Two Racial Revolutionaries: David Walker and George Fitzhugh

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Two Racial RevolutionariesDavid Walker and
George Fitzhugh
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(No Transcript)
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Paradoxes Racist Abolitionism

• Antebellum America thus faced three interrelated
  paradoxes regarding slavery.
• First, although many Americans believed slavery
  was a heinous crime, they simultaneously feared
  that freeing the slaves would be even more
  damaging to the republic.
• Second, although the young nation was in large
  part founded on empowering notions regarding the
  transparency and veracity of the popular will,
  and hence on a radically new, immediatist concept
  of the body politic, debates regarding the status
  of slavery frequently revolved around mediated
  and nonverifiable rhetorical issues of textual
  interpretation.
• Third, although slavery was an incredibly popular
  subject of discussion, much of this discourse
  addressed not slaves and slavery per se but
  rather slavery as a metaphor for a host of
  historical issues, including the supposed
  encroachment of Southern politico-economic power
  over free white Northerners, the increasing
  tension between political liberty (democracy) and
  economic inequality (capitalism), the fate of
  democracy amid unprecedented geographic
  expansion, and the crumbling of traditional
  social hierarchies as America marched into
  modernity. Each of these three paradoxes was
  saturated with white fear regarding the potential
  catastrophes of emancipation, and furthermore,
  each of themeven when approached via the
  statements of leading antislavery
  activistsillustrated profound, unsettling levels
  of commitment to white supremacy.
• Given the remarkable intelligence, humanitarian
  passion, and rhetorical genius of the previously
  mentioned antislavery figuresalmost literally a
  pantheon of great Americans Paine, Franklin,
  Adams, Douglass, Lincoln, Rantoulit is more than
  a little disconcerting to notice that their
  antislavery pronouncements (excluding those made
  by Douglass) contained explicit appeals to
  fear-based, racist sentiments... S. J.
  Hartnett, Democratic Dissent and the Cultural
  Fictions of Antebellum America, U of Illinois
  Press.

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Short Bio David Walker

• If I remain in this bloody land, I will not live
  long. As true as God reigns, I will be avenged
  for the sorrow which my people have suffered.
  (On leaving NC, in 1815)
• David Walker was born on September 28, 1785, in
  Wilmington, North Carolina. His father was an
  enslaved African who died a few months before his
  sons birth, and his mother was a free woman of
  African ancestry. Walker grew up to despise the
  system of slavery that the American government
  allowed in America.
• In 1826 Walker settled in Boston, Mass., where he
  became the agent for Freedom's Journal, the black
  abolitionist newspaper, and a leader in the
  Colored Association. For a living he ran a
  secondhand clothing store.
• Walkers revulsion toward slavery led him to do
  something dangerous published his Appeal to
  the Colored Citizens of the World in September
  1829. The Appeal was smuggled into the southern
  states, and was considered subversive, seditious,
  and incendiary by most white men in both northern
  and southern states. It was, without a doubt, one
  of the most controversial documents published in
  the antebellum period.
• Appeal a bitter denunciation of slavery, those
  who profited by it, and those who willingly
  accepted it. Walker called for vengeance against
  white men, but he also expressed the hope that
  their cruel behavior toward blacks would change,
  making vengeance unnecessary.

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Short Bio David Walker

• Walker was concerned about many social issues
  affecting free and enslaved Africans in America
  during the time. Precursor for variety of what
  would later be black nationalist platform
  unified struggle for resistance of oppression,
  reparations (land, for Walker), self-government
  for people of African descent in America, racial
  pride, and a critique of American capitalism.
• Southern elites hated Walker, but were also
  frightened by him. Several states, and some
  individuals, put a price on his head. In 1829, 50
  unsolicited copies of Walker's Appeal were
  delivered to a black minister in Savannah, Ga.
  The frightened minister, understandably concerned
  for his welfare, informed the police.
• The police, in turn, informed the governor of
  Georgia. As a result, the state legislature met
  in secret session and passed a bill making the
  circulation of materials that might incite slaves
  to riot a capital offense. The legislature also
  offered a reward for Walker's capture, 10,000
  alive and 1,000 dead.
• Still, David Walker employed clever and inventive
  ways to circulate his Appeal. His network of free
  black seamen who served as "authorized agents"
  helped to develop circulation far beyond
  Massachusetts and into the South

