Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

A frayed-at-the-elbows scion of a Virginia First Family, Fitzhugh wrote prolifically about “the failure of free society.” In 1854 and 1857 he gathered his essays into books entitled Sociology for the South and Cannibals All! The latter was published a few weeks before the Panic of 1857 and seemed almost to predict it. Free labor under capitalism was a war of each against all, wrote Fitzhugh, a sort of social cannibalism. “Slavery is the natural and normal condition of society,” he maintained. “The situation of the North is abnormal and anomalous.” To bestow “upon men equality of rights, is but giving license to the strong to oppress the weak” because “capital exercises a more perfect compulsion over free laborers than human masters over slaves; for free laborers must at all times work or starve, and slaves are supported whether they work or not.” Therefore “we slaveholders say you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the best, the most common form of Socialism” as well as “the natural and normal condition of the laboring men, white or black.”