Fitzhugh, George, 1806–81, American author and editor, b. Prince William co., Va. Although he had little formal education he was admitted to the bar, but he devoted little time to the practice of law. His voluminous writing on slavery and the race question soon gained him recognition in both the North and the South as a leading proponent of the extreme proslavery position. As a contributing editor of the Richmond Examiner in 1854, he encouraged Southerners to take the offensive against Northern abolitionists, and his article were published in book form as Sociology for the South (1854). He wrote Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters (1856), a detailed attack on the exploitation of labor in nonslaveholding societies, and with George R. Gleddon, Types of Mankind (1856), a racist interpretation of history espousing permanent black inferiority.
See biography by H. Wish (1943).
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