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Short Bio David Walker

• Other Southern states took similar measures.
  Louisiana enacted a bill ordering expulsion of
  all freed slaves who had settled in the state
  after 1825. The slaveholding South was frightened
  by men like Walker, and their harsh reactions to
  the threat they saw in Walker's Appeal seemed
  justified when black slave Nat Turner led his
  bloody rebellion in 1831. But Frederick Douglass
  and Henry Garnett (for example) were not
  convinced. They saw the problem as being too
  little black outrage, not too much.
• Walker was mysteriously found dead in the doorway
  of his Boston home in June 28,1830, at age 45,
  some people believed he was poisoned. More
  plausible was that he died of tuberculosis.

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Outline of the Appeal

• Article I Collective ActionRise!
• Article II History of MiserySelf-defense, not
  murder, will be death of slave lords. No hope
  the Whites will help (Jefferson)
• Article III God is just, but Christianity a
  tool of Whites to subjugate Blacks
• Article IV (Re)colonization is a Trick, to
  separate Free Blacks from Slaves, and Keep Slaves
  Docile. This land is more Ours than it is the
  Whites who own it.

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His Goal Overcome the Collective Action Problem

• The primary object of this institution, is, to
  unite the colored population, so far, through the
  United States of America, as may be practicable
  and expedient forming societies, opening,
  extending, and keeping up correspondences, and
  not witholding anything which may have the least
  tendency to meliorate our miserable condition. 
  
• David Walkers statement on forming the
  Massachussetts General Colored Association (MGCA)
  in 1828

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His Goal Overcome the Collective Action Problem

• His goal That the world may see that we, the
  Blacks or Coloured People, are treated more cruel
  by the white Christians of America, than devils
  themselves ever treated a set of men, women and
  children on this earth.
•      It is expected that all coloured men, women
  and children, of every nation, language and
  tongue under heaven, will try to procure a copy
  of this Appeal and read it, or get some one to
  read it to them, for it is designed more
  particularly for them. Let them remember, that
  though our cruel oppressors and murderers, may
  (if possible) treat us more cruel, as Pharoah did
  the children of Israel, yet the God of the
  Etheopeans, has been pleased to hear our moans in
  consequence of oppression and the day of our
  redemption from abject wretchedness draweth near,
  when we shall be enabled, in the most extended
  sense of the word, to stretch forth our hands to
  the LORD our GOD, but there must be a willingness
  on our part, for GOD to do these things for us,
  for we may be assured that he will not take us by
  the hairs of our head against our will and
  desire, and drag us from our very, mean, low and
  abject condition.
•  
• Who are not too deceitful, abject, and servile
  to resist the cruelties and murders inflicted
  upon us by the white slave holders, our enemies
  by nature.
• (Emphasis added)

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His Goal Overcome the Collective Action
ProblemOn Passing, or Collaboration

• In all probability, Moses would have become
  Prince Regent to the throne, and no doubt, in
  process of time but he would have been seated on
  the throne of Egypt. But he had rather suffer
  shame, with the people of God, than to enjoy
  pleasures with that wicked people for a season.
  O! that the colored people were long since of
  Moses' excellent disposition, instead of courting
  favor with, and telling news and lies to our
  natural enemies, against each otheraiding them
  to keep their hellish chains of slavery upon us.
  Would we not long before this time, have been
  respectable men, instead of such wretched victims
  of oppression as we are? Would they be able to
  drag our mothers, our fathers, our wives, our
  children and ourselves, around the world in
  chains and hand-cuffs as they do, to dig up gold
  and silver for them and theirs? This question, my
  brethren, I leave for you to digest and may God
  Almighty force it home to your hearts. Remember
  that unless you are united, keeping your tongues
  within your teeth, you will be afraid to trust
  your secrets to each other, and thus perpetuate
  our miseries under the christians!!!!! ?

