Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
George Fitzhugh (November 4, 1806 – July 30, 1881) was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based social theories in the antebellum era. He argued that the negro was "but a grown up child" [ 2 ] [ 3 ] needing the economic and social protections of slavery.
George Fitzhugh was a slave owner, a prominent pro-slavery Democrat, and a sociological theorist who took the positive-good argument to its final extreme conclusion. [11]: 135 Fitzhugh argued that slavery was the proper relationship of all labor to capital, that it was generally better for all laborers to be enslaved rather than free.
George Fitzhugh used assumptions about white superiority to justify slavery, writing that, "the Negro is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child." In The Universal Law of Slavery , Fitzhugh argues that slavery provides everything necessary for life and that the slave is unable to survive in a free world because he is lazy, and ...
The Bible, interpreted under these assumptions, seemed to clearly suggest that slavery was Biblically justified: [72] The pro-slavery South could point to slaveholding by the godly patriarch Abraham (Gen 12:5; 14:14; 24:35–36; 26:13–14), a practice that was later incorporated into Israelite national law (Lev 25:44–46).
Farr argues that Locke's theoretical justifications of slavery were inadequate to justify his practical involvement in the slave trade. He sees this contradiction as ultimately unsolvable: Locke never addressed, much less resolved, this contradiction. On Afro-American slavery, silence seems to have been his principal bequest to posterity.
Taylor's approach, defending the preservation of slavery under the circumstances and apprehensions of his day, would be used to support more emphatic defenses of slavery by writers, such as John C. Calhoun, Edmund Ruffin, and George Fitzhugh, who extended the argument by claiming the institution to be a "positive good."
For premium support please call: 800-290-4726 more ways to reach us
Until the 2019–2020 school year, the Texas social studies curriculum required teaching that slavery was a tertiary cause of the Civil War behind "states' rights" and "sectionalism". The updated curriculum describes the "expansion of slavery" as having a "central role" in bringing about the Civil War, but sectionalism and states' rights remain ...