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VII. George Fitzhugh: Southern Thought
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VII. GEORGE FITZHUGH Southern Thought ". ..to defend and justify mere negro slavery,and condemn other forms of slavery, is to give up expressly the whole cause of the South." George Fitzhugh was born in 1804 in Prince William County, Virgina. Although he was descended from one of Virginia's oldest and most prominent families, Fitzhugh himself was never prosperous. The agricultural decline of the 1820s forced the sale of the family plantation, and Fitzhugh received almost no formal education. Self-taught,he was admitted to the bar and entered the practice of law in Port Royal, a country town near Fredericksburg.1 Preoccupied with local and personal concerns, Fitzhugh for years rarely traveled outside his own neighborhood and played little role in public life. In 1849, however, with the publication of Slavery Justified, by a Southerner ,2 this isolation ended. During the next decade, Fitzhugh produced an extraordinary stream of writing on the social issues of his day. He became a regular editorialist for the Richmond Enquirer and a frequent contributor to De Bow's Review, for which he wrote more than one hundred articles. Fitzhugh's greatest renown, however, arose from his publication of two of the best-known volumes on the slavery question, Sociology for the South; or the Failure of Free Society and Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters.3 1. Twentieth-century historians have written extensively on Fitzhugh. See, for example, Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Pantheon, 1969); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1955), Chapters VI and VII; Harvey Wish, George Fitzhugh: Propagandist of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943); C. Vann Woodward, "George Fitzhugh: Sui Generis," in George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters , ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge: John Harvard Library, 1960). 2. George Fitzhugh, Slavery Justified, by a Southerner (Fredericksburg, Va.: Recorder Job Office, 1851). See also George Fitzhugh, What Shall be Done with the Free Negroes? (Fredericksburg , Va.: Recorder Job Office, 1851). 3. George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South; or the Failure of Free Society (Richmond: A. 272 Southern Thought In 1856 Fitzhugh made a lecture tour of the North, where his professed support for white as well as black slavery attracted horrified attention. Despite his public success, Fitzhugh was constantly pressed for funds to meet the needs of his growing family, and he urged friends to find him a remunerative government post that would support him while he continued to write on the South's behalf. With the inauguration of Buchanan, Fitzhugh received a minor appointment in the office of the attorney general and moved to Washington. When the Civil War broke out, Fitzhugh returned to Port Royal. Menaced by marauding troops, he soon departed with his family to Richmond, where he secured a livelihood as a minor government functionary.After the Confederate defeat, Fitzhugh moved to a post at the Freedman's Bureau, the department of the Union army responsible for protection and relief of the former slaves. Fitzhugh took up his pen in protest against the conditions of Reconstruction and the horrors of emancipation. Although he had consistently argued before the war that race was no justification for slavery, his postbellum writings expressed a virulent racism. In 1866 his employment with the Freedman's Bureau ended, and Fitzhugh returned to his war-ravaged home in Port Royal. For the remaining years of his life, he was plagued by poverty. After 1870 his publications ceased, and he died in 1881 after a long period of illness and growing incapacitation. "Southern Thought" appeared as two articles in De Bow's Review in 1857. In them, Fitzhugh both summarized his own proslavery position and commented upon the defense of human bondage as it had evolved in the South during the preceding two and a half decades." Although the region had earlier "had no thought," Fitzhugh proclaimed, she had begun at last to understand her system of domestic slavery as the most desirable and benevolent of social arrangements. Having rejected the social contractual theories of Locke and the "absurd" and "dangerous" principles of the Declaration of Independence, southern slaveholders had begun to find that they lived in the "most prosperous and happy country in the world." But Fitzhugh called upon the South to go still further in her ideological Morris, 1854); George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters (Richmond: A. Morris, 1857). 4. George Fitzhugh, "Southern Thought," De Bow's Review...