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From the Appeal

• ...to my no ordinary astonishment, a Reverend
  gentleman got up and told us (coloured people)
  that slaves must be obedient to their masters --
  must do their duty to their masters or be whipped
  -- the whip was made for the backs of fools, c.
  Here I pause for a moment, to give the world time
  to consider what was my surprise, to hear such
  preaching from a minister of my Master, whose
  very gospel is that of peace and not of blood and
  whips, as this pretended preacher tried to make
  us believe. What the American preachers can think
  of us, I aver this day before my God, I have
  never been able to define. They have newspapers
  and monthly periodicals, which they receive in
  continual succession, but on the pages of which,
  you will scarcely ever find a paragraph
  respecting slavery, which is ten thousand times
  more injurious to this country than all the other
  evils put together and which will be the final
  overthrow of its government, unless something is
  very speedily done for their cup is nearly
  full.-Perhaps they will laugh at or make light of
  this but I tell you Americans! that unless you
  speedily alter your course, you and your Country
  are gone! ! ! ! !

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From the Appeal

• The Americans say, that we are ungrateful-but I
  ask them for heaven's sake, what should we be
  grateful to them for -- for murdering our fathers
  and mothers ? -- Or do they wish us to return
  thanks to them for chaining and handcuffing us,
  branding us, cramming fire down our throats, or
  for keeping us in slavery, and beating us nearly
  or quite to death to make us work in ignorance
  and miseries, to support them and their families.
  They certainly think that we are a gang of fools.
  Those among them, who have volunteered their
  services for our redemption, though we are unable
  to compensate them for their labours, we
  nevertheless thank them from the bottom of our
  hearts, and have our eyes steadfastly fixed upon
  them, and their labours of love for God and man.
  -- But do slave-holders think that we thank them
  for keeping us in miseries, and taking our lives
  by the inches?
• Let no man of us budge one step, and let
  slave-holders come to beat us from our country.
  America is more our country, than it is the
  whites-we have enriched it with our blood and
  tears. The greatest riches in all America have
  arisen from our blood and tears -- and will they
  drive us from our property and homes, which we
  have earned with our blood? They must look sharp
  or this very thing will bring swift destruction
  upon them. The Americans have got so fat on our
  blood and groans, that they have almost forgotten
  the God of armies. But let the go on.

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From the Appeal

• Do the colonizationists think to send us off
  without first being reconciled to us? Do they
  think to bundle us up like brutes and send us
  off, as they did our brethren of the State of
  Ohio? Have they not to be reconciled to us, or
  reconcile us to them, for the cruelties with
  which they have afflicted our fathers and us?
  Methinks colonizationists think they have a set
  of brutes to deal with, sure enough. Do they
  think to drive us from our country and homes,
  after having enriched it with our blood and
  tears, and keep back millions of our dear
  brethren, sunk in the most barbarous
  wretchedness, to dig up gold and silver for them
  and their children? Surely, the Americans must
  think that we are brutes, as some of them have
  represented us to be. They think that we do not
  feel for our brethren, whom they are murdering by
  the inches, but they are dreadfully deceived.

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His Goal Overcome the Collective Action Problem
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Short Bio George Fitzhugh

• George Fitzhugh was born November 4, 1806 in
  Prince William County, Virginia to an established
  southern family in financial decline. His
  physician father, also named George Fitzhugh, and
  his mother, Lucy Stuart, would later struggle as
  small-scale planters when the family moved to a
  plantation near Alexandria, Virginia. Young
  George was then six years old.
• Though he attended a local field school, Fitzhugh
  was largely self-educated. In 1829 he married
  Mary Metcalf Brockenbrough and moved near Port
  Royal, Virginia, where he had obtained a small
  plantation through marriage and practiced law.
  Fitzhugh subsequently worked as a law clerk in
  Washington, D.C. (1857-1858) at the office of
  Attorney General Jeremiah Sullivan Black in the
  land claim department.
• Relocating to Richmond in 1862, he also clerked
  for the Confederacy's Treasury Department.
  Following the Civil War, Fitzhugh was appointed a
  judge in the Freedman's Court (part of the
  Freedman's Bureau) but left in 1866. Despite
  later publications in De Bow's Review (in 1867)
  and Lippincott's Magazine (in 1869 and 1870),
  George Fitzhugh's postbellum life, like the lives
  of other proslavery apologist writers, was
  characterized by relative obscurity. Shortly
  after his wife's death in 1877, Fitzhugh retired
  to Frankfort, Kentucky to live with his son. Two
  years later in 1880, he moved near his daughter's
  residence in Huntsville, Texas, where he died
  July 30, 1881.

