Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper and The Impending Crisis of the South

By David Brown
Illustrated, photographs, notes, bibliography, index, 316 pp., 2006. Louisiana State University Press, P.O. Box 25053, Baton Rouge, LA 31206, $50 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Maj. Charles R. Bowery Jr.
Maj. Charles R. Bowery Jr. is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. After serving in command and staff positions as an AH-64 Apache pilot from 1992-1999, he taught military history at the U.S. Military Academy and attended graduate school at North Carolina State. Major Bowery Jr., is a U. S. Army Aviator stationed in Iraq with the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade.

Review:
One of the persistent myths of the antebellum South holds that white Southerners uniformly either supported or tolerated slavery, whether or not they were wealthy enough to own slaves themselves. The life and writings of Hinton Rowan Helper put the lie to that myth, as detailed by David Brown, a lecturer in American history at the University of Sheffield, England.

This reviewer had the pleasure of hearing Brown lecture on this subject six years ago at North Carolina State University; this excellent book is clearly the culmination of a great deal of work over the intervening years. As Brown points out in his first chapter, "there were many 'Souths'" before the outbreak of war. Hinton Rowan Helper was a product of one particular South, the North Carolina Piedmont, an area of small farms, small business concerns and very little slavery.

Born in December 1829, Hinton Helper was the youngest of seven children, and had a comfortable and prosperous childhood. He had little formal education, but by all accounts was an intelligent and inquisitive person. Helper's background explains his integration into antebellum white society; but, contrary to many traditional accounts of his life, Brown disputes theories that poverty drove Helper to despise wealthy landowners. Rather, he became an accepted member of society and acknowledged slavery as "a natural, but somewhat peripheral, part of his world."

In January 1851, Helper began a three-year stint in California, during which time he traveled widely in the state and recorded his experiences in his first book, The Land of Gold, published in 1855.

His experiences in the newest state laid much of the groundwork for The Impending Crisis of the South by giving Helper a new perspective on his home state, a very different place from the vibrant, dangerous, and polyglot world of 19th-century California. This period allowed Helper to reflect and comment on the world around him, broadening him intellectually in a way that set the stage for his masterwork.

After returning to North Carolina in 1854, Helper went to work on The Impending Crisis, concurrently forging a variety of relationships with the Republican Party and the Northern abolitionist leadership.

Brown shows through his research that the book was motivated largely by Helper's belief that slavery was an institution that prevented the South from modernizing, but also by perceived slights from politicians and publishers, many of whom saw the incendiary nature of the manuscript and refused to support it. In spite of these obstacles, the book went to press in 1857.

As published, The Impending Crisis of the South was Helper's statement of a two-part thesis. First, the institution of slavery kept the South in a pre-modern state, unable to modernize, and specifically to industrialize. Secondly, slavery served to keep nonslaveholding whites in a more or less servile status, unable to rise to the social and economic stature of slaveholders.

Helper was an abolitionist, but one who wrote from a Southern perspective. He aimed to create a bloc of nonslaveholding Southern whites who could act through the political process to end slavery. Helper substantiated his arguments with extensive data from the Census of 1850.

At the time of the book's publication, this argument was understandably perceived as dangerous to established Southern social structures.

Another key point of Brown's argument is that the virulent racism of Helper's post-Civil War years was not present in The Impending Crisis or in his other writings in the 1850s.

Brown also does a good job of demonstrating the overly simplistic aspects of Helper's thesis, most notably the stark division of the white Southern population into two classes: slaveholders and nonslaveholders. The reality was a great deal more complex, with constant movement between classes and groups.

After the release of The Impending Crisis in June 1857, Helper spent the next three years defending his work. Brown demonstrates that the book encouraged longstanding animosities between North and South, and contributed directly to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. It was also important to the 1859-60 contest for Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Helper was a "best-selling" author of his time, selling 13,000 copies in the last six months of 1857 alone. A coalition of Republican politicians and abolitionists later released a condensed version of the book to a wider audience. Brown's research in archival sources substantiates his claim that The Impending Crisis had a real and decisive impact on the secession debates in several future Confederate states.

After the outbreak of war in 1861, Lincoln offered Helper the position of U.S. Consul to Buenos Aires, Argentina, a post he held until 1866. While there he married and followed the war with interest and campaigned for a higher salary.

In terms of the development of Helper's theories on race and society, this period reinforced ideas that had taken root years before in California - a theory of America's manifest destiny as a white nation. This belief took Helper's career in a declining direction for the rest of his life.

In his later years, Hinton Helper became obsessed not only with ridding America of blacks, but with their extirpation from human society as a whole. Three subsequent books, released in 1867-1871 with such titles as The Negroes in Negroland, made Helper a marginalized, extreme voice in the ongoing national debates over Reconstruction and the end of slavery.

Helper's last foray into public life concerned his endorsement of an abortive "Three Americas Railway" running through Canada, the U.S. and South America. Bitter from a lifetime of disappointments and deep in debt, he committed suicide on March 9, 1909.

Southern Outcast is a fascinating, well-written book. Brown demonstrates the many and varied roots of racism in America, and also demonstrates the power that racist ideas held in American society after the Civil War. This power goes a long way toward explaining the beginnings of this nation's difficult (and unfinished) road toward racial equality.

It offers an illuminating perspective on the debate over slavery and the coming of the Civil War, and will be of special interest to readers from the North Carolina Piedmont.

While very expensive at $50 retail, the book meets the high standards of previous LSU Press Civil War and Southern history offerings and will make an excellent addition to library collections on the American South.