David Brown wrote a biography of an important Abolitionist and author of the influential antislavery book,
The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857),
Hinton Rowan Helper and the Impending Crisis of the South (2006).
Brown describes Helper’s shift to promoting what can generously be described as a version of white racism that was rancid even by the standards of anti-Reconstruction Southern whites. Fortunately, its influence, articulated in three books published postwar, seems to have been considerably less than that of the I
mpending Crisis. Because Helper used explicitly exterminationist rhetoric against blacks:
The introduction to [Helper’s 1867 book] Nojoque states that “the primary object of this work is to write the Negro out of America, and the secondary object is to write him (and manifold millions of other black and bi-colored caitiffs, little better than himself) out of existence.” This grim beginning becomes worse as it is explained that “mulattoes, Indians, Chinese, and other obviously inferior races of mankind” are also targeted. All groups should be required to leave the United States after July 4, 1876, or sent to a separate state or territory such as Texas or Arizona. “We should so far yield to the evident designs and purposes of Providence, as to be both willing and anxious to see the negroes, like the Indians and all other effete and dingy-hued races, gradually exterminated from the face of the whole earth.”
Helper was a writer, activist, and latter lobbyist, not a politician. But it’s not unusual for people to shift their ideological viewpoints, especially if doing so offers them career or publishing-market advantages. But it’s not obvious that Helper was motivated in his postwar racism by opportunist considerations. In fact, since he had achieved a national reputation and prominence among the abolitionist movement by his anti-slavery book, continuing to work with Republicans and pro-Reconstruction activists and publicists would have been a more obvious way to build on his reputation. Especially since he had so incensed the planter class and their supporters before the war.
So why did he make such a dramatic and ugly shift in his social and political stances? Both the drastic nature of his seeming conversion and also the contrast between the coherent polemical logic of
Impending Crisis and the sloppy, unsophisticated, and disorganized arguments of his postwar racist-eliminationist books suggests a psychological explanation. Brown writes, “The complex worldview displayed in [Helper’s 1855 book]
The Land of Gold had flattened into a one-dimensional obsession with black-white relations bordering on paranoia” after the war.
But Brown also finds no obvious evidence in his personal life that Helper suffered from pathological problems in his dealings with people or in the conduct of his professional affairs. It is possible to be a mean-hearted jerk without suffering from a clinical illness.
Joaquín Cardoso wrote that “it can be generalized that Helper’s mind began to lose its grip of reality” around 1889, but Hugh C. Bailey pointed to a later decline due to “his great poverty and loneliness and as a result of many defeats and chronic criticism.” Helper’s actions did become increasingly erratic, of that there can be no doubt, but the case for his complete breakdown cannot be proven, given a lack of evidence. ...
Moreover, other accounts show that Helper remained mentally agile in old age.
He argues that part of the difference between the Helper of the
Impending Crisis was focused more on economic and class issues than racial theorizing or promotion white racist tropes. “Helper’s position in the 1850s was complex and reflected multiple concerns. It was not fixated on the issue of race relations.” Brown does not think that Helper had some fundamental change in his view of race as such during the Civil War: “In the 1850s, Helper implicitly and unconsciously assumed the superior qualities of whites. By the late 1860s white superiority was not only explicit but dominated his thinking. Indeed, it had almost become a way of life.“
So what changed?
Brown does note that “though
The Impending Crisis became a bestseller he did not make a penny out of it.” So it’s not impossible that pecuniary considerations played a role in Helper’s shift of emphasis. Still, “Helper never complained about this and was seemingly oblivious to the potential riches that passed him by. By contrast, he did enjoy being in the public eye.” But his postwar racist tracts don’t seem to have been lucrative for him, either.
Helper was appointed consult to Buenos Aires in late 1861 and arrived there in April 1862, the month Bartolomé Mitre, the Governor of Buenos Aires, began claiming himself in charge of the country’s executive power. Mitre was formally elected President – in an uncontested, indirect election – in October of 1862 and remained President during Helper’s service there. Helper attended Mitre’s inauguration on October 12, and according to Brown, “Helper was very much an important American spokesman in Argentina.”
He also writes that Helper “pretty much worked out his racist agenda in Buenos Aires.”
Brown’s account of Helper’s years in Argentina mainly focuses on his official activities as they relate to the United States and the ongoing Civil War. He seems to have been a consistent, enthusiastic Unionist, who greeted Lincoln’s 1862 in a very positive way in his official statements. But he also notes that Helper began to shift his attention more to the goal of deporting all African-Americans out of the country, the completely unrealistic, racist, and cruel aim of the African Colonization movement in the US. Brown relates that Helper, in declining applications from black residents of Argentina on what seemed to be straightforward grounds, also reacted as follows:
However, Helper also rejected these applicants “owing to the fact of their questionable citizenship at any time.” In a frank admission of basic prejudice Helper spelled out his position: “As with my present conviction I could not, of my own accord, do anything whatever to increase or enlarge, even in the smallest degree, the colored population of America—sincerely believing as I do, that population is already too large by the whole number of the same, whether bond or free, black or brown, now inhabiting the continent.” This was an important statement. Helper’s role as consul provided a situation in which he was directly confronted with the issue of black citizenship, two years before it would become a pressing national issue. His response was clear. He would not allow blacks to become citizens of the United States. Although vigorously supporting the war on the idealistic grounds of ending slavery, he would not go any further in aiding the cause of African Americans.
