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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.
Summary
Fitzhugh (1806–1881) offers a stinging attack on free society, laissez-faire economy, and wage slavery, and their philosophical underpinnings, using socialist doctrine to defend slavery. Drawing on the same evidence Marx used in his indictment of capitalism, he holds that socialism is only “the new fashionable name for slavery.”
