Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
Looking back through all of Cash's post I find in extremely hard to determine where anyone is being insulted. I do find that feelings get a little high, but not on Cash's part. I understand folks being sensitive about their own opinions and beliefs, but please, the only thing we endure here is our own personal feelings when folks don't agree with what we feel should be obvious, myself included.
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
If you're referring to the natural right of revolution from oppression, this is always extralegal.
Untrue. Rebellion is illegal as it is an armed resistance. Revolution is not. Many revolutions can and would be peaceful given a chance. They are two very distinct and different things. Finding out which is which may be decided by the hangman but they are not always the same. There was no armed overthrowing of a government. But a peacable takeover of the states. By the so called owners themselves, the People. Hardly a rebellion.
As to treason, if Article III isn’t a breach of allegiance I’m not sure how else to define it. But I see the distinction you are drawing from it.
"I fail to see how this applies to the secessions of the Civil War period, since the white southerners had representation in Congress and their natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were being secured by the government. "
This would be the same government whose ruling powers’ manifesto was Helper’s book? They'd secure Southern rights, life and liberties 'Peaceably if we can but violently if we must' I believe the cry went? Very reassuring indeed.
Forgive me, if like Republican Rufus Choate I see the Rublican party in power as a bane upon that nation and not one that had anything in mind but greed, power, hatred and bloodshed.
Rebellion is illegal as it is an armed resistance. Revolution is not.
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Sorry, my dictionary says different.
rev·o·lu·tion n.
1. Orbital motion about a point, especially as distinguished from axial rotation: the planetary revolution about the sun.
2. A turning or rotational motion about an axis.
3. A single complete cycle of such orbital or axial motion.
4. The overthrow of one government and its replacement with another.
5. A sudden or momentous change in a situation: the revolution in computer technology.
6. Geology. A time of major crustal deformation, when folds and faults are formed.
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Show me a revolution recognized as legal by the government against whom it was directed.
There was no armed overthrowing of a government. But a peacable takeover of the states.
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It was an overthrow of the authority of the United States Constitution and US Laws passed in pursuance of the Constitution over the seceding states, which is an unconstitutional act.
As to treason, if Article III isn’t a breach of allegiance I’m not sure how else to define it. But I see the distinction you are drawing from it.
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It's very clear. Treason against the United States consists only of levying war against the United States or giving its enemies aid and comfort.
"I fail to see how this applies to the secessions of the Civil War period, since the white southerners had representation in Congress and their natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were being secured by the government. "
This would be the same government whose ruling powers’ manifesto was Helper’s book?
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No. That was not the "ruling powers' manifesto." That's just inaccurate.
No. That was not the "ruling powers' manifesto." That's just inaccurate.
No. It is Very accrate. The only inaccuracy therein is your declaration.
Just a little bit.
Ephemera with the header ""Who endorsed the Helper book! Who were the inciters to bloodshed? "The unconditional abolition of slavery", "Peaceably, if we can; violently, if we must." Read! Read! Read!""
Here it is up until it begins listing the signers etc...
WHO ENDORSED
THE HELPER BOOK!
WHO WERE THE INCITERS TO BLOODSHED?
"The Unconditional Abolition of Slavery,"
"Peaceably, if we can; Violently, if we must."
READ! READ! READ!
In the year 1857, an individual named Hinton Rowan Helper, who had been forced to leave his native State, North Carolina, in disgrace, published a book, of which he was the reputed author, entitled "The Impending Crisis," The book recommended direct warfare on Southern society, "be the consequences what they might." It was so extravagant in tone, and so diabolical in its designs, that it was at first generally supposed to be the work of a fool or a madman. No one could believe that any sane or civilized person really entertained any such devilish purposes as it professed.--What, however, was the surprise of the public when the book was actually adopted by the Republican party as a campaign document, and its atrocious principles endorsed by SIXTY-EIGHT Republican members of Congress and all the influential members of the party! Below will be found an abstract of the principles it advocated, taken from the large edition of the work, published by A. B. Burdick, No. 145 Nassau street, N. Y., 1860, and the names of their endorsers, &c:
1. We unhesitatingly declare ourselves in favor of the immediate and unconditional Abolition of Slavery.--Page 26.
2. "We cannot be TOO HASTY in carrying out our designs."--Page 33.
