Hinton Rowan Helper: Abolitionist-Racist (review)

70CIVIL WAR HISTORY takes up two pages in Never Call Retreat and nearly thirty pages in A Stillness at Appomattox. Thus the greater comprehensiveness of the Centennial History has not been achieved without some sacrifice. This third volume is disappointingly thin at times—all the more so because of its otherwise superb quality. That is, Mr. Catton says everything so well that one often wishes he had said more. Never Call Retreat, like the two foregoing volumes in the set, is based upon an exhaustive program of research directed by E. B. Long. The author therefore writes with masterful knowledge and unsurpassed professional authority. Furthermore, from his vast reservoir of source material , he repeatedly draws forth just the right incident or quotation to drive home his meaning and illumine the narrative. Literary skill of a high order is now expected of Bruce Catton, but in this case, I think, he has outdone himself. His style has become leaner, shedding some of its earlier ornamentation but losing none of its dramatic power. Indeed, his eloquence, when it flames up, is more brilliant than ever, because it never seems forced. Yet there is more here than sound scholarship and literary artistry. Mr. Carton's peculiar genius is the universality of his understanding, with its multiple levels of insight. He can view the Civil War with intellectual detachment and even Olympian irony, bringing its largest configurations into sharp focus and digging out its profoundest implications. At the same time, he has his own way of pressing the reader into intimate association with the participants in the war, from presidents and generals to infantrymen . The high-level military and political strategy never for long obscures the tragic personal cost of the conflict. Mr. Catton is at his best in showing how war creates its own sometimes meaningless imperatives. One of his object lessons is the Union assault on Morris Island in 1863, the first step in an abortive effort to take nearby Charleston: It was dug up by spades and by high explosive, almost sunk by sheer weight of metal ana human misery, fought for with a maximum of courage and technical capacity and a minimum of strategic understanding; a place of no real consequence , lying at the end of one of those insane chains of war-time logic in which men step from one undeniable truth to another and so come at last to a land of crippling nonsense. Treated in this way, Morris Island deserves and receives almost as much space as the battle of Gettysburg. Even though Never Call Retreat seems to be one volume doing the work of two, it is also the concluding chapter of a masterpiece. The Centennial History as a whole is now the best comprehensive study of the Civil War. Don E. Fehrenb\ci!ek Stanford University Hinton Rowan Helper: Abolitionist-Racist. By Hugh C. Bailev. (University of Alabama Press, 1965. Pp. xi, 256. $6.95. ) Quite properly, no analysis of the causes of the Civil War omits men- BOOKREVIEWS71 tion of the 1857 bombshell by Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South. Specialists have estimated that its impact almost equaled that of Uncle Tom's Cabin; a kind of literary overkill. Certainly the reaction of outraged southern whites to both of these appeals to abolition sustains the scholars' judgments. Yet the Crisis labored under the relative disadvantage of having the form not of a novel, but of a statistical comparison of northern and southern societies. The message Helper preached was that slavery weighed down the South as a region and the non-slaveholding class in particular, offering rewards only to the small minority of larger slaveowners. Therefore, an end to slavery was in order. If it was ever doubted by anyone who has read The Impending Crisis, Professor Bailey (of Birmingham's Samford University) has made it clear in this useful survey of Helper's life and works, that the man hated slaves as well as slavery. His Negrophobia mixed with abolitionism is an apparently incongruous amalgam. Certainly the simultaneous advocacy of emancipation and of white supremacy violates decent twentieth-century standards on interracial coexistence in a democratic society. But by criteria common...