32 Facts About George Fitzhugh

George Fitzhugh was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based social theories in the antebellum era.

George Fitzhugh argued that the negro was "but a grown up child" needing the economic and social protections of slavery.

George Fitzhugh practiced law but attracted both fame and infamy when he published two sociological tracts for the South.

George Fitzhugh was a leading pro-slavery intellectual and spoke for many of the Southern plantation owners.

George Fitzhugh differed from nearly all of his southern contemporaries by advocating a slavery that crossed racial boundaries.

George Fitzhugh was born on November 10,1806, to George Fitzhugh Sr.

George Fitzhugh's family moved to Alexandria, Virginia, when he was six.

George Fitzhugh attended public school though his career was built on self-education.

George Fitzhugh married Mary Metcalf Brockenbrough in 1829 and moved to Port Royal, Virginia.

George Fitzhugh took up residence in a "rickety old mansion" that he inherited through his wife's family, known for a vast collection of bats in its attic.

George Fitzhugh was something of a recluse in this home for most of his life and rarely travelled away from it for extended periods of time, spending most of his days there engaged in unguided reading from a vast library of books and pamphlets.

Atypical for a slavery advocate, George Fitzhugh subscribed to and regularly read abolitionist pamphlets such as The Liberator.

Never politically active in his own right, George Fitzhugh managed to find the company of well known political figures in his day.

In 1857 George Fitzhugh served as a law clerk in Washington, DC under Attorney General Jeremiah Sullivan Black.

George Fitzhugh gained fairly wide circulation in print, writing articles for several Virginia newspapers and for the widely circulated Southern magazine DeBow's Review.

George Fitzhugh later moved to his daughter's residence in Huntsville, Texas, where he died on July 30,1881.

George Fitzhugh is buried in a grave in Oakwood Cemetery, Huntsville, where his daughter, Mariella Fitzhugh Foster and her husband Capt.

George Fitzhugh argued that the transition away from feudalism and the adoption of liberal values like freedom and equality had been detrimental to workers and to society as a whole, and that the liberal experiment had failed and a return to a pre-liberal mode of society was necessary:.

George Fitzhugh's position was rooted in a kind of medievalism, widely popular in his day, and held up what he thought medieval society was as an ideal for America, as he clarified in 1858: "In the balmy days of royalty, of feudal nobility, and of Catholic rule, there were no poor in Europe".

George Fitzhugh argued in Sociology for the South that all societies have a substratum, and that the new liberal social order was more harmful to this substratum than either the previous feudal order or to slavery:.

George Fitzhugh believed that slavery represented a lingering element of pre-liberal, or even pre-feudal social organization, and proposed the expansion of the institution of slavery to return to a pre-feudal social order of antiquity and alleviate the supposed harm caused by liberalism and capitalism:.

Under this same context, George Fitzhugh asserted that society was obligated to protect the weak by controlling and subjugating them.

George Fitzhugh argued that the feudal system had its roots in slavery, and much like slavery, offered more favorable conditions to laborers than those found in liberal free-market capitalist economies:.

George Fitzhugh's stated position on socialism varies wildly between and even within his works.

George Fitzhugh was among a cadre of Southern intellectuals who advocated for a universal slavery which included the white race.

George Fitzhugh postulated slavery as a humane alternative for both black and white laborers that would rectify the evils in laissez-faire capitalism.

Nonetheless, by the standards of his Antebellum contemporaries, many of George Fitzhugh's ideas were radical.

George Fitzhugh conceived of violence and war as progressive forces that would heal society from its degeneration.

George Fitzhugh attacked the legitimacy of representative institutions for their failure to protect slavery.

George Fitzhugh was a prolific reactionary who advocated anything necessary to preserve slavery such as military dictatorship.

George Fitzhugh differed from his peers in promoting absolute power at the expense of the slave master class' rights.

The authoritarian and forward looking qualities of George Fitzhugh's rhetoric has been seen by some historians as proto-fascist or a type of fascist intellectualism.