3. "No man can be a true patriot without first becoming an Abolitionist."--Page 116
4. Against slaveholders, as a body, we (that is, the Republican signers and endorsers) wage an EXTERMINATING WAR.--Page 120.
5. Slaveholders are nuisances, and it is our imperative duty to abate nuisances; we propose, therefore, to EXTERMINATE SLAVERY, that which strychnine itself is less a nuisance.--Page 139.
6. Slaveholders are more criminal than COMMON MURDERERS--Page 140.
7. All slaveholders are under the shield of a perpetual license to murder.--Page 141.
8. It is our honest conviction that all the pro-slavery slaveholders, who are alone responsible for the continuance of the baneful institution among us, deserve to be at once reduced to a parallel with the BASEST CRIMINALS that lie fettered within the cells of our public prisons.--Page 158.
9. Were it possible that the whole number (of slaveholders) could be gathered together and transferred into four equal gangs of LICENSED ROBBERS, RUFFAINS, THIEVES, AND MURDERERS, society, we feel assured would suffer less from their atrocities than it does now.--Page 158.
10. Once and forever, at least so far as this country is concerned, the internal question of slavery must be disposed of. A SPEEDY AND ABSOLUTE ABOLISHMENT of the whole system is the true policy of the South, and this is the policy which We propose to pursue.--Page 121.
11. Slaveholders! It is for you to decide whether we are to have justice peaceably or by VIOLENCE, for WHATEVER CONSEQUENCES may follow, we are determined to have it, ONE WAY OR THE OTHER.--Page 128.
We Unfurl Our Banner to the World.
Inscribed on the banner which we (W. H. SEWARD, HORACE GREELEY, and the other endorsers,) herewith UNFURL to the world, with the full and fixed determination to stand by it or DIE BY IT, unless one of more virtuous efficacy shall be presented, are the mottoes which, in substance, embody the PRINCIPLES as we conceive should GOVERN us.
The Mottoes on Our Banner.
1. Thorough organization and independent political action on the part of non-slaveholding whites of the South.
2. Ineligibility of slaveholders; never another vote to the trafficer in human flesh. 3. No co-operation with slaveholders in politics, no fellowship with them in religion no affiliation with them in society.
4. No patronage to slaveholding merchants; no bequest to slave waiting hotels; no fees to slaveholding lawyers; no employment to slaveholding physicians; no audience to slaveholding parsons.
5. No recognition to pro slavery men, except as ruffians, outlaws, and criminals.
6. Immediate DEATH to SLAVERY, or if not immediate, unqualified proscription of its advocate during the period of its existence.--Pages 155 and 156.
7. Thus, terror engenderers of the South, have we fully and frankly defined our position: we have no modifications to propose, no compromises to offer, nothing to retract, Frown, sirs, fret, foam, prepare your weapons, threat, strike, shoot, stab, bring on civil war, dissolve the Union, nay, annihilate the solar system if you will--do all, this, more, less, better, worse, anything--do what you will, sirs, you can neither foil nor intimidate us; our purpose is as firmly fixed as the eternal pillars of Heaven; we have determined to ABOLISH SLAVERY, AND SO HELP US GOD, ABOLISH IT WE WILL.--Page 187.
Here are the endorsers, aiders and abettors of this Revolution and Treason.
New York, March 9, 1859.
............
After this it shows letters of approval (most notably Seward) and the lists of those Republicans who signed the circular vouchsafing their endorsement. Most if not all were key policy makers. In control of virtually all the Congressional committees. It show a listing of some who contributed and how much to print books to be given away. Sherman himself called it a manifesto.
Gosh, and I wonder why the Southerners did not believe Lincoln when he said the Republicans were their friends???
Then of course
In November Helper sent this letter to Lincoln expecting to be rewarded for his efforts.
[Washington Nov. 1. 1861.
Sir:
I beg your pardon for again troubling you in reference to myself as an individual; yet I feel that it is but right and proper for me to do so, under existing circumstances. Month after month has elapsed since I first had the honor of applying to you, with numerous and highly respectable recommendations, for some position in the public service, which it was hoped and believed would be granted graciously and without delay. It is now within a few days of 8 months since your Administration, in which all loyal citizens feel the liveliest possible interest, came into power. By expressions of approbation on the one hand, and assurances and promises on the other, I have been enticed on from one point of time to another, until, to speak plainly, disappointments and delays have finally thrown me into a most awkward and unhappy quandary.
