The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1412: The Road to Civil War Pt. 20 - George Fitzhugh (1) - w/ George Bagby

Episode Date: August 23, 2026

63 MinutesSafe for WorkGeorge Bagby is a content creator and publisher of long-forgotten books. George joins Pete to continue a series detailing the long lead up to America's Civil War.George's "Buy Me a Coffee"George's Twitter AccountGeorge's Pinned Tweet w/ Links George's YouTube ChannelPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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the audio files that you can download and listen to, or you can stream in most cases through those locations as well. So if you want to avoid the ads, consider supporting the show if not, just know none of these ads get any endorsement from me, skip by them, do what you need to do. I appreciate all of you. Head on over to the Pekanjana Show.com. You can get the show early and ad free over there. If not, here's a show. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekinianna Show. George Bagby's back and we are going to continue the series about the lead up to America's Civil War. How are you doing this evening, Mr. Bagby? I'm doing well.

I've been real busy on lots of projects. I just released a couple of new Confederate memoirs. I've got Admiral Sims memoirs of service afloat and General Gordon's reminiscences of the Civil War that just came into print. I'm really excited about that. I'm trying to expand some of my reach with wholesalers that deal with this material. So I've been working on that a lot today, trying to network.

It's been a very productive day and have a lot to be pleased with today. Awesome. That's good to hear. All right. Who do you want to talk about today? Well, we're going back into the abolitionist crusade and the southern reaction to this, which takes on a different kind of temper in response to the abolitionists. The Southerners really develop a reactionary streak as what I've alluded to before in a sort of existential crisis where they start realizing the implications of liberalism in in America and what that would mean for their society. They're taking their antagonists among the abolitionists sorts very seriously.

And they're coming up with really shocking kinds of conclusions, certainly in an American context. So we're going back into that today. I did want to start out with some more material from the abolitionists. kind of as an aside, but I didn't want to want this to slip away. Many of the abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, who is the most important of them, they were writing lots of inflammatory material about how the South had become a kind of interracial brothel sort of environment because of slavery. So we can read this a couple of different ways. Like from the modern perspective, we're going to focus on the involuntary nature of the institution of slavery,

and we're going to be more inclined to think of male abuse of female slaves, pressure for favors and the like, and we can well understand the abolitionist criticism there. What was really much more of, well, let's qualify it and say some people were most concerned about the involuntary nature of any sort of trice between a slave owner and a slave. There were also plenty of people who were more concerned with the misogination angle. So this was something that the abolitionists played up for response in part. They were emphasizing mixed unions, mixed racial bastard children, and also the fact that the status of the slave followed

or let's say the status of the child followed the status of the mother. So this would result, obviously, a slave woman bore a child of mixed parentage, then the children would be also with the status as slaves. That's a very ancient designation. there's nothing unusual about the American experience in that respect. But the abolitionists would go on about how the fathers of these illegitimate bastard children would be selling their own children into slavery. And they played up this mostly debunked claim that the South was running slave.

breeding plantations, that they were actively breeding slaves for sale in more profitable areas of the South. Now, this seems to me to be mostly a misunderstanding of the transfer of slaves from the east to the west. So slaves did congregate for some period of time with merchants whose occupation was the transfer of slaves from the exhausted lands of the east out to the west. And they're interpreting this as an active operation to try to increase the total stock of slaves in order to get profit off of human flesh, which is not what this sort of transfer operation was all about, actually. There's natural increase of slaves,

and this can be calculated in terms of wealth, but we don't have reason to believe that people were actively setting slaves together in order to breed more slaves or just increase the total population of the slaves. So this is an interesting factor. the criticism about miscegenation in particular was something that the anti-slave religious movement, such as it was, the anti-slave churches that made abolitionism a tenant of their evangel.

They spent a lot of time talking about the sexual depravity inherently connected with slavery. Certainly, there is a level of that, and no one that studies the law. literature can deny it. But that it set the tone for the whole institution is questionable. It's not to say that it wasn't a feature of something that people knew about, something that people did write about. But whether or not it actually set the tone and that this was the moral tone of the Annabellum South is certainly a topic for controversy. These days when people say whatever they want about the South, and it's generally accepted, no matter how frightful the claim may be, it just doesn't fly with someone that's been in the literature. These were Victorian people of Victorian sensibilities, certainly the slave owners themselves.

Those were the moors of their community. So this was not something practiced in the open, certainly. At worse, this was something that was kept secret, which of course is another criticism of Victorian social norms, that they had all sorts of depravity that they were hiding from the world and so on. So there's a certain amount of this that's just unknowable, but it's interesting factor. So going back to the southern response to the abolitionists,

I've got a quote from John C. Calhoun that is a pretty good summary of this. John C. Calhoun, who we've discussed in previous episodes, he is famous for his conclusion, come up at, come out of certain circumstances, he famously called slavery a positive good. This is an opportunity for us to talk about the kind of liberalism that was the standard of the southern elites of the time. Here is John C. Calhoun's position in brief, that men exist on different cultural levels around the world. Let's talk about technology or literacy or religion.

Some people practice head hunting as a religious discipline. Many nations around the world have no literary culture, no written language. Some live at a level of hunter-gatherer peoples with Stone Age technology. All of these fit the description of colonial era Africa, the African nations. They were living at a very primitive technological level. they had no written language outside of their connection with Islam

and Christianity. They did not have written languages in West Africa. They had frightful kinds of religious discipline, warrior ethic that is to some degree

comparable with the Native Americans. The Southern liberal sensibility as it was, they thought that man would respond reasonably to technological advantage, to language advantage, to religious enlightenment, and would progress towards a cultural mean. We should recognize this idea. This is quite current with modern progressive thought. The idea, oh, well, we can bring Somalians to Minnesota, and they will all become Americans just like you and me,

and they will shop at Walmart and speak English and read the New York Times. Right? This is the same kind of sensibility. Now, I'm not saying this to malign John C. Calhoun, or any other American. I'm just pointing out that this is a commonplace in American thought. This is what we should recognize as the tradition of American liberalism, which is quite widespread. We will have much more to say of this later where we get into critics of liberalism from the South. So when John C. Calhoun says slavery is a positive good, John C. Calhoun says it is a force of culture and enlightenment. John C. Calhoun is not of the opinion that you can take a Somalian and put him in Minnesota

and in a few years or even a few generations he is going to be acculturated, that he is going to start speaking and writing in English. He's going to start understanding the nature of God and going to worship in church, that he is going to give up his head-hunting ways or what have you. John C. Calhoun believes that the institution of slavery is an educational institution that ennobles the primitive peoples that take part in it. So they start out as headhunters. They end up as Christians. They start out as illiterates. They end up exposed to language, culture, arts, crafts, and the rest. And they've come out the other end up, far better. than they were when they were going in. And that slavery is not going to be necessarily the permanent status of these people.

That is what John C. Calhoun is meaning when he says that slavery is a positive good. Of that said, this is what Calhoun had to say about the rise of the abolitionists. He says, it has compelled us in the South to look at. into the nature and character of this great institution and to correct many false impressions that even we had entertained in relation to it. There he's speaking of the early Southern uncertainty and kind of enlightenment sensibilities about the founding generation, manumitting their slaves, buying land for them in the West, in Ohio and such like trying to move away from the institution of slavery, the case in the latter

half of the 18th century. He says, many in the South once believed that it was a moral and political evil. We should note that is what Robert E. Lee said about slavery in the late 1850s. kind of coming after Calhoun, not obviously sending himself at odds with Calhoun at that stage. So Calhoun, many in the South once believed it was a moral and political evil, that folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in its true light and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world. So, notwithstanding the observation that slavery was a force for the acculturation of primitive peoples, that they would be

brought up to a Western level of culture in some fashion or to some degree. There were plenty of opinions about that even then. Calhoun says the challenge of the abolitionists was an opportunity for the Southerners to re-examine their former reservations and dislike of the institution of slavery. The Southerners come to have a reckoning with medieval feudalism and also ultimately with liberalism. the liberal political tradition, which is at odds with what we might characterize as traditional culture, organic perception of human order, the social nature of man, the patriarchal structure designed in human life. We believe by God himself, intended by God as the way that human beings are meant to live. What I would like to characterize and what I characterize while I

teach as Aristotelian conceptions of political science. This is apropos because the Southerners themselves began making reference to Aristotle and also to the Old Testament. It's important to note, and I believe I mentioned this in our last episode, that Southern clergymen, theologians, mostly Presbyterians, Thornwell and Dabney, are going back to the scriptures, going back to religious, religious Protestant traditions, though make reference to the patristics as well, and they see no fault in the institution of slavery from a Christian perspective or from a biblical perspective. They write commodiously on the subject. They actually go into argument with Northern Churchmen. This is such a large piece of literature in the lead up to the war.

