Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters / Edition 1

by George Fitzhugh, C. Vann Woodward

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:	9780674094512
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	05/01/1966
Series:	John Harvard Library Series , #3
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	306
Sales rank:	493,372
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

George Fitzhugh, lawyer, planter, newspaperman, sociologist, was born in Virginia in 1806. He married in 1829, had nine children, and lived until the Civil War in his wife’s home in Port Royal, Virginia. During this period he practiced law, was employed briefly in the Attorney General’s office, wrote for various periodicals and newspapers, and published two books, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All! (1857). After a foray into abolitionist territory in 1856, including a debate in New Haven with Wendell Phillips, he returned to the South more convinced than ever of his position, and up to the War he remained hopeful of converting the North. Fitzhugh died in Texas in 1881.

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

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

1. The Universal Trade

2. Labor, Skill, and Capital

3. Subject Continued—Exploitation of Skill

4. International Exploitation

5. False Philosophy of the Age

6. Free Trade, Fashion, and Centralization

7. The World is Too Little Governed

8. Liberty and Slavery

9. Paley on Exploitation

10. Our Best Witnesses and Masters in the Art of War

11. Decay of English Liberty, and Growth of English Poor Laws

12. The French Laborers and the French Revolution

13. The Reformation—The Right of Private Judgment

14. The Nomadic Beggars and Pauper Banditti of England

15. Rural Life of England

16. The Distressed Needle-Women and Hood's "Song of the Shirt"

17. The Edinburgh Review on Southern Slavery

18. The London Globe on West India Emancipation

19. Protection and Charity to the Weak

20. The Family

21. Negro Slavery

22. The Strength of Weakness

23. Money

24. Gerrit Smith on Land Reform, and William Lloyd Garrison on No-Government

25. In What Anti-Slavery Ends

26. Christian Morality Impracticable in Free Society—But the Natural Morality of Slave Society

27. Slavery—Its Effects on the Free

28. Private Property Destroys Liberty and Equality

29. The National Era an Excellent Witness

30. The Philosophy of the Isms—Showing Why They Abound at the North, and Are Unknown at the South

31. Deficiency of Food in Free Society

32. Man Has Property in Man

33. The Coup de Grâce to Abolition

34. National Wealth, Individual Wealth, Luxury, and Economy

35. Government a Thing of Force, Not of Consent

36. Warning to the North

37. Addendum

Index

Editorial Reviews

George Fitzhugh was possibly the best-known, and probably the best, apologist of the system of Negro slavery which prevailed in the South of the United States until the Civil War. In 1854 he published Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society, and in 1857 Cannibals All!, or, Slaves Without Masters… Fitzhugh was that rare thing, an American conservative; indeed his conservatism was so radical that, apart from his support for the American Revolution, he was almost an American Tory. Professor Woodward traces the influence of Carlyle and Disraeli, and the earlier tradition of Aristotle and Filmer… Yet Fitzhugh was really, as Professor Woodward says, ‘an American original,’ and Cannibals All! is a highly readable text in the John Harvard Library of documents of American cultural history. Fitzhugh was drastically, even deliberately, old-fashioned in his views, but at the same time remarkably modern in the way he came to them through sociology and psychology rather than philosophy, religion, economics or law.

Times Literary Supplement

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)