So by that time, it appears that Helper was already shifting his viewpoint to emphasizing denial of rights to black Americans, even though he continue to oppose slavery. And in the last year of his service in Buenos Aires, 1866, he mentioned in a dispatch that he foresaw that South and Central America “ought to be, must be, and eventually will be, Caucasianized, Anglo-Saxonized, Protestantized.” Which was crazy talk.
We can also wonder about the ways in which events in Argentina itself shaped his perceptions of race and power. Obviously, one of the most significant was his 1863 marriage to an Argentine woman, Maria Rodriguez. Brown quotes his dispatch on his marriage, noting that it shows a particular concern about his new wife’s racial heritage:
Although his bride was a Buenos Aires native, she came from “pure Spanish descent.” Helper suggested a strong contrast between the “pure descent” of upper-class Argentines with that of what he believed was the less worthy Creole background of the masses, highlighting the significance of blood lines in his assessment of personal character. Moreover, Helper desperately sought to create the impression that his wife was American in all but birth. Maria “was educated in New York, where all the time under the immediate guardianship of both her parents, she spent five years at school, and where, meanwhile, she became, in hand and heart, as thoroughly American as if she had been born in the Capitol at Washington.”
Social divisions based on racial definitions were extremely important in Argentine politics at the time, as they were in other Latin American countries. Those with “pure” Spanish blood considered themselves to be the most worthy race, with a hair-slitting set of other racial hierarchies with indigenous peoples and blacks at the bottom, with many intermediate categories of mixtures. Whatever her family’s particular views on race, marrying into an obviously wealthy Argentine family means that Helper was living in an environment in which a neurotic racial hierarchy was a common part of social assumptions of his Argentine social circle. We could also speculate that when he moved back to North Carolina after returning home, having a foreign wife would tempt him to stress how racially acceptable she was in comparison to African-Americans.
The dominant politics of Argentina in the 1860s also elevated questions of racial hierarchies and power. Politics there divided in broad lines between the centralists and the “federalists”, with the federalists being the trend that stressed democratic participation and control and also Argentine national independence more than the centralists. (The centralists were known as Unitarians, which had nothing to do with the Unitarian Church.) This division was overlaid on a long-running struggle between the Province of Buenos Aires and the other provinces over the political dominance of Buenos Aires and its control of the huge revenues of the port there. The wealthier classes tended to support the Unitarians, while the Federalists appealed to the popular classes. In foreign policy, Unitarians tended to be very friendly toward Britain and open to lending by British financial houses that increased Argentina dependence on Britain.
Ethnic-racial factors were of course also involved in that division. It was during Helper’s tenure in Buenos Aires that Unitarian forces defeated and murdered the legendary Federalist caudillo of La Rioja province, Ángel “Chacho” Peñaloza.
Bartolomé Mitre was very much on the side of the Unitarians and supported by the upper class with whom Helper was closely associated there, including by marriage. Mitre encouraged a revolt by the “liberal” party in Uruguay against the Uruguayan government in 1863, leading to the grimmest military conflict in the history of South American, the War of the Triple Alliance (La Guerra de la Triple Alianza) of 1864- 1871. The war involved Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay invading and subjugating Paraguay, which had maintained a relatively independent model of economic development which did not please Britain at all. Argentine leaders like Felipe Varela actively opposed the war, including military uprisings against it.
La Guerra de la Triple Alianza was an exceptionally brutal conflict. Argentina’s great historian, Juan Bautista Alberdi, opposed the war an wrote a book on it, El crimen de la Guerra (The Crimes of the War, 1870), which was became an important influence on the development of international laws of war. While the number of casualties are disputed, Eduardo Nakayama writes that in all of the Americas, only the US Civil War and the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 produced more total dead than the war on Paraguay. (“Una visión paraguaya de la Guerra”
Todo es Historia Mayo 2015)
And the Argentine version of the Indian Wars continued even longer than those in America. Those, too, were charged with racial justifications and bigotry. So it’s entirely plausible that Helper’s close association with Argentine politics influenced the racist and eliminationist views he would express in his books after his return to America. Brown writes:
He greatly enjoyed and appreciated Argentina and maintained a keen interest in its development for the rest of his life. In 1889, he wrote that Argentina had been “transformed [from] a mere military and tyrannical Confederation into one of the most civil and well-ordered and meritorious Republics in the world” and was “soon to become to South America what the United States are already to North America,—the leading and controlling power of a vast continent.” … For better or worse, ideas formulated and developed in Argentina would not only remain with Helper for decades but become an obsessive, relentless, and ultimately tragic pursuit.
