From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hinton Rowan Helper (December 27, 1829-March 8, 1909) was a Southern critic of slavery during the 1850s. In 1857, he published a book which he dedicated to the "nonslaveholding whites" of the South. The Impending Crisis of the South put forth the notion that slavery hurt the economic prospects of non-slaveholders, and was an impediment to the growth of the entire region of the South. The book, which was a combination of statistical charts and provocative prose, might have passed unnoticed if Northern opponents of slavery had not reprinted it, leading to a furor in parts of the South, where authorities banned its possession and distribution and burned copies that could be seized. Between 1857 and 1861 nearly 150, 000 copies of the book were circulated, and in 1860 the Republican party distributed it as a campaign document.

Helper was born near Mocksville, North Carolina. His childhood was difficult, but he was able to obtain an education with the financial help of his uncle following the death of his father. He graduated from Mocksville Academy in 1848, and went to California in 1851 in hopes of finding wealth, but came back in 1854 disillusioned, writing the book The Land of Gold, which widely condemned the state, the following year.

The success of The Impending Crisis of the South made Helper famous almost overnight. It also heightened the political crisis by raising fears^{[citation needed]} among slaveholding Southerners that landless Southern whites might turn against them on the issue of slavery if they saw that it did not benefit them. That fear was probably unfounded: while there were pockets of union support during the Civil War, they were limited to parts of North Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee and were easily contained.^{[citation needed]} Nonetheless the mere prospect of class divisions within the white community was enough to lead many Southerners who had previously been opponents of secession to embrace it after the election of Abraham Lincoln.

Helper himself was a white supremacist^{[citation needed]}, who published works after the Civil War in which he urged the wholesale expulsion of former slaves. His hatred of blacks eventually became a phobia, to the point that he would not patronize hotels or restaurants that employed Negroes for fear he might come into contact with them. Southern enemies of Reconstruction were unwilling, however, to forgive his previous opposition to slavery, so he remained a marginal, and increasingly unstable, character in postwar America.

He served as United States consul in Buenos Aires from 1861 to 1866. He spent most of the postwar years promoting a scheme to build an intercontinental railroad connecting North and South America; which would displace the black and brown peoples by whites. The "Three Americas Railway" was supposed to extend from the Bering Sea to the Strait of Magellan. His schemes never came to anything and he died by his own hand in Washington, D.C.

• The Land of Gold (1855)
• The Impending Crisis of the South (1857)
• Nojoque: A Question of a Continent (1867)
• War of races. By whom it is sought to be brought about. Considered in two letters, with copious extracts from the recent work of Hilton [sic] R. Helper. (1867)
• The Negroes in Negroland, The Negroes in America, and the Negroes Generally (1868)
• Noonday exigencies in America (1871)
• Oddments of Andean Diplomacy, and other oddment (1879)
• The Three Americas Railway (1881)

• New International Encyclopedia
• ANB, sub Helper.

• About.com Article
• Capsule biography