GEORGE FITZHUGH
This is one of the major reasons that Slavery was so hard to end in the South. At the time, the dollar value of the Southern slaves was greater than the value of all the land, factories, inventory, and capital equipment of the South. Slaves were not only capital, they were the largest component of Southern capital and Southern wealth. There were numerous ideas of paying slave owners for the freedom of their slaves, and if this was done, it would have been far less expensive in money alone than the Civil War cost. However, the Southern leadership, like Fitzhugh, were totally intransient with culture and customs—indeed the Southern concept of manhood—was dependent in Slavery. The result was that no compensation was paid to slave owners and the South was impoverished as a result of its capital loss and it would not recover for 150 years.
Of all the defenses is American slavery, this one is probably the most absurd. If it were remotely true, this may have been the only example in human history where people were beaten, debauched, tortured, murdered and degraded by their “friends.”
As absurd as this sounds to us today, it was a commonly held belief by Aristocrats, and upper class people in many societies. Some ultra conservatives in Democracies and Dictators like Franco and Mussolini.
This was a common view of Southern leaders. Society had to be monolithic culturally. In the North, the constant immigration from the world over made pluralism much more normative. However, the vast majority of the North opposed slavery and believed that slavery and free labor could not coexist. So the Southern argument on that point was turned on them, and the monolithic views of the South has constantly eroded and become more tolerant and pluralistic and by the 21st century, there were parts of the South that were more tolerant and pluralistic than some parts of the North. Change, reform and liberalism was slow to take hold but it was inexorable.
At the time, it did seem impossible that labor and capital would ever have harmonious relations. But the notion that slavery would solve the problem is as preposterous as anything ever entered into the American political dialogue. But there were many in the South, and some in the North, who actually believed it. Even 150 years later, while labor and capital relations were much better than pre Civil War, they still could not be described as “harmonious” or “friendly”.
Fitzhugh was a Southern iconoclast whose view of Northern labor was much like that of Karl Marx but who was an enthusiastic supporter of slavery. Fitzhugh was of the opinion that slavery would be reinstated in the North and his treatise agues for that. More and more intellectual opinion was coming to the conclusion that slavery must be abolished or made universal before Lincoln’s famous statement in his debate against Douglas. Although Northerners and Southerners had come to agree on this point, they disagreed about which alternative would and should prevail.
George Fitzhugh was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based sociological theories 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’s worldview has been described as fascist in its rejection of liberal values, defense of slavery, and perspectives toward race. Fitzhugh decried capitalism as practiced by the Northern United States and Great Britain 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. Although most Northern whites at the time agreed with Fitzhugh that blacks were incapable of functioning in a free society, the necessity of free trade and the expansion of slavery to the Southern economy hurt Northern factory workers and Northern farmers, who wished to claim western land for small farms. Fitzhugh's claim that poor whites should be enslaved also infuriated Northern Whites, some of whom remembered that the British had occasionally enslaved white men during the Colonial Era. The British practice of enslaving men involved in rebellion against the British government in Scotland and Ireland on Barbados during the time of Oliver Cromwell and its subsequent practice of deporting convicts to the American Colonies had infuriated the Founding Fathers, this fact contributing to Thomas Jefferson's writing that "All Men Are Created Equal" in the Declaration of Independence. The combination of economic interests and the belief in the equal standing of white men before the law caused many Northerners to embrace abolitionism before the war, but not the concept of full equality between the races that Fitzhugh feared.
