Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters

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.

George Fitzhugh was possibly the best-known, and probably the best, apologist of the system of Negro slavery which prevailed in the South of the United States until the Civil War. In 1854 he published Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society, and in 1857 Cannibals All!, or, Slaves Without Masters… Fitzhugh was that rare thing, an American conservative; indeed his conservatism was so radical that, apart from his support for the American Revolution, he was almost an American Tory. Professor Woodward traces the influence of Carlyle and Disraeli, and the earlier tradition of Aristotle and Filmer… Yet Fitzhugh was really, as Professor Woodward says, ‘an American original,’ and Cannibals All! is a highly readable text in the John Harvard Library of documents of American cultural history. Fitzhugh was drastically, even deliberately, old-fashioned in his views, but at the same time remarkably modern in the way he came to them through sociology and psychology rather than philosophy, religion, economics or law.

• Dedication Preface Introduction 1. The Universal Trade 2. Labor, Skill, and Capital 3. Subject Continued--Exploitation of Skill 4. International Exploitation 5. False Philosophy of the Age 6. Free Trade, Fashion, and Centralization 7. The World is Too Little Governed 8. Liberty and Slavery 9. Paley on Exploitation 10. Our Best Witnesses and Masters in the Art of War 11. Decay of English Liberty, and Growth of English Poor Laws 12. The French Laborers and the French Revolution 13. The Reformation--The Right of Private Judgment 14. The Nomadic Beggars and Pauper Banditti of England 15. Rural Life of England 16. The Distressed Needle-Women and Hood's "Song of the Shirt" 17. The Edinburgh Review on Southern Slavery 18. The London Globe on West India Emancipation 19. Protection and Charity to the Weak 20. The Family 21. Negro Slavery 22. The Strength of Weakness 23. Money 24. Gerrit Smith on Land Reform, and William Lloyd Garrison on No-Government 25. In What Anti-Slavery Ends 26. Christian Morality Impracticable in Free Society--But the Natural Morality of Slave Society 27. Slavery--Its Effects on the Free 28. Private Property Destroys Liberty and Equality 29. The National Era an Excellent Witness 30. The Philosophy of the Isms--Showing Why They Abound at the North, and Are Unknown at the South 31. Deficiency of Food in Free Society 32. Man Has Property in Man 33. The Coup de Grace to Abolition 34. National Wealth, Individual Wealth, Luxury, and Economy 35. Government a Thing of Force, Not of Consent 36. Warning to the North 37. Addendum Index