George Fitzhugh (4 November 1806-30 July 1881) was an American reactionary social theorist who was best known for his writings advocating for racism, feudalism, anti-capitalism, and a military dictatorship to protect slavery.
Biography[]
George Fitzhugh was born in Prince William County, Virginia in 1806 and raised in Alexandria. He became a lawyer in Port Royal in 1829, and he also published sociological works assailing free-market capitalism due to its creation of class conflict, and arguing that slavery protected supposedly mentally-inferior Blacks from free competition by providing them with economic security and moral civilization. While he criticized Northern and British capitalism, he also unfavorably likened abolitionism to socialism and argued for a reversion to feudalism. In a November 1863 writing, he maintained that the "Southern Revolution of 1861" was "reactionary and conservative - a rolling back of the excesses of the Reformation - of Reformation run mad - a solemn protest against the doctrines of natural liberty, human equality, and the social contract as taught by Locke and the American sages of 1776, and an equally solemn protest against the doctrines of Adam Smith, Franklin, Tom Paine, and the rest of the infidel political economists who maintain that the world is too much governed." While he spoke for many planters, his views were considered radical, and - in recent years - "proto-fascist". He worked for the Confederate treasury during the American Civil War and retired to Kentucky after his wife's death in 1877, and he later settled in Huntsville, Texas and died in 1881.