Hinton Rowan Helper

“For more than a century Hinton Helper remained an enigmatic maverick, a human maladjustment always one step short of reality. . . . Bailey has brought a measure of understanding to Helper with a biography so sound that it is not likely ever to be challenged.”
—Civil War Times
 

“As Professor Bailey points out in his careful study of Helper’s career, it is the rigidity of our own social and intellectual categories that keeps us from recognizing Helper as a fully plausible 19th-century type.”
—American Historical Review
 

“Helper (1829–1909) was the antebellum South’s most militant antislavery radical. Bailey, in this able study of his career, describes him as `a statistical fanatic, abolitionist, militant racist, ardent patriot, and railway projector’ and might have added on the strength of evidence he has so skillfully organized, `imperialist, religious bigot, and chauvinist.’. . . These paradoxes may be treated as the attributes of a peculiar individual; to his credit, Bailey properly assigns them to Helper’s class and regional moorings.”
—The Nation