Hammond drapes his sexual predation in the language of philanthropy. He speaks, some might say, as a true Democrat. And I agree—I see in Hammond a forerunner to Bill Clinton. Hammond displays the same sanctimony, the same quivering upper lip, even as his behavior reveals a ruthless selfishness. While Hammond is partial to slave women that he has bedded, and to slave children who might have resulted from those liaisons, he does not for a minute consider freeing any of them. Rather, he wants them to continue as slaves, although slaves “in the family.” Democrats in those days liked to affectionately refer to their slave households as “our family, black and white.”
A favorite discussion theme within the Democratic master class was the laziness and worthlessness of the slaves. It was a running joke among overseers that “it takes two white men to make a black man work” and that “it takes two to help one to do nothing.” Even clear-eyed Mary Boykin Chesnut frets, “A hired man would be a good deal cheaper than a man whose father and mother, wife and twelve children have to be fed, clothed, housed, and nursed, their taxes paid, and their doctor’s bills, all for his half-done, slovenly, lazy work.”23 Yet in reality it was the slaves who did most of the work and the planter class that was lazy and slovenly.
The slaves were property and therefore—it is true—they had little incentive to work. After all, they did not receive the fruits of their labor. With a straight face, the Democratic master class investigated the supposed maladies that led to slaves feigning illness and shirking work responsibilities. A Louisiana doctor active in the Democratic Party, Samuel Cartwright, diagnosed slaves as suffering from Dyaesthesia Aethiopica, a supposedly tropical ailment that caused malingering, irresponsibility and “rascality” in slaves. Cartwright also identified Drapetomania as “the disease causing Negroes to run away.”24
Recognizing they would have to make the slaves work, masters introduced the whip as the main management solution of plantation society. The whip was sometimes used sparingly, but it was used nevertheless by severe and kind masters alike. And the whip left enduring scars, emotional no less than physical. During his slave days, Frederick Douglass was whipped so badly by the slave-breaker Edward Covey that he says his mind broke down, “the dark night of slavery closed in upon me, and behold a man transformed into a brute!”25
Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party, is sometimes compared to Thomas Jefferson. Both were admittedly Southern slave-owners who owned around 200 slaves. Yet Jackson was in his early career a slave-trader, a profession that was universally loathed by Jefferson and the whole founding generation and looked down upon even in Jackson’s own day. Yet Jackson’s era was not Jefferson’s, and Jackson truly represents the Democratic Party of his time in that he shows none of the qualms about slavery that are so characteristic of Jefferson.
When one of his slaves ran away, Jackson purchased an ad in a local Tennessee paper offering a $50 reward for his capture “and ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes a person will give to the amount of three hundred.”26 Three hundred lashes may be considered something close to a death sentence! It is this barbarism in Jackson—unthinkable for Jefferson—that defines his era and, weirdly enough, coexists with Democratic rhapsodies about how slavery is wonderful not only for masters but also for slaves.
No system of tyranny can be sustained, however, entirely through force. The Democratic master class recognized that it needed carrots as well as sticks, and beyond that, it needed a whole social system that would bind the slaves physically and emotionally to the plantation. So the master class created a slave system based on total dependency. The slaves, as Olmsted puts it, were encouraged to develop “a habit of perfect dependence,” so that even without the whip they could see no way out.
This enforced subordination, according to the progressive black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, was the true meaning of slavery. “But there was . . . a real meaning to slavery different from that we may apply to the laborer today,” Du Bois wrote. “It was in part psychological, the enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual.”27
For most of us now, such observations are telling because they give us a window into the past. Du Bois understood the psychology of the plantation. But for many Americans—especially poor blacks, Latinos and Native Americans—what Du Bois writes will seem all too familiar. The past has not disappeared from the present. As we will see, there is a continuity between the Democrats of the mid-nineteenth century and the Democrats now, and a system of enforced dependency is the precise way in which Democrats today maintain their ethnic plantations.
SLAVES WITHOUT MASTERS
The positive-good school of slavery that emerged in the Democratic South is associated with such names as John C. Calhoun, James Henry Hammond, Henry Hughes, George Frederick Holmes, Thomas R. Dew and Edmund Ruffin. Calhoun and Hammond led the charge in the Senate. All these men, needless to say, were Democrats. But its most notorious and charismatic spokesman was George Fitzhugh, author of Sociology for the South and Cannibals All! and a regular writer for pro-slavery publications such as the Richmond Enquirer and De Bow’s Review.
Fitzhugh was hardly a typical member of that school, or even a typical Southerner. Unlike many who celebrated rural agrarianism, Fitzhugh wanted the South to become a manufacturing powerhouse like the North. Virtually alone among pro-slavery apologists, he kept up a lively correspondence with abolitionists. He seems to have convinced the labor reformer George Henry Evans, once a committed abolitionist, to switch allegiances and back the cause of the Confederacy.
