History of Slavery Part 4

When one of his slaves ran away, [Andrew] Jackson purchased an ad in a local Tennessee paper offering a $50 reward for his capture “and ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes a person will give to the amount of three hundred.” Three hundred lashes may be considered something close to a death sentence! It is this barbarism in Jackson—unthinkable for [Thomas] Jefferson—that defines his era and, weirdly enough, coexists with Democratic rhapsodies about how slavery is wonderful not only for masters but also for slaves.

No system of tyranny can be sustained, however, entirely through force. The Democratic master class recognized that it needed carrots as well as sticks, and beyond that, it needed a whole social system that would bind the slaves physically and emotionally to the plantation. So the master class created a slave system based on total dependency. The slaves, as [Frederick Law] Olmsted [travel journal writer] puts it, were encouraged to develop “a habit of perfect dependence,” so that even without the whip they could see no way out.

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Here, then, is [George] Fitzhugh [pro-slavery advocate] in a nutshell. He begins by noting that in every labor system there are basically two kinds of labor: free labor and slave labor. Fitzhugh concedes that at the first glance, free labor seems preferable to slave labor because the farm or factory laborer can leave his employer and go work for someone else or not work at all. By contrast, slaves cannot quit, cannot work for themselves and cannot refuse to work.

But Fitzhugh is unimpressed by this distinction, which he regards as meaningless in practice. He goes on to make an outrageous point. Free labor is actually enslaved labor, and slave labor is actually free. Free labor, Fitzhugh says, is dog-eat-dog. “The maxim, every man for himself,” he writes, “embraces the whole moral code of a free society.” The harsh competition of capitalism, Fitzhugh says, benefits the few and the strong while crushing the many and the weak. As a consequence of freedom, “the rich are continually growing richer and the poor poorer.”

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The beauty of slavery, according to Fitzhugh, is that it establishes an organic relationship between master and slave, not a relationship of contract but something more like a family. To those who say that slaves receive no compensation, Fitzhugh thunders that the considerable cost of maintaining a slave is the compensation. Moreover, the slave is provided for from cradle to grave. He is compensated, and his family is compensated, with food, shelter and care even when he is injured or sick or too old to work.

In a manner that echoes [Karl] Marx’s famous doctrine, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” Fitzhugh contends that a farm or plantation is a sort of commune “in which the master furnishes the capital and skill, and the slaves the labor, and divide the profits, not according to each one’s in-put, but according to each one’s wants and necessities.”

The problem with the socialist theory coming into vogue in Europe and the northeastern states, Fitzhugh writes, is that it is “an ever receding and illusory Utopia.” Socialists, he says, are attempting the impossible task of changing human nature. Slavery, he declares, is an actually existing form of socialism that happens to be its only workable form because it is based on human nature as it is. Slavery achieves “the ends all Communists and Socialists desire.”

Source: Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party (2018) by Dinesh D'Souza.