“THAT VILE WRETCH” HINTON ROWAN HELPER

WITH HIS “HELPERISM”

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Would our civil war shape up as an exercise in race warfare, in class warfare, or in sectional warfare? We have now found out the answer to this, of course, but before the fact, of course (and this needs to be understood): nobody had known, and that was a source of the greatest concern. Was this thing going to shake out as white Americans killing non-white Americans and vice versa, or as rich Americans killing non-rich Americans and vice versa, or as Yankees killing Southrons and vice versa?

Until we understood who it was who was going to be killing whom, clearly, nobody on this landmass was going to be safe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1829

December 27, Sunday: Hinton Rowan Helper was born in Davie County, North Carolina. In the following year his father would die, leaving his family in difficult circumstances which would made indenture a necessity and interfere with his later ability to obtain a higher education. Rowan County, in which he would grow to maturity, was a Quaker stronghold where for many years the Religious Society of Friends had been purchasing slaves from individuals either to immediately grant manumission papers or to hold them, if absolutely necessary due to legal problems, in a condition of purely nominal enslavement. Helper would grow up to consider this sort of conduct to be an abomination, and the ruin of our white Christian nation. The Quakers were setting a bad example. People shouldn’t act like that.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 27th of 12 M 1829 / A day of but little religious favour — hard & dry - Silent meeting in the Morning & in the Afternoon Wm Almy much engaged in testimony — I think I could see that he was favoured. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

While teaching at the Friends School in Lynn, Massachusetts, Friend Abby Kelley met Friend James N. Buffum, father of her classmate, Friend Elizabeth Buffum Chase from Yearly Meeting School in Providence, Rhode Island. Friend Buffum and Friend William Bassett, two leading abolitionists in Lynn, introduced Abby to the growing number of state and local anti-slavery societies that were beginning since the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Abby joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Lynn and began distributing petitions door-to-door, sewing and selling fancy articles at the fairs to raise money for the American Anti-Slavery Society. During her school breaks Abby was visiting Boston and Worcester to attend meetings of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, meetings which women attended but at which they were expected not to speak. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1844

August 1, Thursday: At the Festival de l’Industrie in Paris, Hector Berlioz led 1,000 performers in the premiere of his Hymne à la France for chorus and orchestra to words of Barbier. By intermission, the conductor had developed cold sweats. He was induced to change clothes, and drink some punch. He was then attended by a former teacher, Dr. Amussat, who diagnosed typhoid fever, bled the composer, and prescribed a vacation.

Frederick Douglass, whose location and activities have been a mystery to us during the last half of June and all of the month of July, resurfaced in order to return to Concord and speak during the annual fair of the Anti-

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Slavery Society of Middlesex County celebrating the 1st of August liberation of the slaves of the British West Indies, with Waldo Emerson, William A. White,1 the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, Moses Grandy, and Headmaster Cyrus Pierce of the normal school in Lexington.2

Emerson had agreed to deliver an address on the “Emancipation in the ... Indies....” Henry Thoreau would soon persuade James Munroe & Company of Boston to issue Emerson’s address in the form of a pamphlet, and see it through the press of Thurston, Torry, and Company at 31 Devonshire Street in Boston. THE LIST OF LECTURES

1. This White was the white abolitionist who had in the previous year been traveling with Frederick Douglass as he lectured in Indiana. Would he be related to the Massachusetts abolitionist who is credited with being one of the 4 known presently known and recognized local conductors in the Underground Railroad, William S. White? UNDERGROUND RAILROAD 2. The John W. Blassingame volume I of THE FREDERICK DOUGLASS PAPERS does not mention the presence of Thoreau — but then I notice even Sojourner Truth is not significant enough to have received a mention anywhere in the index to this volume). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This abolitionist group had been refused permission to hold their meeting in any of the local churches, but Nathaniel Hawthorne had invited them to use the grounds of the Old Manse. However, it was rainy, so at the last minute Thoreau got permission to use the auditorium of in Concord’s courthouse. The audience at the lecture was small, and consisted mostly of visitors from outside Concord, and evidently those attending found the topic a difficult one for the Concord resident Frederic May Holland, in the first full-length biography of 3 this American figure Frederick Douglass, has stated that when these attendees had assembled afterward for a collation,4

they said to each other, “Can you eat? I cannot.” Douglass was among the listeners that morning, and also among the speakers in the afternoon.

We may note that the mulatto speaker was present on this occasion only because he had been scheduled to take part in a mass rally in Hingham MA, with the Reverends John Pierpont and James Freeman Clarke, and that rally had been postponed for one day on account of the rain. After Thoreau’s death Emerson would make a minute in his journal which would deal with the events of this day:

I have never recorded a fact which perhaps ought to have gone into my sketch of “Thoreau,” that, on the 1 August, 1844, when I read my Discourse on Emancipation, in the Town Hall, in Concord, and the selectmen would not direct the sexton to ring the meeting-house bell, Henry went himself, & rung the bell at the appointed hour.