For all his uniqueness and eccentricity, Fitzhugh was also widely influential; we hear his arguments echoed by other pro-slavery writers. Lincoln, too, was familiar with Fitzhugh and found his arguments repulsive, but also interesting. The reason, as scholars like Eugene Genovese have recognized, is that Fitzhugh “spelled out the logical outcome of the slaveholders’ philosophy and laid bare its essence.”28
Fitzhugh was also a self-professed leftist and socialist, and progressive scholars, while seeking to keep their distance from him today, cannot resist praising this aspect of his thought. Writing as a Marxist, Genovese confessed his delight in Fitzhugh’s attacks on free-market capitalism. Many passages of Fitzhugh’s work, writes Junius Rodriguez in Slavery in the United States, seem “lifted directly” from Marx, and others “foreshadow twentieth-century leftist thought.”29
Here, then, is Fitzhugh in a nutshell.30 He begins by noting that in every labor system there are basically two kinds of labor: free labor and slave labor. Fitzhugh concedes that at the first glance, free labor seems preferable to slave labor because the farm or factory laborer can leave his employer and go work for someone else or not work at all. By contrast, slaves cannot quit, cannot work for themselves and cannot refuse to work.
But Fitzhugh is unimpressed by this distinction, which he regards as meaningless in practice. He goes on to make an outrageous point. Free labor is actually enslaved labor, and slave labor is actually free. Free labor, Fitzhugh says, is dog-eat-dog. “The maxim, every man for himself,” he writes, “embraces the whole moral code of a free society.” The harsh competition of capitalism, Fitzhugh says, benefits the few and the strong while crushing the many and the weak. As a consequence of freedom, “the rich are continually growing richer and the poor poorer.”
Drawing on a term frequently used by Engels and subsequently used in Marxist theory, Fitzhugh terms laborers in a free market “wage slaves.” Of course he is referring here to white slaves. They are slaves because they are no less dependent on their masters than legal slaves. They too must work in order to eat and to live. And yet they have no protection, no provision, no security in the manner that legal slaves do.
In a free market, Fitzhugh notes, the interest of maste
rs is opposed to that of the “wage slaves.” When the slaves lose, the masters gain. The masters are always contriving to pay their workers less—playing them off against each other—even though the workers are the ones who produce all the products. Free society is a “war of the rich with the poor, and the poor with one another.” In such society, Fitzhugh memorably observes, “virtue loses all her loveliness, because of her selfish aims.”
Fitzhugh takes note of Northern travelers who unfavorably contrast the prosperity of the North with the backwardness of the South. Free labor, they argue, is more efficient and profitable than slave labor. Fitzhugh agrees, but turns the argument against them, contending that precisely to the degree that capitalism is profitable, that is the measure of capitalist exploitation of the working class.
Capitalists earn more, he says, by paying their workers less. They pay the worker only for time spent actually working, even though workers and their families also require support when the worker is disabled, or old, or sick. Capitalist entrepreneurs, Fitzhugh says, are basically slave masters “without the obligations of a master.” That’s how they generate so much efficiency and profits.
The beauty of slavery, according to Fitzhugh, is that it establishes an organic relationship between master and slave, not a relationship of contract but something more like a family. To those who say that slaves receive no compensation, Fitzhugh thunders that the considerable cost of maintaining a slave is the compensation. Moreover, the slave is provided for from cradle to grave. He is compensated, and his family is compensated, with food, shelter and care even when he is injured or sick or too old to work.
In a manner that echoes Marx’s famous doctrine, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” Fitzhugh contends that a farm or plantation is a sort of commune “in which the master furnishes the capital and skill, and the slaves the labor, and divide the profits, not according to each one’s in-put, but according to each one’s wants and necessities.”
The problem with the socialist theory coming into vogue in Europe and the northeastern states, Fitzhugh writes, is that it is “an ever receding and illusory Utopia.” Socialists, he says, are attempting the impossible task of changing human nature. Slavery, he declares, is an actually existing form of socialism that happens to be its only workable form because it is based on human nature as it is. Slavery achieves “the ends all Communists and Socialists desire.”
Fitzhugh concedes that there are masters who mistreat or abuse slaves, but even here, he writes, such abuse is qualified by the master’s recognition that the slaves are expensive. “Labor in slave society is property,” he writes, “and men will take care of their property. When slaves are worth near a thousand dollars a head, they will be carefully and well provided for.” So paradoxically the slave’s status as chattel provides him a sort of protection.
By contrast, Fitzhugh triumphantly notes, free laborers are not property, and this makes them disposable to their employers. If a capitalist entrepreneur has a dangerous job that may cost a worker his health or his life, Fitzhugh says, he won’t risk having a slave do it; rather, he would be sure to get an immigrant laborer who, if he falls and kills himself, does so at his own risk. Free laborers, Fitzhugh says, are basically “slaves without masters,” the worst possible situation for them to be in.