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Short Bio George Fitzhugh

• Major Writings
• Slavery Justified (1849)
• Sociology for the South or, The Failure of Free
  Society (1854)
• Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters (1857)

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Short Bio George Fitzhugh

• In Sociology for the South, Fitzhugh sets out to
  demonstrate what he perceives as the overwhelming
  failure of free society. Opening with a critique
  of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, he also
  rejects Locke's theory of the social contract.
  Fitzhugh details the essential flaw of free
  trade, which, in privileging the wealthy and
  further subjecting the poor, puts society at war.
  Divinely instituted and universally practiced,
  slavery, he argues, promotes community, morality,
  and protection for the disadvantaged.
  Laissez-faire, on the other hand, manufactures
  human degradation, oppression, and selfishness.
  The pursuit of capital gain through free trade,
  Fitzhugh suggests, results in an overall moral
  decline. In triumphing individual self-interest
  and sacrificing the communal good, free
  competition yields only hostility.
• Citing the turbulence in England and France as
  examples, Fitzhugh bemoans the suffering of free
  laborers who, toiling under the myth of liberty,
  equality, and fraternity, actually become
  society's slaves. By comparison, slaves in the
  South enjoy the paternalistic favor and care of
  their masters, making their condition far
  superior to the lives of their free laboring
  counterparts. According to Fitzhugh, while the
  white race remains innately superior in morality
  and intellect, slavery does function as a
  civilizing force that elevates the enslaved.
• Ardently defending life in the South, Fitzhugh
  itemizes those problems prevalent in free
  society, which he argues range from the moral
  decline reflected in changing marital practices
  to the insidious psychological effects of
  mounting worker anxieties. Without such
  antagonisms, southern life under slavery connects
  human beings to one another and appears
  characterized by stability, peace, and
  brotherhood.

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Cannibals All!

• We are, all, North and South, engaged in the
  White Slave Trade, and he who succeeds best, is
  esteemed most respectable. It is far more cruel
  than the Black Slave Trade, because it exacts
  more of its slaves, and neither protects nor
  governs them. We boast, that it exacts more, when
  we say, "that the profits made from employing
  free labor are greater than those from slave
  labor." The profits, made from free labor, are
  the amount of the products of such labor, which
  the employer, by means of the command which
  capital or skill gives him, takes away, exacts or
  "exploitates" from the free laborer.
• The profits of slave labor are that portion of
  the products of such labor which the power of the
  master enables him to appropriate. These profits
  are less, because the master allows the slave to
  retain a larger share of the results of his own
  labor, than do the employers of free labor.
• But we not only boast that the White Slave Trade
  is more exacting and fraudulent (in fact, though
  not in intention,) than Black Slavery but we
  also boast, that it is more cruel, in leaving the
  laborer to take care of himself and family out of
  the pittance which skill or capital have allowed
  him to retain. When the day's labor is ended, he
  is free, but is overburdened with the cares of
  family and household, which make his freedom an
  empty and delusive mockery.
• But his employer is really free, and may enjoy
  the profits made by others' labor, without a
  care, or a trouble, as to their well-being. The
  negro slave is free, too, when the labors of the
  day are over, and free in mind as well as body
  for the master provides food, raiment, house,
  fuel, and everything else necessary to the
  physical well-being of himself and family. The
  master's labors commence just when the slave's
  end. No wonder men should prefer white slavery to
  capital, to negro slavery, since it is more
  profitable, and is free from all the cares and
  labors of black slave-holding.

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Cannibals All!