Once more, therefore, with your permission, I earnestly and confidently appeal to you as the President, and as a Man, for some immediate, positive action in my behalf.
After waiting two months for the Paymastership for which you and others kindly recommended me to the Hon. Secty. of War, I learned yesterday, from my friend Mr. Underwood, Fifth Auditor, that Mr. Cameron still protests that there are not now, and not likely soon to be, any more vacancies for Paymasters, so it would seem to be useless for me to wait longer in expectation of that appointment.
What I respectfully solicit of your Excellency, is relief, without further delay, by employment in the service of the Government, from the sore strait and distress of my present situation -- a situation entailed on me by the authorship (and, to a very considerable extent, by the distribution at my own expense) of 140.000 copies of a work which was adopted as a Republican Campaign document prior to the last Presidential election. I want nothing more -- I ask for nothing more -- than what may in all reason and justice be conceded; and with the facts of my case before you, though I should much prefer a Paymastership or a Consulship -- or some equivalent position -- yet I think I should be quite willing to accept whatever other position your broad and enlighted sense of fairness may suggest.
Very Truly,
Your Excellency's Obedient Servant
H. R. Helper]
Lincoln did indeed do just that. He justly rewarded the Hinton Helper.
In November 1861 he was appointed U.S. consul to Buenos Aires by Lincoln. While there he married a local woman named Maria Rodriguez. He returned to the US in 1866 after the war was safely finished. He once again began to to address the problems of the South. This time he found a new enemy. The threat to the white working class was no longer the indolent, supercilious slaveholder, but the black freeman. His three books--Nojoque: A Question for a Continent (1867), Negroes in Negroland (1868) and Noonday Exigencies (1871) all revealed him to be a virulent racist.
Many reviewers were shocked by Helper's call that by 1876 "No Negro nor Mulatto, No Chinaman nor unnative Indian, No Black or Bi-colored Individual of whatever Name or Nationality" would "find Domicile anywhere within the Boundaries of the United States." For Helper, the black man was "An Inferior Fellow Done For," and the color black was "A Thing of Ugliness, Disease, and Death...a most hateable thing." Helper had become an embarrassment to the Republican Party. Even readers in the South were taken aback by what one reviewer called his "wild ravings."
No longer a thinker to be taken seriously, Helper eked out a career as an agent for U.S. commercial interests that had claims against various South American governments. He became interested in the construction of a railroad that would run through the Americas from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn, and the notion, which he claimed would make him "the new Christopher Columbus," eventually grew into an obsession. A collection of his writings appeared as The Three Americas Railway in 1881.
The info on this scheme of his is much too long to try to relay here in total but I will try to provide a link...yet for some reason it is not recognizing it as a link but you can copy and paste it and it should work....I think
Yet I could not pass up a chance to show my old friend John Sherman’s response to Helper .
[Mansfield, Ohio, July 18, 1881.
Hinton R. Helper, Esq., St. Louis, Mo.
My Dear Sir. -- When I received your book on "The Three Americas Railway," it did not attract my attention. But I have since carefully read it, and am deeply interested in the subject matter. The essays are well written, and the facts stated are striking and impressive. No greater enterprise has been suggested during our time; nor does the difficulty seem so great to me as to deter any one from an active and vigorous effort to secure the construction of the work proposed. I should be glad to receive any information bearing on the subject, and certainly will keep it in mind. If I can suggest, or aid in any feasible method, I will be glad to do so. The part of the road proposed through the United States will be readily constructed, and that to the City of Mexico seems to be in a fair way of being built. But the system should be operated as a whole, and under the most skillful and able direction possible.
Very truly yours,
John Sherman.]
In his final years, Helper was a bitter and impoverished man. His wife went blind and returned to Buenos Aires with their son in 1899, leaving him alone in Washington. All his funds had gone into promoting his railway dream, and although a commission was appointed to study the idea, he was not named a member of it.
On March 8, 1909, Hinton Helper closed the door to his room, wrapped a towel around his neck, and turned on the gas. The maid found him dead the next morning.
