Henry Hughes

Henry Hughes (1829–1862) was an American lawyer, state senator, and Confederate Colonel from Mississippi. He developed the economic notion of warrantism and supported the re-establishment of the African slave trade.

Life and career

Early life Hughes was born on April 17, 1829, in Port Gibson, Mississippi. His father was Captain Benjamin Hughes (1789–1842) and his mother, Nancy Brashear (1797–1875). He was also influenced by Francis Bacon, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Fourier, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill.

Career Returning to Port Gibson, Mississippi, Hughes started practising law. He argued that the economic system of the South was superior to that of the North. The notion implied a strong, central government, whereby all were required to work, whether they were warrantors or warrantees.

Hughes published articles in Mississippi newspapers about the slave trade in his 1857–1858 series entitled 'Reopening the Slave Trade: A Series by St Henry.'. He also published articles about giving more status to African slaves, as "dutiful slaves".

According to literary critic Michael Wainwright, Hughes believed in the mythology of the Southern aristocracy as descendants of Anglo-Saxons with "Germanic heredity" and "North and Celtic inheritance".

During the American Civil War of 1861–1865, Hughes served as Colonel in the Mississippi Twelfth Regiment and the Army of Northern Virginia of the Confederate States Army.

Death Hughes died of rheumatism on October 3, 1862, at his home in Port Gibson, Mississippi.

Legacy Hughes' ideas influenced counter-Reconstruction efforts in the South after the Civil War. His Treatise on Sociology was used as a textbook in the American South until the 1890s.

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. Le Conte used Hughes's ideas to implement the management of former Mexican-owned farms called "latifundias", now the largest farms in California. 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, Filipino and Mexican immigrants, in order to find the most productive and most docile workers. This echoed Hughes's notion of the dutiful slave, or warrantee.

Later, Hughes's ideas influenced President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Keynesian public policy, by demanding that the state ensured all citizens would be working. Hughes's ideas have also been compared to those of Lawrence Mead in terms of requiring the poor to work.

Works 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), reprinted in De Bow's Review, n.s., 1 (o.s. XXV), No. VI (December, 1858). Selected Writings of Henry Hughes: Antebellum Southerner, Slavocrat, Sociologist, edited by Stanford M. Lyman (Jackson, Mississippi, 1985).