The social theorist George Fitzhugh argued that the United States was founded on false “abstractions,” that “life and liberty” were not, in fact, “unalienable.” They had been “sold in all countries, and in all ages, and must be sold so long as human nature lasts.” It was the North, he insisted, not the South, that was out of step with the broad sweep of human history. The “peculiar institution” was not slavery; it was liberalism.[13]