It was the bell in the Unitarian church of Concord which Thoreau had rung. Evidently he was intercepted by the church authorities, for Holland stated that Thoreau had gotten off only “two or three unauthorized strokes” of the bell. In reading up on the subject of the emancipation, which had happened on this date 10 years before, in 1834, Emerson had made “the most painful comparisons” with the present situation for the free blacks of New England. He had noted, for instance, that if any free black man of New England should take service aboard a ship, and should enter the harbor of Charleston, or Savannah, Georgia, or New Orleans, he would be imprisoned ashore for “so long as the vessel remained in port, with the stringent addition, that if the shipmaster fails to pay the costs of this official arrest and the board in jail, these citizens are to be sold for slaves, to pay that expense.”

3. Frederic May Holland. FREDERICK DOUGLASS: THE COLORED ORATOR, original edition 1891, revised edition prepared by the author in 1895 and reprinted by Haskell House Publishers of New York in 1969. In typical Concordian style, to the point that the author appears unwilling to use Thoreau’s full name, the politics of this treatment is to minimize Thoreauvian attitudes. We are dealing here with a town that even today spreads invidious stories among its high school students, which have been passed on by several of them directly to me, that Thoreau was a local sneak thief, taking pies off of windowsills. If hypocrisy were gold, Fort Knox would be on Concord common. 4. The mulatto speaker Frederick Douglass would of course not have been able to be present while these white people of his audience were thus eating and drinking. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER On this day (or perhaps at the meeting at the Unitarian church on June 12th , or perhaps on both occasions) Emerson found that he was so impressed by the mulatto visitor whom he identified as “Douglas” with one “s,” that he wondered whether perhaps he should attribute this person’s obvious excellence to purity of his bloodlines (pure although purely Negroid, which would lead his analysis of his admiration in the direction of the Jungian trope “the genius of this race, to be honored for itself”) or whether perhaps he should consider this person’s obvious excellence to be the result of an admixture of improving European blood (which would apparently have led his analysis of his admiration in the direction of a quite different set of tropes, presumably that white bloodlines are superior to black bloodlines and that this speaker was superior to other blacks evidently due to having a greater share of this superior white ancestry). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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When at last in a race a new principle appears, an idea, that conserves it. Ideas only save races. If the black man is feeble & not important to the existing races, not on a par with the best race, the black man must serve & be sold & exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensible element of a new & coming civilization, for the sake of that element no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him, he will survive & play his part. So now it seems to me that the arrival of such men as Toussaint Louverture if he is pure blood, or of Douglas [Frederick Douglass] if he is pure blood, outweighs all the English & American humanity. The Antislavery of the whole world is but dust in the balance, a poor squeamishness & nervousness; the might & the right is here. Here is the Anti-Slave. Here is Man; & if you have man, black or white is an insignificance. Why at night all men are black. The intellect, that is miraculous, who has it has the talisman, his skin & bones are transparent, he is a statue of the living God, him I must love & serve & perpetually seek & desire & dream on: and who has it not is superfluous. But a compassion for that which is not & cannot be useful & lovely, is degrading & maudlin, this towing along as by ropes that which cannot go itself. Let us not be our own dupes; all the songs & newspapers & subscriptions of money & vituperation of those who do not agree with us will avail nothing against eternal fact. I say to you, you must save yourself, black or white, man or woman. Other help is none. I esteem the occasion of this jubilee to be that proud discovery that the black race can begin to contend with the white; that in the great anthem of the world which we call history, a piece of many parts & vast compass, after playing a long time a very low & subdued accompaniment they perceive the time arrived when they can strike in with force & effect & take a master’s part in the music. The civilization of the world has arrived at that pitch that their moral quality is becoming indispensable, & the genius of this race is to be honoured for itself. For this they have been preserved in sandy desarts [sic], in rice swamps, in kitchens & shoeshops so long. Now let them emerge clothed & in their own form. I esteem this jubilee & the fifty years’ movement which has preceded it to be the announcement of that fact & our anti-slavery societies, boastful as we are, only the shadow & witness to that fact. The negro has saved himself, and the white man very patronisingly says, I have saved you. If the negro is a fool all the white men in the world cannot save him thought they should die.... He who does his own work frees a slave. He who does not his own work, is a slave- holder. Whilst we sit here talking & smiling, some person is out there in field & shop & kitchen doing what we need, without talk or smiles.... The planter does not want slaves: give him money: give him a machine that will provide him with as much money as the slaves yield, & he will thankfully let them go: he does not love whips, or usurping overseers, or sulky swarthy giants creeping round his house & barns by night with lucifer matches in their hands & knives in their pockets. No; only he wants his luxury, & he will pay even this price for it.

TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE Thoreau also heard Frederick Douglass, but it is not known that this encounter with the impressive mulatto orator sent any equivalent racist concerns going in Thoreau’s gourd at that time — probably not, as Thoreau was never so concerned with issues of relative ascendancy as was the higher-caste Emerson. We can be utterly confident, for instance, that no literary researcher will ever be able to uncover, in any pile of unprocessed remarks in Thoreau’s handwriting, any remark even remotely similar to the following blazing amazing one HDT WHAT? INDEX

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HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER which is in Emerson’s handwriting:Quite to the contrary!5 Because Thoreau’s spirit was so utterly different

I think it cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family. Their present condition is the strongest proof that they cannot. The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all the other races have quailed and done obeisance.