It deserves its own episode, and I will devote more time to that in the future. But tonight we're going to get into George Fitzhue, who I had mentioned a couple of times previously. George Fitzhue was from Port Royal in Virginia, Caroline County. This is actually the exact same residence as John Taylor of Caroline, who we had also spent another episode on. George Fitzhue is perhaps the most prolific and also perhaps the most inventive and distinctive of the Southern thinkers of his generation. He is a kind of firebrand,

a patriarchal reactionary, defender, apologist for the institution of slavery. Now, that would paint him in the eyes of most today as one of the most reprehensible characters in American history, I'm sure. I mean to give him a fair hearing and also just to let him speak for himself. We'll get into that. I have some quotes to share from him. So he wrote a book called Sociology for the South or the failure of free society. in 1854. So this is his first salvo against classical liberalism. Now, classical liberalism always deserves some exposition. When we're talking about classical liberalism in America, we could do little better than to look to the introduction to the

Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be something. self-evident that all men are created equal and so on. To things like the Bill of Rights. No established church. All sorts of individual liberties, recognition of the individual as the individual as the basic unit of society. This is all built on liberal notions, theories about the origin. of human society, ultimately theories about history and about the nature of man. When we're talking about classical liberalism, we're going to go to thinkers like John Locke,

Locke who famously posited that all of human inclination is built out of experience, that there's really nothing intrinsic in human nature, that everything that we would define as human is based on personal experience. He posited the famous notion of the blank slate, tabula rasa, in his essay on human understanding. This has many problems with it, and increasingly we have many scientific kinds of reasons to object to Locke's thesis. Nevertheless, Locke wrote his first and second treatises on government. The second treatise on government says that political society is the result of a social contract, all individuals getting together. saying, well, we can better protect our property if we create a government to rule over us. And so we cede our individual sovereign authority to a common authority that we call the state.

So this is a myth that this has this never occurred in recorded history. Man has never lived without any governing authority in recorded history. but it is the origin of liberal ideas about the nature of man. So Fitzhue is assailing liberalism, and with it great American theorists of liberalism like Thomas Jefferson, another Virginian, in Cannibal's All or Slaves Without Masters, published in 1856, Fitzhue gives us his major thesis on economics. He said in the introduction to Cannibals All, labor makes values and wit exploits and accumulates them.

This is his thesis for Cannibals All. This is why Fitzhue is called the Sucyte's You. Southern Marx, because this was also Karl Marx's theory about economics, that labor input determines the value of goods, that there is no intrinsic value of goods, and that is the organization of the product of labor that attributes value. So this is a fascinating point, and there is a tremendous amount of criticism and analysis of Fitzhue because he is coming up with some of Karl Marx's own ideas in a completely different context and with different application. because Fitzhue is far from a communist. Fitschew is constantly raising socialism and communism as his great foes and dismantling his self-proclaimed socialist opponents. And yet he has a Marxist theory of

economic value. So I say all that only to put it aside because this is not my main point when it comes to Fitzhue. I do not intend to analyze Fitzhue's labor theory of value. You've actually spent an awful lot more time on that, Pete. I'd be interested in your take on that. What, the labor theory of value? Yeah. You have anything intelligent to say on it? I don't really, necessarily. Basically, what they're saying is that all value comes from labor, which does, doesn't make sense because if I asked you to take a dig a hole right there and then refill it and I just paid you a day's wage for that, what have I made from it? I mean, that's a, that's a bizarre way of looking at it, but also how many times does somebody decide that they have a great

product that they're going to invent? And then they make it and they hire people to make it. And then it doesn't sell and they don't make any money off of it. Well, you know, indeed. There's an issue there. And also the one that I used to use all the time to talk about the labor theory of value is if I told you, look, we got to, you know, we have to clear this, clear this land here and we're going to plant apple trees and we're going to make money off those apples. And I can pay you right now, you know, $15 an hour to do that. Or you can wait until the apples come to fruition and you can have all of the money that you made from those. You can have all the money from selling those apples, which is going to be how many years down the

