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VI. HENRY HUGHES Treatise on Sociology ". . . the budding poetry of the all-hoping sociologist shall ripen to a fruitful history." Born in 1829, Henry Hughes grew up in Port Gibson, Mississippi . In 1847 he graduated from Oakland College in his native state, then went on to New Orleans to study law and to Paris to pursue such varied subjects as architecture, social science, anatomy, chemistry, and moral philosophy . While abroad, Hughes encountered Auguste Comte, whose philosophy of positivism was to have a significant impact on the young Mississippian . Upon his return to Port Gibson, Hughes took up the practiee of law and began to write and speak on public issues. In 1854 he published a defense of southern slaveryin the form of a Treatise on Sociology: Theoretical and Practical, and he became a vigorous advocate for the reopening of the African slave trade. Hughes served as a state senator in the last years of the antebellumperiod, and during the Civil War he fought as a colonel in the Armyof Northern Virginia. In 1862 Hughes died at home in Mississippi of a war-related illness.' The selection below is from the second or "Practical" half of Hughes's proslavery volume.2 In many ways, it represents an extreme example of proslavery theorists' efforts to buttress their arguments with the language and methods of social science. Hughes here adopted much of the style and vocabulary of Auguste Comte's positivism, hoping to borrow the prestige of sociology for his treatment of southern slavery. To broaden the applicability of his argument, Hughes even replaced the terminology specifically associ1 . Except for a single diary and one scrapbook in the Mississippi Departmentof Archives and History,Jackson, Hughes's papers have been destroyed. I am grateful to Bertram WyattBrown for bringing these to my attention.On Hughes's life, see William D. Moore, The Life and Works of Col. Henry Hughes. A Funeral Sermon, Preached in the Methodist Episcopal Church, Port Gibson, Miss., October 26, 1862 (Mobile: Farrow and Dennett, 1863). 2. Henry Hughes, Treatise on Sociology: Theoretical and Practical (Philadelphia: Lippincott , Crambo and Co., 1854). 239 HENRY HUGHES ated with human bondage in the South with the more general languageof "warranteeism." YetHughes was unable to limit himself entirely to the selfconsciously neutral vocabulary of science and erupted in the final paragraphs of the work into a romantic rhapsody. The "budding poetry of the all-hoping sociologist" seems curiouslyout of place amidst the sparse language of objectivity that he affected in the rest of his volume. The substance of the work similarly reflected elements of both the old and the new. Although presented as a sociological treatise, the book nevertheless followed the basic outline of a traditional tract of moral philosophy, with the emphasis simply shifted from the duties of masters and slaves to those of warrantors and warrantees. In his concern with the limitations imposed on the power of the master or warrantor by his natural interest in the warrantee, Hughes summarized the traditional doctrine of paternalism, declaring that the system's "reciprocity is absolute." The warrantor, he proclaimed, would act "as an honest father of a family acts for the good of his household." Hughes insisted that race was not the rationalization for the warrantee system and asserted that the arrangements he described were appropriate and desirable for societies of any racial composition. His effort to provide a legitimacy for slavery beyond the circumstancesof the Old South compelled Hughes to minimizethe importance of race as a cause of slavery, but this in no way rendered him color-blind. The existence of blacks and whites in the South, he argued, prescribed a particular type of "ethnical" warranteeism, for the prevention of amalgamation of races was a moral and scientific necessity . While race was not the foundation of his argument for warranteeism , racism nevertheless pervaded both his writing and thinking. Although much of what Hughes presented is notable more for the wouldbe scientism of its language than for its substantive innovations, his open embrace of positivism and its theories of progressive phases of social development led him to foresee a future "Slavery-Perfect Society" of man's own creation.3 As a result, he allocated far broader power and responsibility to human agents than did the organic social philosophy of most of his fellow proslavery southerners, who railed against the Perfectionist schemes of northern abolitionists. Hughes's positivism also made him a religious scep3 . Henry Hughes, October 24, 1852, in Diary, Mississippi Department of Archives and...

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