This study will analyze George Fitzhugh's Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters. The study will consider the ways the author supports his arguments in favor of slavery, the evidence he uses and how he uses it, and to what extent the evidence is unconvincing.
As the book's editor points out, Fitzhugh himself admits that he is not trying to convince the reader of the truth of his thesis by using objective arguments based on well-documented and clearly presented evidence. To the contrary, Fitzhugh argues that the enemy---those who would outlaw slavery---are split into many camps and therefore "we are compelled to vary our mode of attack from regular cannonade to bushfighting, to suit the occasion" (xvi).
In other words, the issue of slavery is so essential to the author and to the South which he represents that what Fitzhugh is engaged in is not reasonable argument between reasonable men, but war to the end between sworn enemies. This deceptive and manipulative attitude of the part of the author does not engender a work based on evidence which will convince an intelligent reader who analyzes closely what he reads. As the editor of this book goes on to say, Fitzhugh is not above
resorting to a variety of tricks to confuse his opponents. He deliberately adopted a style . . . "in which facts, and argument, and rhetoric, and wit, and sarcasm, succeed each other with rapid iteration." . . . He wrote: "I see great evils in slavery, but in a controversial work I ought not to admit them" (xvii).
Fitzhugh indicts himself, his ethics, his argument, and his evidence and use of it in such statements. He is not a man using reason and solid evidence to persuade his reader, but is rather an amoral propagandist seeking to bewilder the reader into apathy or surrender to a viewpoint which supports a system that the author himself admits has "great evils."
Perhaps the author's most employed and most preposterous Piece of "evidence"...