Henry Hughes (sociologist)
Henry Hughes | |
---|---|
Born |
Port Gibson, Mississippi | April 17, 1829
Died |
October 3, 1862 33) Port Gibson, Mississippi | (aged
Cause of death | rheumatism |
Education | Oakland College |
Occupation | Lawyer, sociologist, politician |
Title | Colonel |
Parent(s) |
William Hughes Mary (Bertron) Hughes |
Henry Hughes (1829–1862) was an American lawyer, sociologist, state senator and Confederate Colonel from Mississippi. He developed the economic notion of 'warrantism' and supported the re-establishment of the African slave trade.
Biography
Early life
Henry Hughes was born on April 17, 1829 in Port Gibson, Mississippi.[1][2][3][4][5] His father was William Hughes and his mother, Mary Bertron Hughes.[4] His parents were originally from Kentucky.[2]
He graduated from Oakland College in 1847.[3][4][5] He studied the Law in Port Gibson with John B. Thrasher and in New Orleans, Louisiana with Thomas Jefferson Durant.[3] He continued his studies in Paris, France, where he took classes in Architecture, Social Science, Anatomy, Chemistry, and Moral Philosophy.[3] He also became a follower of the sociologist Auguste Comte.[3][6] He was also influenced by Francis Bacon, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Fourier, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill.[7]
Career
Returning to Port Gibson, Mississippi, he started practising the law.[3]
He was one of the first Americans to use the term 'sociology' in a book title with his Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical, the other being George Fitzhugh with Sociology for the South.[1][2][8] He argued that the economic system of the South was superior to that of the North.[1]
He developed the economic notion of 'warrantism,' with the owner being the 'warrantor' and the worker being the 'warrantee.'[1] The notion implied a strong, central government, whereby all were required to work, whether they were warrantors or warrantees.[5] The state would take precedence over individuals, and duty over personal freedom.[5] Indeed, he argued that the ownership of other human beings was absurd, saying 'Men cannot be owned.'[7] Both masters and slaves were 'servants of the social order,' as critic Jeffrey P. Sklansky explains.[7] Furthermore, he argued that warrantees could be threatened with punishment to make sure they would work; warrantors would be self-motivated to work to maintain their position.[5] He rejected Edmund Burke's ideas about laissez faire capitalism.[5]
He was elected a Fellow of the New Orleans Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1853.[1] He then served in the Mississippi State Senate in 1857.[3][4] During his term, he supported the re-establishment of the African slave trade with the South.[4][9]
He published articles in Mississippi newspapers about the slave trade in his 1857-1858 series entitled 'Reopening the Slave Trade: A Series by St Henry.'.[5][10] He also published articles about giving more status to African slaves, as 'dutiful slaves.'[5] Additionally, he suggested repatriating blacks slaves and replacing them with imported new African 'warrantees,' who would learn the duty of work from their birth to serve the state as opposed to slavery.[11]
According to literary critic Michael Wainwright, he believed in the mythology of the Southern aristocracy as descendants of Anglo-Saxons with 'Germanic heredity' and 'North and Celtic inheritance.'[10] He believed segregation between blacks and whites was mandatory to preserve this heritage, arguing that social interaction would inevitably lead to sexual intercourse.[10] Moreover, he wrote that Native Americans would have to be exterminated due to their 'wild' ways.[5]
During the American Civil War of 1861-1865, he served as Colonel in the Mississippi Twelfth Regiment and the Army of Northern Virginia of the Confederate States Army.[3][4]
Death
He died of rheumatism on October 3, 1862 at his home in Port Gibson, Mississippi.[3][5][7]
Legacy
His ideas influenced counter-Reconstruction efforts in the South after the Civil War.[10] Indeed, his Treatise on Sociology was used as a textbook in the American South until the 1890s.[7]
According to scholars Stanford M. Lyman and Arthur J. Vidich, his ideas were also echoed by Joseph Le Conte in California, shortly after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.[11] Indeed, Le Conte used Hughes's ideas to implement the management of former Mexican-owned farms called 'latifudias,' now the largest farms in California.[11] In keeping with Hughes's ideas, Californian farm owners hired non-Anglo Saxon workers to work on their farms, such as Chinese, Japanese, East Indian, Filippino and Mexican immigrants, in order to find the most productive and most docile workers.[11] This echoed Hughes's notion of the 'dutiful slaves,' or 'warrantee.'[11]
Later, Hughes's ideas influenced President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Keysenian public policy, by demanding that the state ensured all citizens would be working.[11]
Hughes's ideas have also been compared to those of Lawrence Mead in terms of forcing the poor, blacks, single mothers and the unemployed youth to work.[11]
Bibliography
- Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Gramco and Co., 1854).
- State Liberties: Or, the Right to African Contract Labor. (Port Gibson: Office of the Southern Reveille, 1858).
- Selected Writings of Henry Hughes: Antebellum Southerner, Slavocrat, Sociologist, edited by Stanford M. Lyman (Jackson, Mississippi, 1985).[5]
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 James Oscar Farmer, Metaphysical Confederacy, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1999, pp. 103-104
- 1 2 3 Luther Lee Bernard, 'Henry Hughes, First American Sociologist', Social Forces, Vol. 15, No. 2 (December, 1936), pp. 154-174
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Drew Gilpin Faust, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830—1860, Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1981
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 James B. Lloyd, Lives of Mississippi Authors, 1817-1967, Oxford, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, p. 243
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 John R. Shook, Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2012, p. 564
- ↑ Stanford M. Lyman, Militarism, Imperialism, and Racial Accommodation, University of Arkansas Press, p.86
- 1 2 3 4 5 Jeffrey P. Sklansky, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920, Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2002, pp. 95-103
- ↑ Eric Dunning, Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilisation, Routledge, 2013 , p. 195
- ↑ Ronald Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade, New York, 1971, pp. 84-101
- 1 2 3 4 Michael Wainwright, Darwin and Faulkner's Novels: Evolution and Southern Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 83-84
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Stanford M. Lyman (ed.), Arthur J. Vidich (ed.), Selected Works of Herbert Blumer: A Public Philosophy for Mass Society, Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2000, pp. 14-19
Further reading
- Douglas Ambrose. Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South. (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1996).
- H. G. Duncan and W. L. Duncan. 'Henry Hughes, Sociologist of the Old South'. Sociology and Social Research, 21 (1937):244-258.
- William D. Moore.The Life and Works of Col. Henry Hughes. (Mobile, Alabama, 1863).