Oakwood Cemetery

George Fitzhugh was born in Virginia on November 4, 1806, which is where he resided for most of his life. He was married in 1829 to Mary Metcalf Brockenbrough and together they had two children, R. H. Fitzhugh and Mariella Foster. He later moved to Huntsville to live near his daughter after the death of his wife in 1877. He was a writer, a practitioner of law, a pioneering sociologist, the first individual to use the word “sociology” in the title of a book, and a leading slavery apologist. In both of his books, Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857), he examined the lives of African American slaves versus those of free white laborers. He argued that black slaves were freer than Northern white laborers, with more rights, stating at one point in Cannibals All! that the Northern white laborer “is more of a slave than the negro, because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave, and has no holiday, because the cares of life with him begin when its labor ends. He has no liberty, and not a single right”. Fitzhugh was not a racist. In fact, in his book Sociology for the South, he advocated that whites as well as African American would benefit from being slaves, deeming that this slavery was “right and necessary”. He and others who shared his beliefs felt that being a slave was an inalienable right and that to deny any person that right was detrimental to the system, and they viewed slaves as children who would benefit best by being taken care of their masters. Fitzhugh and his counterparts concluded that “about nineteen out of every twenty individuals [had] ‘a natural and inalienable right’ to be taken care of and protected…a natural and inalienable right to be slaves”. Unlike others who were pro-slavery, Fitzhugh readily corresponded with those who were abolitionists and also read many abolitionist lectures, speeches, essays, and books. He died on July 30, 1881 at the age of 74 in Huntsville.