• Probably, you are a lawyer, or a merchant, or a
  doctor, who have made by your business fifty
  thousand dollars, and retired to live on your
  capital. But, mark! not to spend your capital.
  That would be vulgar, disreputable, criminal.
  That would be, to live by your own labor for
  your capital is your amassed labor. That would
  be, to do as common working men do for they take
  the pittance which their employers leave them, to
  live on. They live by labor for they exchange
  the results of their own labor for the products
  of other people's labor. It is, no doubt, an
  honest, vulgar way of living but not at all a
  respectable way. The respectable way of living
  is, to make other people work for you, and to pay
  them nothing for so doing - and to have no
  concern about them after their work is done.
  Hence, white slave-holding is much more
  respectable than negro slavery - for the master
  works nearly as hard for the negro, as he for the
  master. But you, my virtuous, respectable reader,
  exact three thousand dollars per annum from white
  labor, (for your income is the product of white
  labor,) and make not one cent of return in any
  form. You retain your capital, and never labor,
  and yet live in luxury on the labor of others.
  Capital commands labor, as the master does the
  slave. Neither pays for labor but the master
  permits the slave to retain a larger allowance
  from the proceeds of his own labor, and hence
  "free labor is cheaper than slave labor."
• You, with the command over labor which your
  capital gives you, are a slave owner - a master,
  without the obligations of a master. They who
  work for you, who create your income, are slaves,
  without the rights of slaves. Slaves without a
  master! Whilst you were engaged in amassing your
  capital, in seeking to become independent, you
  were in the White Slave Trade. To become
  independent, is to be able to make other people
  support you, without being obliged to labor for
  them. Now, what man in society is not seeking to
  attain this situation? He who attains it, is a
  slave owner, in the worst sense. He who is in
  pursuit of it, is engaged in the slave trade.
  You, reader, belong to the one or other class.
  The men without property, in free society, are
  theoretically in a worse condition than slaves.
  Practically, their condition corresponds with
  this theory, as history and statistics every
  where demonstrate. The capitalists, in free
  society, live in ten times the luxury and show
  that Southern masters do, because the slaves to
  capital work harder and cost less, than negro
  slaves.    
• (Emphasis added)    

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Cannibals All!

• 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 oppressed neither by
  care nor labor. The women do little hard work,
  and are protected from the despotism of their
  husbands by their masters. The negro men and
  stout boys work, on the average, in good weather,
  not more than nine hours a day. The balance of
  their time is spent in perfect abandon. Besides,
  they have their Sabbaths and holidays.
• White men, with so much of license and liberty,
  would die of ennui but negroes luxuriate in
  corporeal and mental repose. With their faces
  upturned to the sun, they can sleep at any hour
  and quiet sleep is the greatest of human
  enjoyments. "Blessed be the man who invented
  sleep." 'Tis happiness in itself - and results
  from contentment with the present, and confident
  assurance of the future. We do not know whether
  free laborers ever sleep. They are fools to do
  so for, whilst they sleep, the wily and watchful
  capitalist is devising means to ensnare and
  exploitate them. The free laborer must work or
  starve. He is more of a slave than the negro,
  because he works longer and harder for less
  allowance than the slave, and has no holiday,
  because the cares of life with him begin when its
  labors end. He has no liberty, and not a single
  right. We know, 'tis often said, air and water,
  are common property, which all have equal right
  to participate and enjoy but this is utterly
  false. The appropriation of the lands carries
  with it the appropriation of all on or above the
  lands, usque ad coelumm aut ad inferos. A man
  cannot breathe the air, without a place to
  breathe it from, and all places are appropriated.
  All water is private property "to the middle of
  the stream," except the ocean, and that is not
  fit to drink.
• (Emphasis added)    

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Cannibals All!

• These socialists, having discovered that skill
  and capital, by means of free competition,
  exercise an undue mastery over labor, propose to
  do away with skill, capital, and free
  competition, altogether. They would heal the
  diseases of society by destroying its most vital
  functions. Having laid down the broad
  proposition, that equal amounts of labor, or
  their results, should be exchanged for each
  other, they get at the conclusion that as the
  profits of capital are not the results of labor,
  the capitalist shall be denied all interest or
  rents, or other profits on his capital, and be
  compelled in all cases to exchange a part of the
  capital itself, for labor, or its results. This
  would prevent accumulation, or at least limit it
  to the procurement of the coarsest necessaries of
  life. They say, "the lawyer and the artist do not
  work so hard and continuously as the ploughman,
  and should receive less wages than he - a bushel
  of wheat represents as much labor as a speech or
  portrait, and should be exchanged for the one or
  the other." Such a system of trade and exchange
  would equalize conditions, but would banish
  civilization. Yet do these men show, that, by
  means of the taxation and oppression, which
  capital and skill exercise over labor, the rich,
  the professional, the trading and skillful part
  of society, have become the masters of the
  laboring masses whose condition, already
  intolerable, is daily becoming worse. They point
  out distinctly the character of the disease under
  which the patient is laboring, but see no way of
  curing the disease except by killing the patient.
  
