Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters

by George Fitzhugh, C. Vann Woodward (Editor)

Overview

Cannibals All! got more attention in William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator than any other book in the history of that abolitionist journal. And Lincoln is said to have been more angered by George Fitzhugh than by any other pro-slavery writer, yet he unconsciously paraphrased Cannibals All! in his House Divided speech. Fitzhugh was provocative because of his stinging attack on free society, laissez-faire economy, and wage slavery, along with their philosophical underpinnings. He used socialist doctrine to defend slavery and drew upon the same evidence Marx used in his indictment of capitalism. Socialism, he held, was only “the new fashionable name for slavery,” though slavery was far more humane and responsible, “the best and most common form of socialism.” His most effective testimony was furnished by the abolitionists themselves. He combed the diatribes of their friends, the reformers, transcendentalists, and utopians, against the social evils of the North. “Why all this,” he asked, “except that free society is a failure?” The trouble all started, according to Fitzhugh, with John Locke, “a presumptuous charlatan,” and with the heresies of the Enlightenment. In the great Lockean consensus that makes up American thought from Benjamin Franklin to Franklin Roosevelt, Fitzhugh therefore stands out as a lone dissenter who makes the conventional polarities between Jefferson and Hamilton, or Hoover and Roosevelt, seem insignificant. Beside him Taylor, Randolph, and Calhoun blend inconspicuously into the American consensus, all being apostles of John Locke in some degree. An intellectual tradition that suffers from uniformity—even if it is virtuous, liberal conformity—could stand a bit of contrast, and George Fitzhugh can supply more of it than any other American thinker.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674036925
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2009
Series:	John Harvard Library Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	455 KB

About the Author

C. Vann Woodward was Professor of American History at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He is the author of several authoritative books on the South: Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1938); Origins of the New South (1951); Reunion and Reaction (1951); and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). He passed away on December 17, 1999.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

“George Fitzhugh, Sui Generis”

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
George Fitzhugh is known as the ranking propagandist for southern slavery, but to dismiss him for that reason is intellectually irresponsible. Far from being a crass statement about Africans, his book's title is a reference to the moral degradation that, in his view, is natural to laissez-faire capitalism where each person must fend for himself to the detriment of his neighbor.

In this astonishing book we find a provocatively modern assault on the very idea of liberty. Indeed, Fitzhugh essentially argues that in practical terms freedom is meaningless for the majority of the laboring classes, an assessment that would find sympathy among not a few present-day progressives: if you don't know the horrors of industrial life in the maquilladoras of 19th century England, you will find them amply catalogued here.

In some respects, one feels a creepy sense of déjà vu in reading Fitzhugh, because what he has to say not only anticipates Marx , it also leads to some very uncomfortable reflections upon the welfare state. For, while Franklin Roosevelt might have argued that the state has an obligation to help those who cannot help themselves, Fitzhugh would suggest that this duty should fall on the shoulders of those who actually can help, namely, the wealthy, landed aristocracy. In other words, at a very disturbing level, Fitzhugh, as a self-styled socialist, argues for a personal sense of noblesse oblige as opposed to one derived from the state, and in this respect the difference is perhaps not very great. (C. A. Hoffman)