I thought I’’d show just how volatile the situation was before the war and who helped it become so and his connection to the men in power as well as their Formal endorsement of him and his book that they distributed freely....... yeah. inaccurate.
We have covered this ground before, but I must admit, I am very curious to see Cash's response to this one.
But are you saying that the Hinton Helper book is an indication of the political situation between the North and the South at that time? That this one publication constitutes the central theme of discourse between the North and the South prior to the Civil War? That this publication should be viewed as a sort of 'litmus test' of why the South left the Union?
PS: The link you provided does not work.
Curious,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
No. It is Very accrate. The only inaccuracy therein is your declaration.
-------------------
Sorry, but what I said was accurate.
The book recommended direct warfare on Southern society, "be the consequences what they might." It was so extravagant in tone, and so diabolical in its designs, that it was at first generally supposed to be the work of a fool or a madman.
---------------------
This is a mischaracterization.
Sorry, but your source is inaccurate about what the book was about.
"Helper, a rather obscure nonslaveholding white from North Carolina, had taken a firm grasp of the idea that the North was rapidly outstripping the South in the race for economic progress, and that the South was, in fact, falling into a state of economic decline. The southerners who suffered most, as he saw it, were the nonslaveholding whites, more and more of whom were lapsing into the wretched status of 'poor whites.' Slavery, with its wastefulness and inefficiency and its monopolistic aspects, was the curse of the South and especially of the nonslaveholders. Helper wasted no sympathy on the slaves; in fact, he called stridently for their deportation, and later became one of the country's most violently anti-Negro writers. But his attack on slavery was particularly alarming to the South because he appealed to class divisions between the slaveholding and nonslaveholding whites. [My emphasis] No dogma of the southern creed was held more sacrosanct than the tenet that race transcended class and, indeed, extinguished it--that all whites were on the same footing simlpy by virtue of their status as whites. And no form of attack--not even the appeal for a slave insurrection--found the South more vulnerable than did an appeal to the nonslaveholders to reject the slave system. Southerners had denounced Helper as 'incendiary and insurrectionary,' as a traitor, a renegade, an apostate, a 'dishonest, degraded, and disgraced man.' " [David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, pp. 386-387]
Helper's book called for nonslaveholding whites to stand up against slaveholders. It didn't call for murdering whites in their sleep or any of the other outlandish lies told by southerners about it. Now, today we're told by neoconfederate sources that slaveholders were a tiny minority of the south. If that's true, then how could The Impending Crisis be such an incendiary work? If that's true, what makes his program a threat to the natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for white southerners?
In fact, his book was not a threat to the natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for white southerners. And it was not a manifesto for the ruling party of the United States. A toned-down version of it was endorsed by John Sherman and some other Republicans, but not the Republican Party, nor was it endorsed by Abraham Lincoln.
[begin quote]
The myth probably began with Abraham Lincoln. When he met Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, in 1862, Lincoln supposedly said, "So you are the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war."
Ever since that meeting, Uncle Tom's Cabin has been considered the most important anti-slavery tract ever published in the United States and the key text in inflaming the passions that brought on the Civil War. No doubt it was a very important book. It sold 300,000 copies in its first year of publication and was translated into at least 23 languages.
And yet, another book caused a far greater sensation than Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). It was The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. Even more surprising, the strident anti-slavery treatise was not written by some stern New England Yankee. The author was a son of the Old South, Hinton Rowan Helper. Although he has been largely forgotten, for several years after his work was published in 1857, Helper was one of the most famous men in America.
Uncle Toms Cabin, although detested in Dixie, could be dismissed by many Southerners as sentimental rubbish from a Yankee preacher's wife who knew little about the South's "peculiar institution." Helper, however, was born in Rowan County, N.C., on December 27, 1829 and his father, who died a year after Hinton's birth, worked a small farm and owned a few slaves. Nor could The Impending Crisis be in any way considered a mawkish romance. This was a book that hammered the reader with statistic after statistic, remorselessly piling up evidence that slavery was the only reason the South had fallen behind the North in almost every area of achievement--wealth, productivity, population, literacy, culture--and had descended to what Helper called "a state of comparative imbecility and obscurity." Slavery, he Said, " was the most hateful and horrible word that was ever incorporated into the vocabulary of human economy." To Southerners, Helper was not just a gadfly, he was a traitor.
