George Fitzhugh

An outspoken champion of slavery, George Fitzhugh justified his position with a scathing attack on what he called "white slavery," or the exploitation of wage laborers by wealthy northern capitalists. To Fitzhugh's way of thinking, black slaves enjoyed a far better way of life than "white slaves," who suffered neglect and oppression at the hands of the moneyed classes that benefited from their endless toil. It was an argument drawing, somewhat perversely, on the socialist theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that would gain strength among the workers of the industrial world in the latter half of the nineteenth century. To Fitzhugh, laissezfaire capitalism was the world's true economic evil, and slavery the most natural and happy condition for the African and his descendants in America.

We are all, North and South, engaged in the White Slave Trade, and he who...