capitalists (or the professional class) into masters and free laborers into exploited slaves. Within a capitalist society, the very labor and skill extracted in pursuit of profit enslaves these workers, leaving them far more disenfranchised than their slave counterparts. Specifying capitalism's many "evils," Fitzhugh notes that it encourages falsehood and hypocrisy, impedes scientific modifications of supply to meet demand, demeans labor's value and nobility, and results in the greater impoverishment of already poor peoples while augmenting the wealth of the affluent.

According to Fitzhugh, under the humane code of southern paternalism in which masters labor on behalf of their enslaved workers, African American slaves—unlike those miserable participants in free labor's "White Slave Trade"—are happy and free. They enjoy those comforts and necessities granted them under a mutually beneficial, supportive system and community. To address the charge that slavery results in immorality, namely through illicit sexual liaisons, Fitzhugh suggests that contact between the ignorant and the more enlightened acts as a natural form of education. Despite the obviously specious and racist tendencies of Fitzhugh's arguments, more recent critical scholarship has reexamined his works and their critique of modern capitalism's industrialized, mechanized society in relation to Marxism and its theoretical offshoots.

EXCERPTS

 

 |  | W e are all, North and South, engaged in the White Slave Trade, and he who succeeds best is esteemed most respectable. It is far more cruel than the Black Slave Trade because it exacts more

of its slaves, and neither protects nor governs them. We boast that it exacts more when we say “that the profits made from employing free labor are greater than those from slave labor.” The profits made from free labor are the amount of the products of such labor which the employer, by means of the command which capital or skill gives him, takes away, exacts or “exploitates” from the free laborer. The profits of slave labor are that portion of the products of such labor which the power of the master enables him to appropriate. These profits are less, because the master allows the slave to retain a larger share of the results of his own labor than do the employers of free labor. But we not only boast that the White Slave Trade is more exacting and fraudulent (in fact, though not in intention) than Black Slavery, but we also boast that it is more cruel, in leaving the laborer to take care of himself and family out of the pittance which skill or capital have allowed him to retain. When the day’s labor is ended, he is free, but is overburdened with the cares of family and household, which make his freedom an empty and delusive mockery. But his employer is really free, and may enjoy the profits made by others’ labor without a care or a trouble as to their well-being. The Negro slave is free, too, when the labors of the day are over, and free in mind as well as body, for the master provides food, raiment [clothing], house, fuel, and everything else necessary to the physical well-being of himself and family. The master’s labors commence just when the slave’s end. No wonder men should prefer white slavery to capital, to Negro slavery, since it is more profitable, and is free from all the cares and labors of black slave-holding.

Now, reader, if you wish to know yourself — to “descant on your own deformity”1 — read on. But if you would cherish self-conceit, self-esteem, or self-appreciation, throw down our book, for we will dispel illusions which have promoted your happiness, and show you that what you have considered and practiced as virtue is little better than moral Cannibalism. But you will find yourself in numerous and respectable company, for all good and respectable people are “Cannibals all,” who do not labor, or who are successfully trying to live without labor, on the unrequited labor of other people — whilst low, bad, and disreputable people are those who labor to support themselves and to support said respectable people besides. 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. The gentlemen exploitate [exploit], which being done on a large scale and requiring a great many victims, is highly respectable — whilst the rogues and beggars take so little from others that they fare little better than those who labor.

But, reader, we do not wish to fire into the flock. “Thou art the man!” You are a Cannibal! and if a

 

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Copyright © National Humanities Center, 2013. AMERICA IN CLASS®: americainclass.org/. Footnotes and bracketed notes added, and punctuation and some grammar modernized for clarity. Full text online in Documenting the American South (UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries; docsouth.unc.edu/).

1 Shakespeare, Richard III, Act I, Scene I: “ . . . descant on mine own deformity”; in opening monologue (“Now is the winter of our discontent”).

successful one, pride yourself on the number of your victims, quite as much as any Feejee [Fiji] chieftain, who breakfasts, dines and sups on human flesh. — And your conscience smites you if you have failed to succeed, quite as much as his, when he returns from an unsuccessful foray.

Probably you are a lawyer, or a merchant, or a doctor, who has made by your business fifty thousand dollars, and retired to live on your capital. But, mark! not to spend your capital. That would be vulgar, disreputable, criminal. That would be to live by your own labor, for your capital is your amassed labor. That would be to do as common working men do, for they take the pittance which their employers leave them, to live on. They live by labor, for they exchange the results of their own labor for the products of other people’s labor. It is, no doubt, an honest vulgar [common, ordinary] way of living, but not at all a respectable way. The respectable way of living is to make other people work for you, and to pay them nothing for so doing — and to have no concern about them after their work is done. Hence, white slave- holding is much more respectable than Negro slavery — for the master works nearly as hard for the Negro, as he for the master. But you, my virtuous, respectable reader, exact three thousand dollars per annum [year] from white labor (for your income is the product of white labor) and make not one cent of return in any form. You retain your capital, and never labor, and yet live in luxury on the labor of others. Capital commands labor, as the master does the slave. Neither pays for labor, but the master permits the slave to retain a larger allowance from the proceeds of his own labor, and hence “free labor is cheaper than slave labor.” You, with the command over labor which your capital gives you, are a slave owner —

a master, without the obligations of a master. They who work for you, who create your income, are slaves, without the rights of slaves. Slaves without a master! Whilst you were engaged in amassing your capital, in seeking to become independent, you were in the White Slave Trade. To become independent is to be able to make other people support you, without being obliged to labor for them. Now, what man in society is not seeking to attain this situation? He who attains it is a slave owner, in the worst sense. He who is in pursuit of it, is engaged in the slave trade. You, reader, belong to the one or other class. The men without property, in free society, are theoretically in a worse condition than slaves. Practically, their condition corresponds with this theory, as history and statistics everywhere demonstrate. The capitalists, in free society, live in ten times the luxury and show that Southern masters do, because the slaves to capital [i.e., the northern factory workingmen] work harder and cost less than Negro slaves.