line? So there's a time preference issue there also when it comes to the labor theory of value. So the labor theory of value is junk economics because it just there's too many variables that just don't work out when you say that all value comes, all value comes from labor. And really what happens is most value comes from demand, people wanting a product. See, that does make sense to me. I have a certain sympathy with Fitzhue

where I do not have sympathy with Marx on the question. And it's because Fitzhue is, interested in citing Aristotle's politics. And I have, I've made quite a study of Aristotle's politics. I used to teach it. And Aristotle talks about political communities. So Aristotle, very interestingly, he posits at the very beginning that man is a social creature. Man is a political animal is what Aristotle says. He is designed to live in community. So you do not find human beings without language, without some religious practice, without property, without marriage and family life. You can't even imagine man without these things. So Aristotle says these are all

part of man's nature. This is something that makes Aristotle quite different from the liberal theorists who imagine man in their mythology as an isolated individual with sovereign political power over himself. And Locke famously formulates this in the beginning of the

treatise, the second treatise on government, where he basically gives a libertarian formula that so long as people don't act against one another, they can do whatever they want with their own stuff. Like the non-aggression principle. Locke, Locke basically gives us that in the first pages of the second treatise.

Aristotle has very different formulation. So Aristotle says man is designed to live in community with other people. Aristotle also says, no matter how you organize a community, there are going to be people with better talents. They're going to be people with less talents. There are going to be wealthy people and they're going to be poor people. and there are going to be people that are somewhere in the middle, which Aristotle much preferred because it lent stability to a community. He's famous for praising the middle class.

So Aristotle, he analyzes this relationship on several occasions. This is all related to Fitzhue because Fitzhue does go into this. Aristotle says the rich are helpless without the poor because what good is, your capital if no one can produce anything out of it. The rich need labor. And the poor do not have resources. The poor at the bottom levels of society, they do not have property. They do not have anything to invest in.

They would starve without the investments of the rich, which give them occupation, which produce commodities they need to live, not some newfangled gadget just off the ship from China that has questionable utility or whatever, but the necessities of life, the basic functions of any sustainable community, which is what Aristotle is most interested in. So these are the terms on which Fitzhue is talking about his theory of value and why labor is the component. You aren't rich if you own a factory and you don't have anyone to work it.

Sure, and that all makes sense, but what the Marxist will say is, is that, well, how did they get rich from the first place? Why are they rich and why are the other ones poor? And they just, they want to reduce everyone to a single labor unit. that is responsible for their own labor. It's actually, when you really understand dialectical materialism, it's very anti-human. It really is.

Yeah, it is work for yourself and survive on your, I mean, really what comes out to is your survival is on your own and you can work until your body's broken down. And when your body's broken down, you don't really deserve to eat anymore. Since you can't provide for yourself, boom, bullet in the back of the head. But then they try to, but then when you bring it up to, oh, we're going to have a dictatorship of the proletariat, we're going to move to the point where everybody else is working for each other. Well, that's just they're basically rebuilding a hierarchy at that point because now somebody's going to have to be in charge. And the praxis, if you want to see the praxis of that, I mean, just look at Lenin.

That's where the praxis comes into, it comes into play. Absolutely. What's most remarkable to me about all of that is Aristotle seems to anticipate most of it in the politics. The fact that there is elite organization and that's inescapable, that's often. often observed in the politics. Aristotle is so prescient. He's such an excellent resource. I just happen to have been deep in Aristotle for several days now. But back to Fitzhue, just to give the man his due, though we have our questions about the labor theory of value, both you and I do. He is getting a lot of ideas out of

Aristotle. He actually cites Aristotle and the Old Testament many times early in his study. He is extremely frank in his thesis, his conclusions, the gist of his argument. He's very upfront. And he's not in the least interested in trying to be gentle about any of this. He is emphatically pro-slavery as a as the social and humane option for the West, which is just stunning. And he's not at all trying to be sly about it. He's extremely earnest. He says, unrestricted exploitation of so-called free society is more about. oppressive to the laborer than domestic slavery.

