George Fitzhugh Quotes

The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm, work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are opposed neither by care nor labor.

Socialism, with such despotic head, approaches very near to Southern slavery, and gets along very well so long as the depot lives.

This is no dispute between Northerners and Southerners; but between conservatives and revolutionionists; between Christians and infidels; between law and order men and no-government men; between the friends of private property and socialists and agrarians; between the chaste and the libidinous; between marriage and free-love; between those who believe in the past, in history, in human experience, in the Bible, in human nature, and those who, like Greeley, and Fourier, and Fanny Wright, and Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, and Seward, foolishly, rashly, and profanely, attempt to "expel human nature," to bring about a millennium, and inaugurate a future wholly unlike anything that has preceded it.

No association, no efficient combination of labor can be effected till men give up their liberty of action and subject themselves to a common despotic head or ruler. This is slavery, and towards this socialism is moving.

Our only quarrel with Socialism is, that it will not honestly admit that it owes its recent revival to the failure of universal liberty, and is seeking to bring about slavery again in some form.

Our slaves till the land, do the coarse and hard labor on our roads and canals, sweep our streets, cook our food, brush our boots, wait on our tables, hold our horses, do all hard work, and fill all menial offices. Your freemen at the North do the same work and fill the same offices. The only difference is, we love our slaves, and we are ready to defend, assist and protect them; you hate and fear your white servants, and never fail, as a moral duty, to screw down their wages to the lowest, and to starve their families, if possible, as evidence of your thrift, economy and management—the only English and Yankee virtues.

With thinking men, the question can never arise, who ought to be free? Because no one ought to be free. All government is slavery.

[Man] is not free because he has no where that he may rightfully lay his head. Private property has monopolized the earth, and destroyed both his liberty and equality.

Free trade or political economy is the science of free society, and socialism is the science of slavery.

All concur that free society is a failure. We slaveholders say you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the best and most common form of Socialism. The new schools of Socialism promise something better, but admit, to obtain that something, they must first destroy and eradicate man’s human nature.

But slavery does, in practice as well as in theory, acknowledge and enforce the right of all to be comfortably supported from the soil. There was, we repeat, no pauperism in Europe till feudal slavery was abolished.

We say allowance, not wages; for neither slaves nor free laborers get wages, in the popular sense of the term: that is, the employer or capitalist pays them for nothing of his own, but allows them a part, generally a very small part of the proceeds of their own labor.

The failure of laissez-faire, of political economy, is admitted now by its last and lingering votary. Free society stands condemned by the unanimous testimony of all its enlightened members.

Slavery is a form of communism… The manner to which the change shall be made from the present form of society to that system of communism which we propose is very simple.

Naturally, Southerners, like slaveholders, are liberal and public spirited.