The Negro slaves of the South

are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life

provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters. The Negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. Besides, they have their Sabbaths and holidays. White men, with so much of license and liberty, would die of ennui [boredom], but Negroes luxuriate in corporeal [bodily] and mental repose. With their faces upturned to the sun, they can sleep at any hour, and quiet sleep is the greatest of human enjoyments. “Blessed be the man who invented sleep.” ’Tis happiness in itself — and results from contentment with the present, and confident assurance of the future. We do not know whether free laborers ever sleep. They are fools to do so, for whilst they sleep, the wily and watchful capitalist is devising means to ensnare and exploit them. The free laborer must work or starve. He is more of a slave than the Negro because he works

longer and harder for less allowance than the slave and has no holiday, because the cares of life with him begin when its labors end. He has no liberty, and not a single right. We

know, ’tis often said, air and water are common property, which all have equal right to participate and enjoy, but this is utterly false. The appropriation of the lands carries with it the appropriation of all on or above the lands, usque ad coelumm aut ad inferos.2 A man cannot breathe the air without a place to breathe it from, and all places are appropriated. All water is private property “to the middle of the stream,” except the ocean, and that is not fit to drink.

Free laborers have not a thousandth part of the rights and liberties of Negro slaves. Indeed, they have not a single right or a single liberty, unless it be the right or liberty to die. But the reader may think that he and other capitalists and employers are freer than Negro slaves. Your capital would soon vanish, if you dared indulge in the liberty and abandon of Negroes. You hold your wealth and position by the tenure of constant watchfulness, care and circumspection. You never labor; but you are never free.

Where a few own the soil, they have unlimited power over the balance of society, until domestic slavery comes in to compel them to permit this balance of society to draw a sufficient and comfortable living from “terra mater.”3 Free society asserts the right of a few to the earth — slavery maintains that it belongs, in different degrees, to all.

But, reader, well may you follow the slave trade. It is the only trade worth following, and slaves the only property worth owning. All other is worthless, a mere caput mortuum,4 except insofar as it vests the owner with the power to command the labors of others — to enslave them. Give you a palace, ten thousand acres of land, sumptuous clothes, equipage, and every other luxury; and with your artificial wants, you are poorer than Robinson Crusoe or the lowest working man if you have no slaves to capital, or domestic slaves. Your capital will not bring you an income of a cent, nor supply one of your wants, without labor. Labor is indispensable to give value to property, and if you owned everything else and did not own labor, you would be poor. But fifty thousand dollars means, and is, fifty thousand dollars worth of slaves. You can command, without touching on that capital, three thousand dollars’ worth of labor per annum. You could do no more were you to buy slaves with it, and then you would be cumbered with the cares of governing and providing for them. You are a slaveholder now, to the amount of fifty thousand dollars, with all the advantages, and none of the cares and responsibilities of a master.

Public opinion unites with self-interest, domestic affection and municipal law to protect the slave.

The man who maltreats the weak and dependent, who abuses his authority over wife, children or slaves, is universally detested. That same public opinion which shields and protects the slave encourages the oppression of free laborers — for it is considered more honorable and praiseworthy to obtain large fees than small ones, to make good bargains than bad ones (and all fees and profits come ultimately from common laborers) — to live without work by the exactions of accumulated capital, than to labor at the plough or the spade, for one’s living. It is the interest of the capitalist and the skillful to allow free laborers the least possible portion of the fruits of their own labor, for all capital is created by labor, and the smaller the allowance of the free laborer, the greater the gains of his employer. To treat free laborers badly and unfairly, is universally inculcated as a moral duty, and the selfishness of man’s nature prompts him to the most rigorous performance of this cannibalish duty. We appeal to political economy — the ethical, social, political and economic philosophy of free society — to prove the truth of our doctrines. As an ethical and social guide, that philosophy teaches, that social, individual and national competition is a moral duty, and we have attempted to prove all competition is but the effort to enslave others, without being encumbered with their support. As a political guide, it would simply have government ‘keep the peace,’ or, to define its doctrine more exactly, it teaches “that it is the whole duty of government to hold the weak whilst the strong rob them” — for it punishes crimes accompanied with force, which none but the weak-minded commit, but encourages the war of the wits in which the strong and astute are sure to succeed in stripping the weak and ignorant.                                                                                                   

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2 “All the way to heaven and all the way to hell” [Latin]. Full line: Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos : “for whoever owns the soil, it is theirs all the way to heaven and all the way to hell.” In law, meaning unlimited property rights—from the sky to the center of the earth.

3 Mother earth [Latin].

4 Worthless remains; literally, “dead head” [Latin]; originally from medieval alchemy, meaning a leftover substance after a chemical reaction.