George Fitzhugh Quotes
It is a gross mistake to suppose that ' abolition' is the cause of dissolution between the north and the south. The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots of the south naturally hate, contemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the north. The former are master races, the latter a slave race, the descendants of the Saxon serfs
Fitzhugh was a Southern iconoclast whose view of Northern labor was much like that of Karl Marx but who was an enthusiastic supporter of slavery.
George Fitzhugh, 1806-1881, Sociologist, Explanation of the Cause of the Civil War
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Prior to his diplomatic service, Dodd was one of the preeminent scholars of the country.
The reason for secession was the threat to slavery, which was a great threat to the slave-owners of the South. However, the non slave-owners had a very strong vested interest in maintaining slavery in that most Southerners had been brought up with such a negative view of Blacks that they were paranoid of Black equality or even worse some Blacks in positions of authority over whites. At the time, it was the Republican Party that was the advocate for minority equality and the Democratic Party embraced the racists. The parties would flip flop after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ending legal segregation was passed by a Democratic President and a Democratic Majority Congress.
Phelps was a Copperhead Democrat who was a virulent racist, an enemy of Lincoln and supported McClellan against Lincoln in 1864. His extreme disrespect for the President and his racism was not appreciated in Vermont, and Phelps not only failed to help McClellan but destroyed his own credibility in his home state of Vermont. Phelps had been practicing law in New York City where there was a large Copperhead, racist and anti-Lincoln part of the population there.
Buchanan us considered by most historians to have been the worst or one of the worst Presidents of the United States. At this point, he was a lame duck president with Abraham Lincoln, the President Elect soon to take office. This speech, just encouraged the South more than ever and helped to bring about the Civil War. His vacillation and lack of any leadership on the slavery question exacerbated the polarization that was tearing the nation apart.
The letter was also published in the Charleston Mercury, February 13, 1861
The report was praised by some of the intellectuals of Pakistan and most of the non-Islamic world. However, Pakistan the discussion of each of the cleavages, instigated the public passion of the cleavage and nothing significant was done.
Newsletter of the United Sons of Confederate Veterans
The issue of Abolition dominated the entire national landscape. Buchanan and his followers were determined not to undermine the South and so opposed an anti-slavery action. However the public was constantly talking about the issue. The strategy of diverting the public’s attention by going after the Mormons appealed to many. President Buchanan did send an army against the Mormons in what was called the Mormon War.
The issue of free trade verses protectionism has been with us throughout American history with national sentiments going one way and then later the other, only to come back and the cycle has gone on. Floyd was very modern in his economic views, so much so that he, even as a Southern politician, opposed slavery on the grounds that it was economically inefficient and the South would never develop industrially if it had no incentive, as existed in the North and England, to reduce the amount of labor required for economic opportunity. He was right on that point as well.
Througout political history, including in America, opportunistic, unscruplous politicians have appealed to the prejudices and hates of subsets of the population for others (usually minorities) to get elected or obtain support for legislation and administrative action. In America this has been an element of all populist movements—an enemy. This quote is particularly enlightening in that it shows that the real need is to have a minority to focus the public against—which one is not as material as the fact that there is one.
The last lines of the editorial were tragically accurate in predicting the Civil War. The more the slavery question was debated in the nation, the more polarized the country became. If the South would persist in trying to curtail men’s freedom and maintain slavery, the slaves had the same right of revolution and insurrection as was established in the American Revolution. That was the view of most abolitionists. Southern slave holders, feared an armed slave rebellion more than anything else, and observed that debating the issue of slavery was just riling up Blacks and whites and would instigate such armed revolutions. The Southern solution was to cease debating the slavery question. The Northern solution was to end slavery. Neither side would accept the solution of the other and the Civil War ensued.
This was one of the perceived advantages of the South—that the North, with its more complex and sophisticated society, would pay a higher economic price by fighting than the South would. Southern whites didn’t work or farm much and they could fight and the older men and slaves could keep the agriculture and economy going. However, the huge superiority of the North in productivity and technology, in farming, manufacturing, transportation and military offset the Southern advantage do a great degree. But when the North attracted so many of the Southern Negro slaves to their lines, the Southern labor force was diminished greatly for the first time. And Sherman’s March showed how the entire Southern economy could be crippled and the war was strategically lost by the Confederates. The reality of superiority of the North and the attitude of elites like Emerson in freely discussing that fact, was resented by Southerners then and since. There is to this day a Southern resentment of intellectuals and highly educated people—a vestige of the reality of differences existing in the 1860s and since. It was not until the 1950s that the South started developing educational and cultural institutions and populace that is on a par with the rest of the nation. But the states which spend less per capita on educational and cultural institutions, tend to have the poorest educational attainments of their citizens and they are mostly states of the deep South where values are still somewhat different from the North.
During Southern slavery, the poor white of the South had almost no prospects. He was always competing against slave labor which held his wages very low. At first he could he could get by if he had a trade—a carpenter, a blacksmith, a teamster, etc. However, soon slave owners invested in training some of their slaves, so even a white Southern tradesman could not earn a high wage as a Northern tradesman did. Unfortunately, the Southern upper class persuaded the poor whites that if slaves were emancipated they would be greater competition than they were under slavery, and there never was the common interest with the Northern labor that Emerson hypothesized.
This classic quotation illustrates several things. First, the degree of racism that existed in 1944 in West Virginia. Second, not how young Robert Byrd immediately leaped from the possibility of integrating our fighting forces to interracial sex. That has been typical of white racism in America—a preoccupation with race and sex. Last, Byrd who became a member of the KKK, completely changed his mind over the year and ended up supporting the things that, as a youth were worse than the demise of the nation. He matured and grew on the race issue as much of the country did and ended as a strong supporter of equality and civil rights—including affirmative action.
George Fitzhugh was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based sociological theories in the antebellum era. He argued that the negro "is but a grown up child" who needs the economic and social protections of slavery. Fitzhugh’s worldview has been described as fascist in its rejection of liberal values, defense of slavery, and perspectives toward race. Fitzhugh decried capitalism as practiced by the Northern United States and Great Britain as spawning "a war of the rich with the poor, and the poor with one another", rendering free blacks "far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition." Slavery, he contended, ensured that blacks would be economically secure and morally civilized. Although most Northern whites at the time agreed with Fitzhugh that blacks were incapable of functioning in a free society, the necessity of free trade and the expansion of slavery to the Southern economy hurt Northern factory workers and Northern farmers, who wished to claim western land for small farms. Fitzhugh's claim that poor whites should be enslaved also infuriated Northern Whites, some of whom remembered that the British had occasionally enslaved white men during the Colonial Era. The British practice of enslaving men involved in rebellion against the British government in Scotland and Ireland on Barbados during the time of Oliver Cromwell and its subsequent practice of deporting convicts to the American Colonies had infuriated the Founding Fathers, this fact contributing to Thomas Jefferson's writing that "All Men Are Created Equal" in the Declaration of Independence. The combination of economic interests and the belief in the equal standing of white men before the law caused many Northerners to embrace abolitionism before the war, but not the concept of full equality between the races that Fitzhugh feared.