Here's another statement of his thesis, more or less. Now, we can look at examples of this in the Annabellum South and understand just what in the world he's getting at here, because this seems so foreign to us, so opposite of our inclinations when we think of the institution of slavery. George Fitzhue is using examples like the building of rail tunnels in the Appalachian Mountains in places like Virginia. Obviously, it's dangerous work, it's difficult work, you're detonating gunpowder, drilling into solid rock deep underground and so on, or mining another example of this. Slave labor was not used in such dangerous work because the slaves were too valuable. This was the province of so-called free labor. And I've mentioned free labor several times before.

The gist of it is you get the Irishman off the docks or something. You pay them a dollar a day. You transport him up to the mountains. You send him out to Paul Rock out of a hole in the ground. And if he crushes his leg, then you get the next Irishman. There is no workman's compensation. You don't have any liability for it as just the hazard of this dangerous work. And if the guy can't work because his leg is broken or whatever,

you just get the next guy. And you don't pay him because he's not doing any work for you anymore. That's what free labor looks like. in the 19th century this is just unfathomable by most of us when we're thinking of working for wages we're thinking of something that we're all doing

but we're also living in a labor system that has been humanized to suit our moral concerns to some degree we have made it far more gentle than it was then. So the rail tunnels, they weren't, they weren't using slaves for that. Slaves were too valuable.

Slavery is only profitable if these people live long and productive lives. The slaves have to live long and productive lives. They must be kept healthy. They must be kept with their bodies intact. They may not risk them for dangerous occupations or accident-prone. sorts of situations. The same is true about canals. Down in South Louisiana, there were great many needs for canals, especially in New Orleans. There are other canals built elsewhere in the south, such as Central Virginia. And they don't want to use slaves for the canals. Again, it is very difficult labor. It's very dangerous. They're using heavy machinery. accidents happen. and it's not economical at all to use the slaves.

So slaves are kept out and these are the province of free labor. Again, if there is an accident, if there are casualties, then you're not out any investment. And this is the reason why. Because the hireling doesn't have anyone responsible for him. No one is responsible for his life. No one has a state in his life. No one looks at him as something desirable to have a stake in because he is not property.

This is an important formulation. George Fitzhue believes in responsibility that people will care for other people if they are responsible for those people, that they have a long-term stake in the well-being of those people. This is a very Aristotelian idea. This is something that Aristotle is constantly talking about in his politics. So just to turn to another observer of this, Eugene Genevese, who is one of the great historians of the Annabellum South, we should note Eugene Genevese began his career as a thergoing materialist Marxist historian. By the time he ended his career, he had returned to his native Catholicism.

So he presents a very interesting biographical picture. He ends up befriending lots of traditional southern historians and such. People like Clyde Wilson and such are friends with Genovese before his death. His very interesting fellow. But he really writes very justly and appreciatively of the Anabellum Southerners. This is his speciality. He wrote a wonderful book about Anabellum slavery called Roll Jordan Roll, which is a standard on slavery. It's one of two or three books everyone should have about the institution of slavery in America. But he also wrote several marvelous books about the slave-owning Annabellum Whites.

The most important of those is called The Mind of the Masterclass. And I highly recommend that book. That is a marvelous book. But Genevese, he said, The Old South must be understood as a historically discreet slave society. the basic tendencies of which were anti-Bourgeois. Now, by that, he meant anti-materialist in their conception of economic life, that the goods of economic activity were placed in responsible human relationships, including slavery.

This is a very Aristotelian notion of social organization. Genovese called the Anabellum white southerners pre-capitalist, quasi-aristocratic landowners. And these are really interesting qualifications, especially from a man trained as a Marxist. He is qualifying them, partly because he grew to really love and esteem them in his study. Genovese said, paternalism defined the involuntary labor of slaves as a legitimate return to their masters for protection and direction. Now, what's really fascinating about that is that is the precise formulation of medieval feudalism. Why does the serf serve his feudal lord? Because the feudal lord is providing for him and protecting him,

which is, moreover, the basic formulation for loyalty to a government as well. It's just much more personal. Fudalism is always his personal relationship between the serf and his liege. So now I'm going to turn to more Fitzhue. Here are passages from Cannibal's All. So Fitzhue says, I'm sure it will be easier to convince the world that the customary theories of our modern ethical philosophy,

whether utilitarian or sentimental, are so fallacious or so false in their premises and their deductions as to deserve rejection, than to persuade it that the social forms under which it lives and attempts to justify and approve are equally erroneous and should be replaced by others founded on broader philosophical systems or more Christian principles. So he poses the question, you know, is, Is it really easy to look around you and say everything here is fake and ill-founded? Or is it easier to accept that? Take it as a given.