Unlike other pro-slavery writers who wrote paeans to slavery but could not answer the objection, “If slavery is so great, why not try it on white people?,” Fitzhugh argues that a national or even worldwide slave system would benefit all workers, white as well as black. In this respect he was consistent, and he did not flinch when some of his fellow Democrats balked as he pursued the rationale of the pro-slavery philosophy to its logical conclusion. Ultimately, Fitzhugh says, the world will either adopt the slave system or the free-labor system, and his own preference was clear.
Yet in America, in his own day, Fitzhugh made the case to whites that they could escape being slaves because there were blacks to fill the task at hand. This racial hierarchy he attributed to the Democratic Party, of which he was a proud member. With blacks as the enslaved class, he says, white citizens “like those of Rome and Athens, are a privileged class.” Here, from the mouth of a Democratic pro-slavery propagandist, are the roots of our contemporary term “white privilege.” Fitzhugh also hints at what whites get out of white supremacy. They get the privilege of belonging to a superior caste, whether or not they own slaves.
Even so, like his Democratic successors today, Fitzhugh would have hotly rejected the idea that he was anti-black. Negro slaves, he says, are “the happiest and in some sense the freest people in the world.” While the supposedly free white laborer of the North is constantly agonizing over how to support himself and his family, Fitzhugh says the black slave does his work and beyond that has not a care in the world because he and his family are fully provided for in any possible situation.
Slavery, Fitzhugh argues, is especially well-suited for blacks because “the Negro . . . is but a grown up child . . . His liberty is a curse to himself, and a greater curse to the society around him . . . The master occupies toward him the place of parent or guardian.” So convinced is Fitzhugh about the benefits of blacks in captivity that in a pamphlet, What Shall Be Done with the Free Negroes?, he recommends that they should recognize what’s good for them and voluntarily enslave themselves. “Let them select their masters.”
Fitzhugh insists that the slave community is a kind of extended family in which “the interests of the various members of the family circle . . . concur and harmonize.” His rhetoric on this point seems akin to, and reminiscent of, Democratic governor Mario Cuomo’s 1984 Democratic Convention speech in which he likened the whole nation to a single family working toward a common purpose, one that takes care of all its members.
It seems almost eerie to hear Fitzhugh speak the modern language of compassion and social justice. For him, slavery is the ultimate expression of both. Without slavery, Fitzhugh warns, blacks would be “an intolerable burden” to themselves and society. As slaves, they are provided for in a manner that may seem meager but is in fact better than they could provide for themselves. For Fitzhugh, the slave plantation is a sort of welfare state, offering at least a basic provision of food, healthcare and security for all of its inhabitants.
Fitzhugh’s sharp break with the American founders can be seen in his ridicule of Thomas Jefferson. In this he is not alone. Calhoun, Hammond and Jefferson Davis all attack the equality clause of the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming it not self-evidently true but self-evidently false. Here, again, we see what Lincoln means when he says that the Democrats introduced a new spirit of receptivity to tyranny that was not present at the founding.
In response to the Declaration of Independence, Fitzhugh quips that blacks “have a natural and inalienable right to be slaves.” Seeking to refute Jefferson’s famous remark that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their back, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God,” Fitzhugh responds that some people are meant to be ridden, “and the riding does them good. They need the reins, the bit and the spur.”
Fitzhugh pungently attacks not merely Adam Smith’s free-market philosophy—“a system of unmitigated selfishness . . . rotten to the core”—but also John Locke’s theory of the social contract, which posits that humans have natural rights and societies are formed with limited power to enforce only those rights that are delegated to the state.
Nonsense, says Fitzhugh. “Man is born a member of society . . . He has no rights whatever, as opposed to the interests of society . . . Whatever rights he has are subordinate to the good of the whole.” Here, as we will see, Fitzhugh proves a forerunner to the fascist glorification of the state, an ideology that would strongly influence Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party in the twentieth century.
As you may have begun to s
uspect by this point, George Fitzhugh was a statist and a supporter of a strong and powerful government, which in his time admittedly involved state power, not federal power. In this Fitzhugh was not alone. Most of the members of the Democrats’ positive-good school were statists. Henry Hughes, for example, condemned abolitionist agitation as “a rebellion against the state.”
Once again, however, Fitzhugh spells out the position with the greatest clarity. While some people say “the world is too little governed,” Fitzhugh insists that “the masses require protection and control.” He adds, “More of government is needed . . . Government is the life of a nation, and . . . it is absurd to define on paper . . . what they shall do and not do.” For him, government power is unlimited and its exercise is controlled only by the exigencies of a given situation.
Fitzhugh places his hope for realizing his vision, at least in the United States, in the Democratic Party. A political commitment to the common interests of master and slave on the plantation is “the true and honorable distinction of the Democratic Party.” Thrilled that the Democrats are dominant in the South, he predicts that “soon the Democratic Party will be in a majority again at the North.” The outlook and mores of the Democratic plantation, he feels, would surely become universal. “Give the North a little more time, and she will eagerly adopt them.”
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