QUORA: ‘Were the Confederate States fascist?’
I posted this answer:
Well, they were socialist, but more akin to communism than fascism (if by fascism you mean the system defined by Benito Mussolini and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile in 1932).
As the Abolitionist movement gained strength in the decades leading up to the Civil War, Southern intellectuals mounted a spirited moral and economic defense of slavery. They defended plantation slavery on grounds that anticipated Karl Marx. Leading Antebellum intellectual George Fitzhugh, for example, published a widely read book titled Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854). In this book, Fitzhugh defended plantation slavery as “the beau ideal of communism,” while condemning the free labor of the North as victims of greedy capitalists. The slaves, he argued, were well taken care of from cradle to grave, and always had employment when they could work. When they couldn’t work, Fitzhugh explained, they were well supported by their masters. “The children and the aged and infirm, work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are opposed neither by care nor labor.”
The free labor of the North, Fitzhugh held, were not really free because they were at the mercy of exploitative capitalists, to whom they had to sell their labor for money, and could be fired at will, leaving they and their families on their own with no support. James Henry Hammond, South Carolina governor, argued that black slaves were better off than Northern free laborers, whom he argued were essentially wage slaves. This is essentially the argument that Marx would advance in support of his brand of Communism.
As historian C. Bradley Thompson has observed, Southern intellectuals, drawing on German philosophy, were the first in America to reject the Declaration of Independence and free market capitalism. They were essentially Marxists before Marx.*
Of course, most whites and some blacks were relatively free, so the Confederate states defy broad labels like socialist, Communist, or Fascist. If one were to label the South, Slavocracy would best “fit the bill.”
* [Thompson is the author of America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It]
Related Reading:
Brad Thompson on “the unidentified, unacknowledged union of proslavery and progressive thought.”
Sociology for the South: Or the Failure of Free Society by George Fitzhugh
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