Before the Civil War, George Fitzhugh was one of the foremost apologists for southern slavery. Fitzhugh believed deeply that slavery was a benign social institution, which produced both a harmonious social order and served as a “civilizing” influence on the enslaved. Confederate defeat and universal emancipation destroyed the institution of slavery, which he saw as so important to the maintenance of southern life. Still, he held some hope for the post-war world. Steeped deeply in the paternalistic ethos of the pre-war South, Fithugh could not imagine a world where the freedpeople were economic, political, and social equals of whites. Instead, he argued for legal restraints on the lives of freedpeople, imagining them as an inferior, semi-servile caste with limited legal rights. Most important, he believed, was the need to provide legal mechanisms in keep freedpeople engaged in manual labor. His argument served as a potent ideological justification of the black codes passed by southern state legislatures in 1865.

We of the South would not find much difficulty in managing the negroes, at least tolerably well, if left to ourselves, for we would be guided by the lights of experience and the teachings of history, sacred and profane. . . . We should be satisfied to compel them to engage in coarse, common manual labor, and to punish them for dereliction of duty or nonfulfillment of their contracts with sufficient severity, to make the great majority of them useful, productive laborers.

We would take care of, in the most humane and ample manner, those, unable to provide for and take care of themselves; but they should be no charge or burden on the whites. By a tax on the labor of the strong and healthy negroes we would raise a sufficient fund to provide comfortable subsistence for the weak, infirm and aged negroes. We should treat them as mere grown-up children, entitled like children, or apprentices, to the protection of guardians or masters, and bound to obey those put above them, in place of parents, just as children are so bound. . . .

To punish idleness is the first and most incumbent duty of government; and the punishment should be severe enough to prevent or correct the evil. Vagrant laws are hardly needed by the whites, and they sleep upon our statute books. The white race is naturally provident and accumulative, and but few of them thieves. They have many wants, and to supply those wants, generally labor assiduously and continually. Little legal regulation is needed to induce white men to work. 

But a great deal of severe legislation will be required to compel negroes to labor as much as they should do, in order not to become a charge upon the whites. We must have a black code, and not confound white men with negroes, because one in a thousand may be no better than the negroes. Some negroes are sufficiently provident and industrious, to be left like white men, to take care of themselves without danger of their supporting themselves by theft in youth, and becoming a charge on the public in old age. Such persons would suffer nothing from a severe black code that compelled negroes to labor and to fulfil their engagements, under the penalty of punishment. . . .

Immemorial usage, law, custom and divine injunction, nay human nature itself, have subordinated inferior races to superior races. Never did the black man come in contact with the white man, that he did not become his subordinate, if not his slave. We must quite expel nature before we can make the negroes the equals of the whites, or even so elevate them, as to fit them to be governed by a code so mild as that which suffices to govern whites. . . .

It is sheer nonsense to talk of extending special protection to any class of people, without at the same time abridging their liberties. We hope, indeed, we believe, the Freedmen’s Bureau will not perpetrate this nonsense. It does extend complete and most costly protection to the negroes, but this protection will operate most ruinously to North and South, and to the negroes themselves, unless they be compelled to fulfil their duties as laborers. If the Bureau will force them to labor, as the emancipated white slaves of England were forced to labor, it will do much to benefit the North and the South, and more to benefit the negroes themselves; for it is on such terms alone, that they can be saved from a cruel and tedious extermination.

Source: George Fitzhugh, “What’s to Be Done with the Negroes?” DeBow’s Review 1:6 (June 1866), 577-581.

Document 4.8.13