•    

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Cannibals All!

• In the preceding chapter, we illustrated their
  theory of capital by a single example. We might
  give hundreds of illustrations, and yet the
  subject is so difficult that few readers will
  take the trouble to understand it. Let us take
  two well known historical instances England
  became possessed of two fine islands, Ireland and
  Jamaica. Englishmen took away, or defrauded, from
  the Irish, their lands but professed to leave
  the people free. The people, however, must have
  the use of land, or starve. The English charged
  them, in rent, so much, that their allowance,
  after deducting that rent, was not half that of
  Jamaica slaves. They were compelled to labor for
  their landlords, by the fear of hunger and death
  - forces stronger than the overseer's lash. They
  worked more, and did not get half so much pay or
  allowance as the Jamaica negroes. All the reports
  to the French and British Parliaments show that
  the physical wants of the West India slaves were
  well supplied. The Irish became the subject of
  capital - slaves, with no masters obliged by law,
  self-interest or domestic affections, to provide
  for them. The freest people in the world, in the
  loose and common sense of words, their condition,
  moral, physical and religious, was far worse than
  that of civilized slaves ever has been or ever
  can be - for at length, after centuries of slow
  starvation, three hundred thousand perished in a
  single season, for want of food. Englishmen took
  the lands of Jamaica also, but introduced negro
  slaves, whom they were compelled to support at
  all seasons, and at any cost. The negroes were
  comfortable, until philanthropy taxed the poor of
  England and Ireland a hundred millions to free
  them. Now, they enjoy Irish liberty, whilst the
  English hold all the good lands. They are
  destitute and savage, and in all respects worse
  off than when in slavery.
• (Emphasis added)
•    

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Cannibals All!

• It seems to us that the vain attempts to define
  liberty in theory, or to secure its enjoyment in
  practice, proceed from the fact that man is
  naturally a social and gregarious animal,
  subject, not by contract or agreement, as Locke
  and his followers assume, but by birth and
  nature, to those restrictions of liberty which
  are expedient or necessary to secure the good of
  the human hive, to which he may belong. There is
  no such thing as natural human liberty, because
  it is unnatural for man to live alone and without
  the pale and government of society. Birds, and
  beasts of prey, who are not gregarious, are
  naturally free. Bees and herds are naturally
  subjects or slaves of society. Such is the theory
  of Aristotle, promulged more than two thousand
  years ago, generally considered true for two
  thousand years, and destined, we hope, soon again
  to be accepted as the only true theory of
  government and society.
• (Emphasis added)
•    

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• From photographs by T. B. Bishop, these images of
  "the escaped slave" and "the escaped slave in the
  Union Army" appeared in Harper's Weekly during
  the Civil War. Antislavery literature continually
  emphasized slaves' virtue and agency their
  willingness to run away from slavery and to fight
  for their freedom. If slaves could make good
  soldiers, as these images in the northern press
  suggested, they must be worthy of freedom.
  Reprinted from Harper's Weekly, July 2, 1864. In
  the original, "the escaped slave" appears above
  "the escaped slave in the Union Army."

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Anti-Capitalist Views

• Walker
• The idea of property needs more content.
  Pre-exisiting distribution of wealth and power
  are crucial for claims that trade or exchange in
  anything are just.
• A Lockean theory of property slaves worked the
  land, improved it, they should own it.

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Anti-Capitalist Views

• Marx, Chapter 26, Capital
• ...Capitalistic production presupposes the
  pre-existence of considerable masses of capital
  and of labour-power in the hands of producers of
  commodities. The whole movement, therefore, seems
  to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can
  only get by supposing a primitive accumulation
  (previous accumulation of Adam Smith) preceding
  capitalistic accumulation an accumulation not
  the result of the capitalistic mode of
  production, but its starting point.
• This primitive accumulation plays in Political
  Economy about the same part as original sin in
  theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin
  fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to
  be explained when it is told as an anecdote of
  the past. In times long gone-by there were two
  sorts of people one, the diligent, intelligent,
  and, above all, frugal elite the other, lazy
  rascals, spending their substance, and more, in
  riotous living.... Thus it came to pass that the
  former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter
  sort had at last nothing to sell except their own
  skins. And from this original sin dates the
  poverty of the great majority that, despite all
  its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but
  itself, and the wealth of the few that increases
  constantly although they have long ceased to
  work....
• As soon as the question of property crops up,
  it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the
  intellectual food of the infant as the one thing
  fit for all ages and for all stages of
  development. In actual history it is notorious
  that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder,
  briefly force, play the great part. In the tender
  annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns
  from time immemorial. Right and labour were
  from all time the sole means of enrichment, the
  present year of course always excepted....

