Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters

Fitzhugh (1806–1881) offers a stinging attack on free society, laissez-faire economy, and wage slavery, and their philosophical underpinnings, using socialist doctrine to defend slavery. Drawing on the same evidence Marx used in his indictment of capitalism, he holds that socialism is only “the new fashionable name for slavery.”

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.
-- Times Literary Supplement