author
George Fitzhugh
1806–1881
Best known for arguing one of the most extreme defenses of slavery in the antebellum South, this Virginia writer attacked free labor and claimed slavery was a safer social system. His books remain important today mainly as stark evidence of how proslavery ideology was argued before the Civil War.
1 Audiobook
Cannibals all! or, Slaves without masters
by George Fitzhugh
About the author
Born in Prince William County, Virginia, in 1806, George Fitzhugh trained as a lawyer and spent much of his life in Virginia. He became known in the 1850s as a social theorist and polemicist whose writing pushed beyond many other proslavery authors in both tone and argument.
His best-known works are Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters (1857). In them, he defended slavery as a paternal system and attacked capitalism and free labor, arguing that wage workers in the North and in Europe were exploited more harshly than enslaved people in the South.
Fitzhugh died in 1881. Although he wrote forcefully and tried to give slavery a broad social theory, he is remembered chiefly as a leading defender of white supremacy and slavery in the years before the American Civil War.