Helper graduated from Mocksville Academy, near his home, in 1848 and then worked in a store in Salisbury, N.C. He went to New York in 1850 and from there sailed by way of Cape Horn to San Francisco at the height of the California Gold Rush. He spent three years fruitlessly trying to wrest gold from the hills and then returned to the East to publish The Land of Gold (1855), a bitter account written, he said, to warn other would-be gold hunters of the perils and disappointment that awaited them.
The same year Helper sailed for the West was the year of the seventh U.S. census. The 1850 census set off alarm bells throughout Dixie. Nearly every statistic showed that in the decade from 1840 to 1850 the North had leapfrogged over the South. In 1840, for example, 44 percent of the total U.S. railway mileage was in the South; by 1850 its share had declined to 26 percent. In 1840 the South possessed 20 percent of the nation's manufacturing capacity; in 1850 it had 18 percent. These figures only confirmed what many Southerners already suspected--they were becoming economic underlings. As one Southern analyst put it, "The North grows rich and powerful whilst we at best are stationary."
Historians are still debating the reasons for the failure of industrialization in the South, but Helper, who waved the 1850 census like a red flag, echoed the views of the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, who argued that free labor was intrinsically superior to slave labor. Unlike a free worker, Smith said, a slave "can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible."
The Impending Crisis drew heavily on the 1850 census to show that slavery was the ruination of the South. It began with a long chapter in which Helper presented a host of tables illustrating the contrast between the two regions of the United States. He cleverly began with statistics showing the difference in agricultural output because, he said, many Southerners liked to flatter themselves that, if in nothing else, the South was superior to the North in agriculture. Not so, Helper pointed out, adding, "Such rampant ignorance should he knocked in the head!" After parading his tables across his pages, he arrived at the Conclusion that in 1850 the North produced some $352 million worth of farm products; the South, about $307 million. "So much," he snorted, "for the boasted agricultural superiority of the South!"
The second chapter was the most threatening in a menacing book. Titled "How Slavery Can Be Abolished," it scoffed at the notion that any system of emancipation required compensating slaveholders for the loss of their property. "The idea," he said, "is preposterous." Helper blamed the slaveholders for the wide discrepancy in the value of land between the North and the South. Again using 1850 figures, he reckoned that the average value of an acre of land in the Northern states was $28.07; in the South it was $5.34. "We conclude, therefore," he wrote, "that you, the slaveholders, are indebted to us, the non-slaveholders, in the sum of $22.73, which is the difference between $28.07 and $5.34, on every acre of Southern soil in our possession." The grand total that the "chevaliers of the lash" had gypped the non-slaveholders, according to Helper's calculations, was slightly over $7.5 billion. "And now, Sirs," he demanded, "we are ready to receive the money."
Having thus dismissed the idea of compensation, Helper laid out an 11 -point plan for abolishing slavery by July 4, 1876. The agenda included organizing nonslaveholding whites into a political force, denying slaveholders the vote, boycotting slaveholders' services, banning the hiring of slaves by non-slaveholders, and instituting a tax of $60 on every slaveholder for every slave in his possession. Although there was virtually no chance that such a plan would be adopted, it nevertheless was strong stuff for Southern readers.
The book cited numerous authors from both North and South--as well as from other countries--who concurred with Helper's abolitionism. He marshaled quotations from, among others, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, along with economists, French philosophers and Biblical prophets. Helper returned to statistics to contrast North and South in areas such as manufacturing, exports, canals, railroads, bank capital, public schools, libraries, newspapers and literacy. He ruefully concluded that "our indignation is struck almost dumb at this astounding and revolting display of the awful wreck that slavery is leaving behind it in the South."
The most notable aspect of The Impending Crisis was its fierce language. Helper railed that "five millions of 'poor white trash'" suffered under a "second degree of slavery" and that "every white man who is under the necessity of earning his bread, by the sweat of his brow ... is treated as if he was a loathsome beast." "There is not," he charged, "a grain in of patriotism in the South, except among the non-slaveholders." And since slavery is a "sin" and a "crime," he could not recognize the slaveholders "as gentlemen." "Slaveholders," he thundered, "are more criminal than common murderers." Helper did not even shun the threat of violence. "Do you aspire," he asked the slaveholders of the South, It to become the victims of white nonslaveholding vengeance by day, and of barbarous massacre by the negroes at night?"
