Cannibals all! or, Slaves without mastersFitzhugh, George
General
Cannibals all! or, Slaves without masters
Fitzhugh, George
Slave labor; Slavery -- Justification; Slavery -- United States; Working class
DEAR SIR--I have observed so much fairness in the manner in which
slavery and other sociological questions are treated in _The Liberator_,
that it has occurred to me you would not consider suggestions from an
ultra pro-slavery man obtrusive, and might deem them worth a place in
your columns. I shall not promise that the example of your liberality
will be followed at the South. It is a theory of mine, that "recurrence
to fundamental principles" is only treason clothed in periphrastic
phrase; and that the right of private judgment, liberty of the press,
freedom of speech, and freedom of religion, are subordinate to these
"principles," and must not be allowed to assail them,--else there can be
no stability in government, or security of private rights. The South
thinks me heretical, but feels that I am right, and takes care to
trammel these sacred rights quite as efficiently by an austere public
opinion, as Louis Napoleon does by law or by mere volition.
I entirely concur in a theory I heard Mr. Wendell Phillips[35] propound
in a lecture at New Haven. I shall not attempt to give his eloquent
words, for I am incapable of doing justice to his language; but the
amount of his theory was, that governments are not formed by man, but
are the gradual accretions of time, circumstance, and human exigencies;
that they grow up like trees, and that man may cultivate, train and aid
their growth and development, but cannot make them out and out. Now, I
accept the theory, and propose, in the first place, to deter men from
applying the axe to the root of our Southern institutions, (that is,
discussing or recurring to "fundamental principles,") by moral suasion
or monition; next, by tar and feathers, and, that failing, by the
halter. The worst institutions that ever _grew up_ in any country are
better than the best that philosophers or philanthropists ever devised.
As for ours, we deem them, since the days of Rome, Athens and Judea, the
crack institutions of the world.
With these preliminary remarks, I will make the following suggestions or
interrogations:--
Is not slavery to capital less tolerable than slavery to human masters?
Where a few, as in England, Ireland and Scotland, own all the lands, are
not the mass, the common laborers, who own no capital, and possess
neither mechanical nor professional skill, of necessity, the slaves to
capital?
Was it not this slavery to capital that occasioned the great Irish
famine, and is it not this same slavery that keeps the large majority of
the laboring class in Western Europe in a state of hereditary
starvation?
In old societies, where the laborers are domestic slaves, and exceed in
number the demand for labor, would not emancipating them subject them at
once to a mastery, or exacting despotism of capital, far more oppressive
than domestic slavery?
Did not the emancipation of European serfs, or villiens, in all
instances, injure their condition as a class?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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