George Fitzhugh And The Political And Social Outbreak Of The Civil War

The Civil War was one of the most famous and pivotal time periods in American history. It was a time when a country, created to stand together against England, turned against each other. On the one hand, there was the North, which became home to the Federal officers. Down below was the South, the Confederates. It was the ideology of slavery, particularly the arguments of George FitzHugh and the Fugitive Slave Act which made the Civil War inevitable and necessary. Both of these elements worked together to fuel the political and social controversy to split the country into two. This paper will discuss how the psychological workings of FitzHugh and the political and social turmoil of the Fugitive Slave Act worked together to make the Civil War

In the economic sphere, the South depended on slavery to run their economy and their plantations. The North was focused on industrialization where business and machinery could operate without the need for manual labor. The justification of the South was not only economical, it was psychological as well. George FitzHugh is a key figure for the South and the ideology they had towards it. FitzHugh’s argument was that to go against slavery, is to go against religion and the Bible, the “Holy Writ”, which is the law of the land which allows human beings to be slaves to one another. The rarity of the practice results in the assumption and the “general truth” that slave and master must be of a different race. Slaves, particularly black people, are of an inferior race. They are uncivilized, and savage, and white civilized men have a duty to the Bible and to society to civilize these people by making them affectionate and faithful

The Fugitive Slave Act was a law enacted to allow the recapturing of all fugitive slaves. Under this Act, no free slave was safe. Slaves who had risked their lives were under threat of being caught by slave hunters. The Act also contained ludicrous provisions. First, it denied any alleged fugitive any right to jury trial. Secondly, the Northerners believed that the other provisions inevitably turned people into full blown man hunters. The Fugitive Slave Act became something greater than just ensuring slaves won’t run away again; it became a way to recover slaves who ran away in the past. Under the Act, many cases arose of black slaves who lived in free-state communities being torn away from their families with no chance of a fair trial. These former slaves were left with “inadequate safeguards”, which exposed them to such dangers as kidnapping. All of these cases of injustice fueled the cause of the Abolitionists in the North. They used the Act as propaganda value and focused all of their energy towards using it against the South. The Abolitionists from the North had New England Puritan ideologies, had a long tradition of preserving the good against the evil. The people upholding and supporting the Fugitive Slave Act were regarded to as religiously “evil” and “wicked”. So, when southerners sent to get their fugitive slaves back from the North, it caused trouble. “Dramatic episodes” resulted in fugitive slaves