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

Next to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Hinton Helper's critique of slavery and the Southern class system, The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), was arguably the most important antislavery book of the 1850s. After the Civil War, he followed it with intensely antiblack polemics. Consequently, historians and critics from Edmund Wilson (Patriotic Gore, 1962) to George Fredrickson (The Arrogance of Race: Perspectives on Slavery, Racism and Social Inequality, 1988) have dismissed him as an inveterate racist and crank. David Brown, however, portrays Helper as a determined writer, a capable statistician, and, early in his career, a committed Republican with malleable racial views. Dismissing Helper as a bigot, Brown fears, leads to minimizing his historical impact.

Brown deserves credit for focusing renewed critical attention on Helper. His biography contains numerous insights into this complicated individual and his importance, although it is unclear that he has overturned prevailing interpretations. The work shines in its treatment of Helper's early life in North Carolina, his family's ownership of slaves, and Helper's embezzlement of $300. His wartime service as consul in Buenos Aires also illuminates a neglected facet of wartime American foreign relations.

The book's greatest contribution may be the fine chapter that discusses the 1859–60 crisis over the Speakership of the House of Representatives. In the aftermath of John Brown's raid, Southerners determined to bar any candidate who had endorsed Helper's book. Brown argues that this two-month political struggle was almost a "rehearsal for secession" (173). Like Fredrickson, Brown points out that Republican support for Helper's book made it very difficult for Southern Democrats to believe Republican claims that they would not harm Southern slavery. Despite the contretemps, Brown argues that Helper's book, focused on the impact of slavery on whites, helped merge antislavery ideas with conservative Republican nationalism. The book became the "most important campaign document" of 1860 (153), "virtually sold itself" (153), and "contributed significantly" to the sectional crisis and Lincoln's election and secession (187).

Brown's argument about Helper's racial views, however, is less convincing. Brown maintains that before the Civil War, Helper worried only about "cultural diversity" and was not a systematic racist (45). This allows him to move Helper's racist period to after the Civil War, rescuing The Impending Crisis from the taint of racism. This claim is contradicted by Helper's statements in The Land of Gold (1855) that the "inferior races" would have to give way before the "Anglo-Saxons." Brown discounts them, however, and argues that since Helper did not believe in a biological basis for racial difference, he lacked an organized racial hierarchy.

This line of argument is very troublesome. Antebellum racial thought was complicated, but for Helper, who later places race at the crux of his argument, it must be fully grappled with. As William Stanton compellingly argued (The Leopard's Spots, 1960), the most sophisticated, pseudoscientific antebellum racial constructs made limited inroads into Southern thought because of their implicit critique of biblical accounts of creation. The failure of polygenist scientific racialism to win acceptance, however, did not preclude Southerners, including Helper, from having profoundly hierarchical views of race. Brown's claims that Helper's prewar views were "different . . . from believing in a superior white race" are unconvincing (45).

With most of its space given to literary analysis, the book omits some biographical details such as who Helper's associates were. The birth of his son is never mentioned. Most such omissions are minor, except where they relate to the tricky question of Helper's motivations. Late in the book Brown identifies Helper as a "lawyer," a potentially vital piece of information (250). Helper's motivation to write The Impending Crisis is still unclear. Could he have been hoping for advancement in the Southern or Northern wings of the Republican party? Political aspirations were common for antebellum lawyers, but Brown rarely considers such...