27
Anti-Capitalist Views

• Fitzhugh
• All labor is enslaved. Better to be enslaved to
  a master, who owns your value.
• Competition is destructive, and competition for
  property is corrosive to society and social
  capital. Better to be settled, and have
  community.
• Subsistence wage in capitalist system may not
  guarantee survival. No schooling, no social
  mobility. So freedom is a cruel illusion.

28
Anti-Capitalist Views

• Fitzhugh
• Predicts collapse of laissez-faire capitalism
• Decries social Darwinism. Competition and
  social nature, red in tooth and claw actually
  destroy fabric of culture, make happiness
  impossible. For him, slaves were the freest of
  all, because they had no responsibilities. Very
  similar to passages in Marx, describing the
  proletariat after the revolution.
• Worries about atomistic individualism. Values
  communities, even among slaves

29
Commonalities

• 1. Human nature is fixed, and immutable.
• Fitzhugh Aristotelian hierarchy, with many only
  fit to serve others. Cannot rise
• Walker Whites are completely socialized to keep
  blacks repressed. With only a very few
  exceptions, all whites are inherently and
  irredeemably racist. Only African power, and
  white blood, will give freedom to blacks.

30
Commonalities

• 2. Rejection of Locke, or at least claim Locke
  is irrelevant.
• Walker Pre-existing rights dont. Or else they
  reify illegitimate power relations. The way to
  get rights is to seize power. Rules are made to
  protect the powerful
• Fitzhugh Even more complete rejection of Locke.
  Robert Filmer, Thomas Carlyle were his icons.
  Free trade benefits only the wealthy, those
  with access to the market. Hierarchy is not only
  natural, but necessary, natural. Slaves are the
  freest, and free labor is slavery to capital.

31
Commonalities

• 3. Rejection of Jefferson.
• Walker Has Mr. Jefferson declared to the
  world, that we are inferior to the whites, both
  in the endowments of our bodies and of minds? It
  is indeed surprising, that a man of such great
  learning, combined with such excellent natural
  parts, should speak so of a set of men in chains.
  I do not know what to compare it to, unless, like
  putting one wild deer in an iron cage, where it
  will be secured, and hold another by the side of
  the same, then let it go, and expect the one in
  the cage to run as fast as the one at liberty
• Mr. Jefferson's very severe remarks on us have
  been so extensively argued upon by men whose
  attainments in literature, I shall never be able
  to reach, that I would not have meddled with it,
  were it not to solicit each of my brethren, who
  has the spirit of a man, to buy a copy of Mr.
  Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia," and put it in
  the hand of his son. For let no one of us suppose
  that the refutations which have been written by
  our white friends are enoughthey are whiteswe
  are blacks. We, and the world wish to see the
  charges of Mr. Jefferson refuted by the blacks
  themselves, according to their chance for we
  must remember that what the whites have written
  respecting this subject, is other men's labors
  and did not emanate from the blacks.

32
Commonalities

• 3. Rejection of Jefferson He Had NOTHING to
  Do With 76, EVERYTHING to do with 61.
• Fitzhugh "All the bombastic absurdity in the
  Declaration of Independence about the inalienable
  rights of man, had about as much to do with the
  occasion as would a sermon or oration on the
  teething of a child or the kittening of a cat . .
  . Our institutions, State and Federal, imported
  from England where they had grown up naturally
  and imperceptibly . . . would have lasted for
  many ages, had not thoughtless, half-informed,
  speculative men, like Jefferson, succeeded in
  basing them on such inflammable materials. . . .
  The Revolution of 76 was, in its action, an
  exceedingly natural and conservative affair it
  was only the false and unnecessary theories
  invoked to justify it that were radical, agrarian
  and anarchical." (Fitzhugh, Revolutions of 76
  and 61 Contrasted, 1863).