Henry Hughes

Background

Henry Hughes was born on April 17, 1829 in Port Gibson, Mississippi

Education

After a precocious childhood he went to Oakland College in his own state and graduated in 1847. While still in college he began writing his Treatise on Sociology, an examination and defense of slavery in the South, which, after some delay and a revision, appeared in 1854.

Career

Hughes practised law half-heartedly at Port Gibson, spending most of his time in social studies. Foreseeing the outbreak of the Civil War, he had for some years been reading on military tactics, and drilling as a private in the Port Gibson Riflemen. In this organization he entered the war. Within a month he was elected captain of the Claiborne Guards and later colonel of the 12th Mississippi Regiment, of which the Guards formed a company. After heavy campaigning in Virginia, during which he constructed fortifications at Bull Run, he returned to Mississippi with authority from the war department to raise a regiment of partisan rangers for the defense of Claiborne and adjoining counties on the Mississippi River. He was soon brought to his bed with inflammatory rheumatism, contracted during his hardships in Virginia, and died shortly afterward at Port Gibson.

Achievements

• He developed the economic notion of 'warrantism' and supported the re-establishment of the African slave trade. His ideas influenced counter-Reconstruction efforts in the South after the Civil War. Indeed, his Treatise on Sociology was used as a textbook in the American South until the 1890s.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Pract...)

Politics

His chief work was as an apologist for Southern slavery. He read to the Southern Commercial Convention at Vicksburg, 1859, "A Report on the African Apprentice System" which advocated reopening the African slave trade and further expounded his characteristic doctrine that slavery had progressed in the South into a status which he called "warranteeism. " He held that "warranteeism" afforded all the benefits of a stable society with co"rdination of management and labor, but with none of the injustices of chattel slavery which had been the first condition of the negroes in America. Masters of slaves, he contended, were magistrates of the State in ordering work and warranting security. What the master owned was not the body of the "warrantee, " but a "labor obligation" capitalized. "Warranteeism" he believed was not repugnant to the Constitution, though the slavery out of which it evolved he believed was.

In 1857, as senator, Hughes had introduced a bill in the Mississippi legislature to charter the African Immigration Company of which he was a promoter, but this and similar bills in other Southern legislatures failed of passage. He wanted to bring in Africans under fifteen-year indentures; at the conclusion of this period the negroes would continue as "warrantees, " with more regulation by the State of working conditions. His writings were thin sophistry, encumbered with pseudoscientific terminology, and he produced no evidence to justify his contention that slavery had changed essentially as a social institution since its introduction into America.

References

• Selected Writings of Henry Hughes: Antebellum Southerner, Slavocrat, Sociologist