Hinton Rowan Helper

• Hinton Rowan Helper
• Born: December 27, 1829
• Died: March 9, 1909

Antislavery writer and Negrophobe, was born on the banks of a tributary of the South Yadkin River in Rowan County (now Davie County), North Carolina. Helper was the youngest child of Daniel Helper and Sarah (Brown) Helper, who had four other sons and two daughters. The Helpers owned more than 200 acres of farmland and, according to their son, four slaves. Daniel Harper was the son of Jacob Helper, who, according to local legend, was a “Hessian” soldier from the vicinity of Heidelberg who stayed in America after the defeat of Cornwallis. Sarah Helper, who was of a slightly higher social class than her husband, was of English descent; she raised the children after the death of their father the year after Hinton’s birth.

Hinton Helper attended the Mocksville Academy, a school not far from his home, until graduation in 1848 and then moved to the nearby town of Salisbury for two years to work as a bookstore clerk. It was later asserted by his critics that Helper embezzled $300 from his employer, an allegation that it was hoped would impugn his integrity. Horace Greeley, a friend of Helper’s, held, however, that in 1850 Helper ran into his former employer while living for a short time in New York, confessed his crime, and vowed to pay the money back. It was a youthful indiscretion and his employer reportedly said that he “would think the better of him for the revelation.”

Helper spent only a year in New York after leaving Salisbury, and in January of 1851 he traveled by clipper ship to California, where he lived for three years. Impoverished, he then returned to Salisbury and attempted to make good his losses by publishing the letters he had written to friends at home as The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction. In this work he tried to prove that California was a financial drain on the United States, describing it as the “poorest state in the Union ... rich in nothing and poor in everything.”

Shortly after the publication of this book, Helper began his most famous work, The Impending Crisis of the South, a fiery polemic against slavery—that “mother of harlots.” The Impending Crisis argued that the institution of slavery impoverished the nonslaveholding whites of the South—some 70 percent of the population, and retarded the growth of commerce and industry. Published in 1857, the book was used as a campaign document by the Republican party three years later. The Republicans published at least 100,000 copies of an abridged edition, and its circulation rivaled that of William Harvey’s Coin’s Financial School, making it one of the best selling books of nonfiction ever published in the United States.

Charged by his fellow southerners with commiting a “vile treason,” the suddenly notorious Helper had to flee to New York. In some states it was a penal offense to own or circulate a copy of the work, and in Arkansas three men were hanged for owning copies.

In spite of the wide circulation of his book, Helper was destitute again by 1861, but he managed to put enough political pressure on Lincoln to obtain the post of American consul in Buenos Aires. He had already tried lecturing as a means of making a living but had been unable to attract audiences. He left for Argentina in the fall, and in 1863 he married María Luisa Rodriguez, a wealthy Argentinian whom he met there. The union produced no children.

Helper resigned his post in 1866 and returned to the United States, in debt to the government for $6,000. The Grant administration absolved him of this debt, and he went back to Asheville, North Carolina, to spend the next four years writing. He produced three books on the “Negro Question”: Nojoque; The Negro in Negroland, the Negroes in America, and Negroes Generally; and Noonday Exigencies in America. All three works were highly racist, and Helper seems to have sought as his ultimate aim the eradication of the black race. Helper also emerged as an imperialist at this time, advocating the division of the world into twenty-one large nations.

In 1871 Helper became a Washington lobbyist for the claims of South American nations and an advocate of the Three Americas Railway, a scheme for constructing a rail network from the United States to Peru or Chile. His last two books, Oddments of Andean Diplomacy (1879) and The Three Americas Railway (1881), dealt with this concept.

In 1899 Maria Helper went blind and returned to South America, where she died. After her death Helper became totally unbalanced; he began to argue the theory that human ills are attributable to novel reading. In 1909, at the age of seventy-nine, he checked into a rooming house in Washington, D.C., under an assumed name, and committed suicide. He was buried in a plot donated by a friend in the Lake Forest Cemetery, and his grave is unmarked. Helper’s last words reportedly were, “There is no justice in this world.”

Helper was a product of his class and his time; he reflected the former in his hatred of the slaveholders who impoverished his own class, and he mirrored the latter in his vehement race hatred and in his imperialism. Certainly strong overtones of the expansionist claim of manifest destiny are to be found in his work. Yet there were also the signs of monomania in his character. He overstepped the bounds of his own society in the depths of his hatred, and when it rejected him he destroyed himself.

Helper’s body of work included The Impending Crisis of the South (1857); The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction (1855); Nojoque (1867); The Negro in Negroland, the Negroes in America, and Negroes Generally (1868); Noonday Exigencies in America (1871); Oddments of Andean Diplomacy (1879); and The Three Americas Railway (1881). The contemporary response to Helper’s work is represented by S. M. Wolfe, Helper’s Impending Crisis Dissected (1860); G. J. Beebe, A Review and Refutation of Helper’s “Impending Crisis” (1860); and L. Schade, For the “Impending Crisis” (1860). A modern commentary can be found in H. T. Lefler, “Hinton Rowan Helper, Advocate of a ‘White America,’” Southern Sketches, no. 1 (1935). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1932). Obituaries were published in The Washington Post, March 10, 1909, and in The Nation, March 11 and March 18, 1909.