He says it's actually a lot harder to look around and say everything that we see in our world is false. Now he's writing in the 1850s, obviously, so we know we know. know some of the things he's talking about. He's challenging the critics of the South. He says, I believe that under the banners of socialism and more dangerous because more delusive, semi-socialism, society is insensibility and often unconsciously, in arching to the utter abandonment of the most essential institutions, religion, family ties, property, property, property and the restraints of justice.

The present profession is indeed to stop at the halfway house of no government and free love, but we are sure that it cannot halt and encamp in such quarters. Society will work out erroneous doctrines to their logical consequences and detect error only by the experience of mischief. The world will only fall back on domestic slavery when all other social forums have foiled and been exhausted. That hour may not be far off. So here he's saying the reformers, his antagonists, are proposing radical news social organizations,

government institutions that will take care of the indigent, presuming, also the soon-to-be emancipated slaves. But they are challenging the most essential institutions of society, the elements that Aristotle defined as connected essentially with human nature. Religiosity, family organization, property ownership, law and tradition. Fitzhue often mocks his antagonists. for their connections to anarchist theory and fornication, justifications, the abolition of marriage and all those that are questioning the institution of marriage, which are very common at this time.

He says they are attempting to break down the form of society in the most radical means. now Fitzhue lives to see what he prophesies here he says we're going to have a different form of slavery in the near future if these people succeed and what comes to mind is a famous book by another libertarian certainly a worthy contribution Jeffrey Hummel's book emancipating slaves enslaving free men. That's an excellent book, yeah. Yeah. Basically just presenting in the title, what fits you is referencing in his thesis. Yeah, we could emancipate the slaves

who will serve them then. You're going to strip the southern classes of their property and you're going to strip them of all their status. You aren't actually improving the general status of the people at large. You're stripping some and enfranchising others. And that's a good little summary of what Reconstruction looks like. Fitzhue, he says,

all men began very clearly to perceive that a state of revolution is politically and socially abnormal and exceptional, and that the principles that would justify it are true in the particular and false in the general. A recurrence to fundamental principles by an oppressed people is treason if it fails, the noblest of heroism if it eventuates in successful revolution, but a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles is at war with the continued existence of all government. It's a doctrine fit to be supported only by the isms of the North and the Red Republicans

of Europe. Let's recall he's writing in the 1850s. He is referring to the revolutionaries of 1848. 1848, coincidentally, is the year of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. and a whole course of revolutionary movements that spring up all over Europe. That's his reference there. Basically anti-monarchy, anti-aristocrat movements, pro-Republican movements all across Europe that do mostly fail. He says, let's see, with them, no principles are considered established and sacred.

Nor will ever be. When in a time of revolution, society is partly disbanded, disintegrated, and dissolved. The doctrine of human equality may have a hearing and may be useful in stimulating rebellion, but it is practically impossible and directs conflicts with all government, all separate property, and all social existence. So here is Fitzhue going out guns blazing saying human equality is not a thing. Arguing about equality disintegrates all social order, constantly bringing it up as some organizing principle for government, for any kind of social organization. detonates any institution it's brought into. Just destroys everything. Because it's a phantom and it cannot be realized. Because people are different from each other. This is very hard-headed stuff.

But it's also not in the least unfamiliar to anyone that's read Aristotle's politics. Aristotle is constantly talking about this problem of arguing about equality. Aristotle even poses the question. Equality in what? In what way are human beings equal to each other? So we see the Southern criticism coming back from the abolitionists is going to first principles and is getting very interesting, very skeptical, very radical in its nature, which is why I call it reactionary. George Fitzhue in particular is going in very interesting places with this and cites Aristotle many times as his source. He says, the comparative evils of slave society and a free society, of slavery to human masters,

and of slavery to capital, are the issues which the South now presents and which the North her avoids, and she avoids them because the abolitionists, the only assailants of Southern slavery, have, we believe, to a man, asserted the entire failure of their own social system, proposed its subversion, and suggested an approximating millennium, or some system of free love communism or socialism as a substitute. So Fitzhue, Fitzhue's devastating in his mockery of the enlightened intellectuals of New England. And he frequently resorts to this and it's, is quite amusing. It's one of the reasons why Fitzhue is regularly compared to Marx, though they have totally different bases and goals in their arguments.

