George Fitzhugh was born on November 9, 1806, in Prince William County, Virginia, to physician George Fitzhugh and Lucy Stuart Fitzhugh. Around 1812, the family relocated to a plantation in King George County. Fitzhugh’s formal education was limited, as he attended an irregularly convened local school; however, he was an avid reader, mastering Latin and pursuing self-education. He studied law, becoming an attorney on October 4, 1827, and married Mary Metcalf Brockenbrough on December 21, 1829. They settled in Port Royal, Caroline County, where Fitzhugh practiced law with John T. Thornton by 1842. The couple had nine children—six daughters and three sons—though one daughter and one son died in 1844, at the ages of ten and two.
Fitzhugh became the most prominent antebellum Virginian defending slavery, intensifying sectional conflicts. His provocative writings promoted a paternalistic view of slaveholder society, influencing twentieth-century historical analyses of American slavery. In Tidewater Virginia, rapid social changes saw enslavers selling surplus slaves at a rate exceeding 20 percent per decade, with many white Virginians emigrating. By mid-century, Caroline County had an African American majority, predominantly enslaved, with a growing free Black population. Census records show Fitzhugh owned five enslaved people in 1830, eight in 1840, and twenty-seven in 1850.
Rather than critically examining these societal shifts, Fitzhugh idealized the slaveholding system. In his 1850 pamphlet “Slavery Justified: By a Southerner,” he attacked the concept of a free society, arguing that Southern slavery was a benevolent, domestic institution, less oppressive than the industrial free societies of Britain, Europe, or the American North. In a 1854 addendum, he claimed that free competition in capitalist systems was far harsher than slavery. In his 1851 pamphlet What Shall Be Done With the Free Negroes, published via the Fredericksburg Recorder, he proposed enslaving free African Americans, addressing local white fears of economic competition.
Fitzhugh thrived on controversy, drawing inspiration from John Taylor of Caroline’s economic perspectives and Thomas Carlyle’s conservative thought, adopting Carlyle’s vivid writing style. He subscribed to British political economy journals and corresponded with abolitionists like Gerrit Smith and William Lloyd Garrison, even reading Garrison’s The Liberator. Fitzhugh’s major works, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters (1857), solidified his notoriety. In Sociology, he criticized free trade and labor for fostering social conflict, rejecting Adam Smith’s free market principles and John Locke’s social contract, arguing that slavery aligned the interests of enslavers and the enslaved. In Cannibals All!, he claimed capitalism enslaved workers to capitalists and defended slavery as biblically grounded.
Fitzhugh’s defense of slavery extended beyond race, noting that Southern slavery included people of mixed European, Native American, and African descent. However, he expressed racist views, describing Black people as lacking “energy or enterprise” and their freedom as detrimental to society. His 1855 debate with abolitionist Wendell Phillips in New Haven marked his first trip to the North, reinforcing his convictions. Between 1855 and 1867, he published over ninety articles in De Bow’s Review and Southern Literary Messenger, covering topics from culture to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Postwar, he wrote for Lippincott’s Magazine and Southern Magazine.
Despite his extremism, Fitzhugh privately questioned slavery’s morality, viewing it as a necessary evil in correspondence with George Frederick Holmes, who praised Sociology for the South. Neglecting his law practice for writing led to financial strain; by 1860, the Fitzhughs owned only eight enslaved people, down from twenty-seven in 1850, with his wife listed as their owner. In 1857, Fitzhugh briefly worked in the attorney general’s office in Washington, D.C., and in 1860, he lectured on Southern self-sufficiency.
During the Civil War, Fitzhugh supported secession, viewing it as a rejection of Enlightenment ideals. He worked as a clerk in the Confederate Treasury Department and later as an associate judge for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Richmond. His postwar writings opposed Reconstruction, denigrated African Americans, and reversed his earlier anti-capitalist stance, praising property monopolies as essential to civilization. Fitzhugh stopped publishing in 1872. After his wife died in 1877, he lived with his son in Frankfort, Kentucky, and later with his daughter in Huntsville, Texas, where he died, nearly blind, on July 30, 1881, and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery.