George Fitzhugh

Born in Virginia in 1806, George Fitzhugh trained as a lawyer and spent much of his life writing about politics, society, and the economy. He is remembered chiefly for his fierce defense of slavery and for attacking the idea of free labor as unjust and unstable.

His most noted books include Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters (1857). In them, he claimed that slavery was a paternal system that protected workers better than the competitive labor systems of the North and Europe.

Today, Fitzhugh is studied less as a literary figure than as an important example of pro-slavery thought in the antebellum United States. His work offers a stark view of the arguments used to defend slavery in the decades before the Civil War.