It's important to note that in spite of certain similarities, they have totally different grounds. They want very different things. Fitzhue is really good at making fun of his enemies. So Fitzhue says, well, the abolitionists, they say that their economic system is totally faulty and unjust. Is this really what they want to give to us? Is this really better than what we've got when they say what they have is so bad?

Fitzhue is emphasizing, like Aristotle, organic human connections, these ancient institutions like property, religion, family, and slavery. Because slavery is old. older than written law. It's older than the written Old Testament, the code of Hammerabi. It's unquestionably one of the most ancient of human institutions. Now, just antiquity doesn't justify his existence, but he's saying this is something that's been around for so long. We take it for granted when it comes to human organization. He says, Because slaves are part of the natural household.

They are not members of the family unit, but they are part of the family property. These connections that bind a household together, the loyalty that a son owes his father, A wife owes her husband. The slave owes his master and so on. This is an organization around mutual needs, the collective needs of the family unit. Because in Aristotle's conception, the individual does not count politically. The basic unit of society is this extended household unit. not even the blood relations of a family, but the extensions of that, including the slaves,

like the household of Abraham, which included slaves, or the household of King Solomon, which included slaves, and concubines, for that matter. It's all organized around property, the basic natural elements that human beings need to survive. the plants that we consume, that we farm, the animals whose products we consume, whose flesh we slaughter and eat, the organization Fitzhue is pointing to is the very one that Aristotle is emphasizing through his whole politics. That is responsible patriarchy. So Fitzhue continues. and we will wrap up our observations here shortly.

But there are a couple points I want to get to before we're done. Fitzhue writes, returning from the north, we procured in New York a copy of Aristotle's politics and economics. To our surprise, we found that our theory of the origin of society was identical with his, and that we had employed not only the same illustrations, but the very same words.

We saw it once that the true vindication of slavery must be founded on his theory of man's social nature, as opposed to Locke's theory of the social contract, on which latter free society rests for support. Tis true we had broached this doctrine, but with the world at large our authority was merely, repulsive, whilst the same doctrine coming from Aristotle had, besides his name, 2,000 years of human approval and a concurrence in its favor, for without that concurrence and approval, his book would have long since perished.

He says, in addition to all of this, we think we have discovered that Moses has anticipated the socialists, and that in prohibiting usury of money and of vittles and of all things, that are lent on usury, and in denouncing increase, he was far wiser than Aristotle, and saw that other capital or property did not breed any more than money, and that its profits were unjust exactions levied on the laboring man. The socialists proclaim this is a discovery of their own. We think Moses discovered and proclaimed it more than 3,000 years ago, and that it is the only true theory of capital and labor, the only adequate theoretical defense of slavery.

For it proves that the profits which capital exacts from labor makes free laborers slaves without the rights, privileges, or advantages, of domestic slaves, and capitalists, their masters, with all the advantages, and none of the burdens and obligations of the ordinary owners of slaves. Totally fascinating thesis. And one ironically subtracted an awful lot of attention from modern Marxist scholars who see a certain correspondence between Fitzhue and their ideas. Of course, they're completely horrified in his conclusions, So they must rebut him, but it's a very interesting contrast and a fascinating argument.

That is, I mean, I've got plenty more, but we've gotten to the hour, and I might as well save it for next time. That'll be my syllabus for this evening. Much appreciate the time. Of course, of course, that was great. I am going to encourage everybody to go over to Tallman Books and order the books that Mr. Bagby's been talking about. Remind us again, you mentioned two new ones and tell people where they can, the easiest way to get them. Yes, you can find my most recent books on my Twitter feed. I've posted links for my last several books there.

That's at Tallman Books on Twitter. You can also find most of my books available on my website. That's www.tallmanbooks.com. Awesome. Awesome. And I'm sure I'm speaking for everyone who's listening to this and loving this series. I really appreciate what you did.

and can't thank you enough, but thank you. Thank you. Pleasure to be with you.