Hinton Rowan Helper: Abolitionist-Racist

Fine in very good+ rubbed and price-clipped jacket // xi, 256 pages: portrait; 22 cm; bibliographical references (pages 221-229) and index // First full-length life of the North Carolinian (1829–1909) whose The Impending Crisis of the South (1857) became one of the bombshells of the sectional crisis. Its argument was economic: slavery dragged down the South as a region, and non-slaveholding whites above all, rewarding only the few large planters. Republican circulation of a compendium edition turned the book into the central issue of the two-month House speakership deadlock that began in December 1859. Bailey, then at Samford University in Birmingham, follows Helper from his early Land of Gold (1855), a little-noticed account of California’s failure to live up to his hopes, through the postwar polemics. Chief among these is Nojoque: A Question for a Continent (1867), which made plain what readers of the Crisis might have missed: Helper hated Black people as well as slavery, and despised most peoples he considered non–Anglo-Saxon. Bailey’s portrait is of “a statistical fanatic, abolitionist, militant racist, Republican propagandist, ardent patriot, international railway projector, and promoter of inter-American co-operation.” Reviewers praised the book’s soundness. The Nation added that Helper might also be called imperialist, religious bigot and chauvinist, and credited Bailey with tracing those traits to Helper’s class and region rather than to personal eccentricity. ¶ Contents: Youth and adventure -- The impending crisis -- The crisis projected -- Political import of The impending crisis -- Contemporary criticism -- Modern criticism -- Consul at Buenos Aires -- Militant racist -- Personal envoy -- Railway promoter.;Named Person: Helper, Hinton Rowan, 1829-1909. Helper, Hinton Rowan, 1829-1909 Biographies. Biographies.Southern historical publications, no. 7.…