"THE DON QUIXOTE OF SLAVEDOM—ONLY STILL MORE DEMENTED": VERY SCARCE FIRST EDITION OF FITZHUGH'S CANNIBALS ALL!, 1857

FITZHUGH, George. Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters. Richmond, VA.: A. Morris, 1857. Octavo, original blindstamped brown cloth. $2000.

First edition of Fitzhugh's incendiary proslavery work, arguing Northern laborers are the true slaves and viewing slavery as "the most sensible arrangement" for most of humanity, the notorious work that "put the ax to the tree of American liberty," published in Richmond shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War.

A self-educated white Southerner, Fitzhugh was "one of the most vociferous, and radical of the proslavery southern polemicists in the U.S" (Rodriguez, Slavery in the U.S. I:285). Relying on the "myth of the Southern plantation as a large, compassionately run multiracial family" (Abrahamson, Men of Secession, 18), Fitzhugh nevertheless differed from other proslavery voices in arguing that most of humanity, black and white, is incapable of living in freedom. In Cannibals All!, he calls the South's slaves the "freest people in the world," and declares the North's "miscalled free laborers" are the true slaves. Fitzhugh viewed slavery as "the most sensible arrangement for the average human being. [It] was the moral duty of the South to say so, and to 'vindicate that institution in the abstract'" (Stanley Elkins in Commentary). "Taking that step demanded that Fitzhugh put the ax to the tree of American liberty" (Abrahamson, 19). Rejecting Locke and the Founding Fathers, Fitzhugh asserts that all governments are "governments of force, not of consent."

William Lloyd Garrison called Fitzhugh "the Don Quixote of Slavedom—only still more demented" (Boston Liberator), and "quoted long passages from the book as horrible examples of the extremes to which 'this cool audacious defender of the soul-crushing, blood-reeking system of slavery' could go" (C. Vann Woodward, 1988 Introduction, xxix). To many scholars, however, Cannibals All! "was probably the most imaginative book to emerge from all the polemics that formed the intellectual background of our Civil War… At the core of Fitzhugh's attack on free society was the assertion that its basic economic arrangement, capitalism, was merely a form of white slavery which enabled the capitalist to extract value from the laborer, the ultimate source of all value" (Elkins). Fitzhugh remains, strangely, "the most logical reactionary in the South… [with] a touch of the Hobbesian lucidity of mind" (Harz,Liberal Tradition, 176). With two leaves of publisher's advertisements at rear. "Influenced profoundly southern belief in Negro inferiority" (Howes F164). Howes "aa": indicating "quite scarce, obtainable only with some difficulty." Sabin 24617. Work, 465. See Blockson 9283. Small early owner bookplate.

Text generally fresh with only light scattered foxing, light expert cloth restoration to spine ends and joints.