Final answer:
George Fitzhugh defended slavery as a paternalistic institution, claiming that Africans were childlike and needed to be governed as such.
Step-by-step explanation:
The individual who defended slavery as a paternalistic institution that protected Africans, who he said were children needing to be 'governed as a child,' was George Fitzhugh. He utilized this defense in his book Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (1854). Fitzhugh argued that enslaved people, due to their supposed inherent racial inferiority and incapacity to manage their own lives, were better off in slavery, where they were provided with care and guidance from cradle to grave by their enslavers. This justification for slavery was a gross misrepresentation of its reality - a brutal, dehumanizing institution that was in truth a horrendous crime against humanity.
Despite the attempt to justify slavery through paternalism, the enslaved were neither passive nor completely controlled, and they found ways to resist and subvert the system imposed on them. They actively engaged in acts of defiance, from subtle forms of resistance such as feigned ignorance, which allowed them to sabotage work effectively, to more overt acts like escape and rebellion.