He was widely hated, I gather because of the industriousness of his slaves. He was said to have freed the most slaves in the state, and by a wide margin.

I suppose at least some of them just spent their Saturdays loafing about. Would Fitzhugh have to say that the rest should not have been slaves in the first place?

I don’t fully understand how southern slavery worked, but I do know that some slaves earned their own money, and some fraction of those bought their own freedom — and some fraction of those went on to buy their own slaves.

That still leaves the question of whether it’s better to belong to an individual or to a faceless bureaucracy representing society. We seem to have settled on a faceless bureaucracy that either imprisons the improvident and dull, and thus tells them exactly what to do, or gives them money with minimal guidance, because it would be wrong to tell them what to do.

Only the military seems to take on the role of guiding its charges.

True. But people in positions of power are likely to use a fairly broad filter in determining who is “improvident” and “dull.”

To take an example which is far less extreme than slavery: Frederick Winslow Taylor, considered the father of Scientific Management, believed not only in measuring and analyzing work, but also in the absolute separation of “thinking” from “doing.” His prototype worker with “Schmidt,” an immigrant whose job was shoveling sand in a foundry. It was obviously to Taylor that people like Schmidt were so dull that they could not usefully contribute to design of how the task was to be performed — they needed to be told how long the handle of the shovel should be, how much sand a single scoop would take, the precise motions to use in shoveling, etc.

It turns out, though, that the real laborer “Schmidt” used in these experiments built his own house, so he couldn’t have been as dumb and in need of direction as Taylor claimed.

If you personally value your freedom and dignity more than food, clothing, and housing — that is, you (correctly) believe you could earn your own livelihood — then, Fitzhugh would argue, you are not the kind of man who should be enslaved. But the “weakest” among us — the “improvident” and “dull” — do need care and guidance.

This is where Fitzhugh’s point of view is foreign enough to be unpredictable to our modern audience: Make him the slave of one man, instead of the slave of society, and he would be far better off.

“Though the negroes are fed, clothed, and housed, and though the Irish peasant is starved, naked, and roofless, the bare name of freeman — the lordship over his own person, the power to choose and will — are blessings beyond food, raiment, or shelter; possessing which, the want of every comfort of life is yet more tolerable than their fullest enjoyment without them. Ask the thousands of ragged destitutes who yearly land upon these shores to seek the means of existence — ask the friendless, penniless foreign emigrant, if he will give up his present misery, his future uncertainty, his doubtful and difficult struggle for life, at once, for the secure, and as it is called, fortunate dependence of the slave: the indignation with which he would spurn the offer will prove that he possesses one good beyond all others, and that his birthright as a man is more precious to him yet than the mess of pottage for which he is told to exchange it because he is starving.”