Cannibals All! got more attention in William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator than any other book in the history of that abolitionist journal. And Lincoln is said to have been more angered by George Fitzhugh than by any other pro-slavery writer, yet he unconsciously paraphrased Cannibals All! in his House Divided speech. Fitzhugh was provocative because of his stinging attack on free society, laissez-faire economy, and wage slavery, along with their philosophical underpinnings. He used socialist doctrine to defend slavery and drew upon the same evidence Marx used in his indictment of capitalism. Socialism, he held, was only "the new fashionable name for slavery," though slavery was far more humane and responsible, "the best and most common form of socialism." His most effective testimony was furnished by the abolitionists themselves. He combed the diatribes of their friends, the reformers, transcendentalists, and utopians, against the social evils of the North. "Why all this," he asked, "except that free society is a failure?" The trouble all started, according to Fitzhugh, with John Locke, "a presumptuous charlatan," and with the heresies of the Enlightenment. In the great Lockean consensus that makes up American thought from Benjamin Franklin to Franklin Roosevelt, Fitzhugh therefore stands out as a lone dissenter who makes the conventional polarities between Jefferson and Hamilton, or Hoover and Roosevelt, seem insignificant. Beside him Taylor, Randolph, and Calhoun blend inconspicuously into the American consensus, all being apostles of John Locke in some degree. An intellectual tradition that suffers from uniformity--even if it is virtuous, liberal conformity--could stand a bit of contrast, and George Fitzhugh can supply more of it than any other American thinker.
Table of Contents
Dedication Preface Introduction
I. The Universal Trade
II. Labor, Skill, and Capital
III. Subject Continued -EXploitation of Skill
IV. International EXploitation
V. False Philosophy of the Age
VI. Free Trade, Fashion, and Centralization
VII. The World is Too Little Governed
VIII. Liberty and Slavery
IX. Paley on EXploitation
X. Our Best Witnesses and Masters in the Art of War
XI. Decay of English Liberty, and Growth of English Poor Laws
XII The French Laborers and the French Revolution
XIII. The Reformation - The Right of Private Judgment
XIV. The Nomadic Beggars and Pauper Banditti of England
XV. Rural Life of England
XVI. The Distressed Needle-Women and Hood's "Song of the Shirt"
XVII. The Edinburgh Review on Southern Slavery
XVIII. The London Globe on West India Emancipation
XIX. Protection and Charity to the Weak
XX. The Family
XXI. Negro Slavery
XXII. The Strength of Weakness
XXIII. Money
XXIV. Gerrit Smith on Land Reform, and William Lloyd Garrison on No-Government
XXV. In What Anti-Slavery Ends
XXVI. Christian Morality Impracticable in Free Society--But the Natural Morality of Slave Society
XXVII. Slavery -Its Effects on the Free
XXVIII. Private Property Destroys Liberty and Equality
XXIX. The National Era an EXcellent Witness
XXX. The Philosophy of the Isms -Showing Why They Abound at the North, and Are Unknown at the South
XXXI. Deficiency of Food in Free Society
XXXII. Man Has Property in Man
XXXIII. The Coup de Gr�ce to Abolition
XXXIV. National Wealth, Individual Wealth, Luxury, and Economy
