Way back in 1998, I was writing a thesis on a book by an obscure Southern apologist for slavery named Edmund Fitzhugh. His tract was published under the title of Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters.

I was researching why it was that Fitzhugh’s particular apologetics not only did not gain traction within supporters of slavery, but inspired intense criticism and were dismissed as quickly as they had appeared.

What did I see but this little gobbet from The Atlantic talking about that very book.

Ta-Nehisi Coates commented on what I (and indeed, anyone else who ever read the book) saw, and that was weird strain of proto-communism inherent in the book.

Oddly enough, for a slavery apologia, it rejected the most overtly racist aspects of other apologias (though any argument in favor of a system that kept Southern blacks in bondage is inevitably going to be racist). He did not see Africans as inferior or particularly suited for slavery (as many apologias argued). He argued for slavery in the abstract and even explicitly said that slavery would have been just as “good” had a different group been targeted for slavery. Which also goes to the core of his curious argument (and where the strain of proto-communism came from) – which was an economic argument (most apologists used, odd as it may seem today, moral and religious arguments, not economic ones).