George Fitzhugh

Born in Prince William County, Virginia, in 1806, he grew up with limited formal schooling and was largely self-educated. He trained as a lawyer and spent much of his adult life in Port Royal, Virginia, where he wrote the works that made him widely known in the years before the Civil War.

He is best remembered for aggressively defending slavery and attacking free labor and liberal reform. His best-known books, Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All! (1857), argued that enslaved labor was preferable to wage labor—views that made him one of the most extreme and controversial proslavery writers of his time.

He died in 1881. Today, his significance lies less in literary fame than in how clearly his writing reveals the intellectual arguments that supported slavery in the United States.