George Fitzhugh Quotes
We need never have white slaves in the South, because we have black ones. Our citizens, like those of Rome and Athens, are a privileged class. We should train and educate them to deserve the privileges and to perform the duties which society confers on them. Instead, by a low demagoguism depressing their self-respect by discourses on the equality of man, we had better excite their pride by reminding them that they do not fulfill the menial offices which white men do in other countries.
George Fitzhugh, 1806-1881, Southern Planter, Attorney & Pro-Slavery Advocate, Sociology of the South, 1854
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation explains why so many of the Southern poor so actively supported the racist Slavery system even though they could not afford slaves and received no direct benefit from slavery or the discrimination against free Blacks. The poor were not at the bottom of the totem pole, and therefore had a dignity and social status, that the poor in a racially integrated society never possessed.
Newsletter of the United Sons of Confederate Veterans
It was indeed the first government that was ever founded on that fallacious principle. In retrospect, it was amazing that more Southerners did not question why no other government in the history of the world based a society on that principle. The Southern hubris was a great failing for them.
It was not until this publication that people who suggested that discrimination and lack of education and opportunity might have something to do with the problem Blacks faced in society were regarded by many Americans as anything but left wing intellectuals.
This was the first of the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates. The men were contesting for the U. S. Senate. Douglas won the election.
the white Southern racist system She was one of the first prominent white southerners to denounce racial segregation.
Incredible as it seems today, no Black person had ever dined in the White House as a guest of the President. African American servants were common. And Abraham Lincoln had received many Black visitors as had Presidents after him. But no president had ever had a Black person to dine as a social equal. The photo, reproduced here, illustrates the parity. But that was the worst thing a President could do so far as Tillman and his fellow racists were concerned. They had, since the end of the Civil war, used violence and terrorism to murder, maim and/or intimidate the Negro population to remain in an economic and socially inferior position. In Tillman’s state over these decades they had more lynchings than legal executions and there were plenty of them. Newspapers over the South riled up the whites and there was a wave of terror to be sure that the President’s importune action would not be taken as an endorsement of the Negro’s right to any equality or even dignity. This dinner essentially wedded all the Blacks to the Republican Party and all the Southern Whites to the Democratic Party. This would remain the political situation for over 60 years until the Democrats passed the LBJ Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Republicans decided to solicit the Southern White racists who accepted the invitation and within a few years, there was a complete reversal of party loyalty of most Blacks and most Southern White Racists.
At the time all the Australian political parties were supporting a White Only immigration policy. Lambrick, who sometimes used the name Hypatia, started the race policy debate in the Socialist Party by this line in a Socialist Journal.
Captain W.W. Polk, commanding the Coast Guard revenue cutter Florida, wrote Treasury Secretary asking permission to employ a young Negro on board. Existing regulations prohibited such. The Negro in question was a free Black born in New York who was an “expert sailor for his age and competent to the duty of a boy of the first class.” Polk had hired the boy as a servant after he had worked at sea for another Captain. Good seamen were hard to come by, decision was extremely contentious. Ingham “compromised” by limiting the allowable role of Negroes at sea—a practice that lasted till the Second World War.
He was lecturing to an audience of 1500 Blacks. Darrow was castigated for telling Negroes that they did not have an inherently inferior capacity from whites, This was feared would make them too demanding and insist on unrealistic equality.
Throughout the Jim Crowe era of the South, the Southern whites were the poorest Americans with the exception of the Blacks, with few economic and cultural opportunities compared with the rest of the nation, the schools were the weakest of any area of the nation, the universities behind, and politically even whites had few choices with single party (Democratic Party) rule. While desegregation was fought tooth and nail by most white Southerners, it had the effect of elevating all phases of Southern life go that the gap between the South and the rest of the country diminished considerably. But the Blacks were also freed from the evil system and that was the “price” to the whites to which Baldwin referred.
Charleston was in the Southern part of the state where most people supported slavery. Douglas made an unequivocal pitch for the racist vote {600060} and forced Lincoln to take a stand. Like many politicians today, Lincoln decided to give the audience what they wanted to hear. It is not clear whether or not he ever believed this statement or was just pandering in a political campaign. He had never said this in the Northern part of the state of before. Lincoln’s views on race changed and matured over the years, culminating in the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln lost the Senate seat to Douglas.
Robert Allen Zimmerman
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.
