the Abolitionists and Socialists as identical, because they are notoriously the same people, employing the same arguments and bent on the same schemes. Abolition is the first step in Socialism: the former proposes to abolish negro slavery, the latter all kinds of slavery - religion, government, marriage, families, property - nay, human nature itself. Yet the former contains the germ of the latter, and very soon ripens into it; Abolition is Socialism in its infancy. At other times he sympathized with socialist critiques of liberal free market economies, but argued that reverting to an older feudal or pre-feudal social model through the expansion of slavery was a more effective means to the end of addressing the destitution caused by capitalism, and that proposals by socialists were untested and went against human nature: We entirely agree with the socialists, that free competition is the bane of modern society. We also agree with them, that it is right and necessary to establish in some modified degree, a community of property. We agree with them in the end they propose to attain, and only differ as to the means. [...] What madness and folly, at this late day, to form society for human beings regardless of human nature. Yet the Socialists are guilty of this folly, and gravely propose to change man's nature to fit him for their new institutions. How much more wise, prudent and philosophical it would be to recur to some old tried forms of society, especially as we shall presently show that such forms of society have existed, and do now exist, as will remove all the evils they complain of, and attain all the ends they propose. After the Civil War however Fitzhugh shifted his position on capitalism and especially the monopolization of land, arguing that rather than being more oppressive to the laborer than slavery or serfdom, as he had formerly argued, the subjugation of the laborer through the monopolization of land had, in his view, a positive civilizing effect similar to that of slavery, stating in Land Monopoly - Savage Nature (1867): Land Monopoly, or the private ownership of lands by the few, civilizes the landless, by making them quasi-slaves- that is, slaves to capital. ‘The land owners, would not produce luxuries, fine houses, fine furniture, fine clothes and fine equipage for themselves; nay, they would live, as savages, on the barest necessaries of life, had