Helper first intended to publish his book in Baltimore, but was prevented from doing so by a law that made it a crime to "excite discontent amongst the people of color of this state." He therefore went to New York in 1857, partly, he says, because he feared that he might be "subjected to physical violence" if he stayed in the South. In New York, the influential newspaperman Horace Greeley offered his support.
In the year after The Impending Crisis was published, it sold some 13,000 copies--a respectable figure--and was well-received in
several Northern newspapers. But in the spring of 1859 the Republican Party, then gearing up for the election of 1860, realized--with Helper's prodding--that the volume could be an asset to their campaign. The Republicans followed Greeley's advice that championing the book would prove that they did not seek the "ruin" of the South, but rather its "renovation." Accordingly, they distributed at least 100,000 copies of an abridged (and slightly toned down) version, called The Compendium, and Helper was suddenly the talk of the nation. Abraham Lincoln had a copy and said he was very interested to know that there was a potential schism between slaveholders and non-slaveholders in the South. By contrast, in many places in the South it was a crime to possess Helper's book.
Things got hotter during the election of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1859. The Republicans put forth John Sherman of Ohio (brother of the soon-to-be-famous William Tecumseh Sherman), but he was assailed by John B. Clark of Missouri for having committed the dastardly deed of reading The Impending Crisis. Another congressman charged that "one who consciously, deliberately, and of purpose lent his name and influence to the propagation or such writings is not only not fit to be speaker, but is not fit to live." The two-month debate grew so intense that the representatives took to showing up in the Capitol armed with pistols and bowie knives.
By the time Lincoln took office in March 1861, Helper was famous. But the publication of The Compendium had been basically a nonprofit enterprise, and Helper needed to find regular work. Accordingly, he applied to the Lincoln administration, and in November 1861 he was appointed U.S. consul to Buenos Aires.
Helper performed his duties competently in Buenos Aires, where he married a local woman named Maria Luisa Rodriguez. In 1866 he returned to the United States and again took up his pen to address the problems of the South. This time he found a new enemy. The threat to the white working class was no longer the indolent, supercilious slaveholder, but the black freeman. He dashed off three books--Nojoque: A Question for a Continent (1867), Negroes in Negroland (1868) and Noonday Exigencies (187 1)that revealed him to be a virulent racist.
Many reviewers were shocked by Helper's call that by 1876 "No Negro nor Mulatto, No Chinaman nor unnative Indian, No Black or Bi-colored Individual of whatever Name or Nationality" would "find Domicile anywhere within the Boundaries of the United States." For Helper, the black man was "An Inferior Fellow Done For," and the color black was "A Thing of Ugliness, Disease, and Death... a most hateable thing." Helper had become an embarassment to the Republican Party. Even readers in the South were taken aback by what one reviewer called his "wild ravings."
No longer a thinker to be taken seriously, Helper eked out a career as an agent for U.S. commercial interests that had claims against various South American governments. He became interested in the construction of a railroad that would run through the Americas from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn, and the notion, which he claimed would make him "the new Christopher Columbus," eventually grew into an obsession. A collection of his writings appeared as The Three Americas Railway in 1881.
In his final years, Helper was a bitter and impoverished man. His wife went blind and returned to Buenos Aires with their son in 1899, leaving him alone in Washington. All his funds had gone into promoting his railway dream, and although a commission was appointed to study the idea, he was not named a member of it.
On March 8,1909, Hinton Helper closed the door to his room, wrapped a towel around his neck, and turned on the gas. The maid found him dead the next morning.
[end quote]
Joseph Gustaitis, "Southern-born Hinton Helper--Not Harriet Beecher Stowe--wrote the most stinging indictment of slavery," America's Civil War, Vol 10, No. 6, January, 1998, pp. 8-16]
The real objection to Helper's book was that he told the truth about slavery and couldn't be dismissed as a Yankee who didn't know about the subject. And he sought to mobilize nonslaveholding whites against the slaveholders.
Sorry, but your source is inaccurate about what the book was about.
Really? That is funny because my source is Helper's book itself. Which I have personally read in depth several times. There was a reason John Brown treasured his copy. It was not because of very bogus statistical data Helper used to vent his spleen.
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