ALFRED ROSENBERG WALDO EMERSON from the blind prejudice displayed above, what we might confidently expect to uncover in any new pile of unprocessed remarks in Thoreau’s handwriting would be more remarks similar to this lovely one anent the Irish interlopers in Walden Wood:

Methinks I could look with equanimity upon a long street of Irish cabins and pigs and children revelling in the genial Concord dirt, and I should still find my Walden wood and Fair Haven in their tanned and happy faces.

Note that historical revisionism has rendered Frederick Douglass’s arrival in Concord that summer utterly

5. I do drip with sarcasm, don’t I? Well, when I come across stuff like this, I can’t help myself, a demon takes over my keyboard and the screen echo comes across this way even if what I am typing is the alpha string “Hail Mary full of grace.” The point is that if Thoreau had ever been guilty of writing something like this phrase from Emerson’s miscellaneous notebooks, we would long ago have burned every existing copy of WALDEN and none of us in this generation would ever have heard of the guy. And that would be only right. Emerson, however, is invulnerable, is Teflon, nothing ever sticks to him. Or, perhaps, it is the Emerson scholars who are invulnerable, or heedless or something. That quote I attributed to Emerson, repeated below, needn’t be characterized as a piece of Emersoniana at all! It could be characterized, instead, as Emerson in the 19th Century merely –somehow– “channeling” the geist of Alfred Rosenberg (the philosopher of the Nazis in our 20th Century).

I think it cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family. Their present condition is the strongest proof that they cannot. The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all the other races have quailed and done obeisance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER transparent,6 with all the stir and ferment of that annual fair of the Anti-Slavery Society of Middlesex County being nicely explained away as nicely white Concordians interacting with other nicely white Concordians, and Emerson’s journal entry above has been attributed to mere musings made earlier –spontaneously, à propos de nothing– during the spring or earlier summer of this year, rather than to the unthinkable: an actual relevant encounter with a mulatto relevant interloper in nice polite white Concord. It has been revisionist scholarship subsequent to that point which has almost totally erased Douglass from the Concord scene, with all the stir and ferment of that Anti-Slavery Fair coming to be nicely explained away in more recent history books as merely a few of the nice white Concordians having an argument of some sort with a few other of the nice white Concordians. This almost total erasure has made it possible for Emerson scholars to attribute his lengthy “if he is pure blood” journal musing (exhibited nearby as a full separate page) about Douglass to irrelevant jottings done within the half-year timeframe rather than to the unthinkable: a specifically locatable and quite actual encounter with a black relevant interloper in nice polite white Concord. But here is the event as fantasized by a historian of this tradition7 — who, inheriting a tradition which has so conveniently forgotten the black speaker, proceeds to fantasize Emerson as having been being deeply impressed by the abstract idea of the abilities of Douglass the black man when that man, actually, was sitting before him staring him full in the face as he orated:

6. “That transparent black man over there can’t be seen and therefore hasn’t come to be heard by us, and therefore we’re not not polite in not not listening to him.” 7. Robert D. Richardson, Jr. EMERSON: THE MIND ON FIRE. Berkeley CA: U of California P, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Emerson had been asked to speak on the tenth anniversary of the British emancipation of all slaves in the British West Indies; the sponsor was the Women’s Anti-Slavery Association, to which both Lidian and Cynthia Thoreau belonged. Because abolition was a controversial subject on which the people of Concord were divided, none of the local churches would open their doors to them. The event was scheduled for the courthouse. Henry Thoreau went from door to door urging Concord residents to attend. When the sexton of the First Parish Church refused to ring the bell to announce the meeting, Henry rushed to the church and rang the bell himself. The speech itself was a departure from Emerson’s usual style in three ways. It is mainly a long chronological narrative, it is full of the oratorical devices the young Emerson had learned from Everett, and it is intended as agitprop, like Antony’s speech over the body of Caesar. Emerson intended to arouse, to inflame, to move his audience to action: “If any cannot speak, or cannot hear the words of freedom, let him go hence, — I had almost said, creep into your grave, the Universe has no need of you.” He recounted the horrors of slavery, “pregnant women set in the treadmill for refusing to work,” “men’s necks flayed with cowhide, and hot rum poured on, superinduced with brine or pickle, rubbed in with a cornhusk, in the scorching heat of the sun.” He told of “a planter throwing his negro into a copper of boiling cane-juice.” He adds heavy irony to the horrors: “The sugar they raised was excellent. Nobody tasted blood in it.” Emerson continued for page after page, giving the history of slavery and the history of efforts to stop it, culminating in the act of Parliament of August 1, 1834, by which “slavery shall be and is hereby utterly and forever abolished and declared unlawful throughout the British colonies, plantations and possession abroad.” The reason for celebrating this British act was, of course, to shame the Americans who had no such act on their books. Emerson was very much alive to the economic argument against slavery by which British manufacturers were encouraged to regard the West Indian blacks as so many potential customers. But he was also aware of the insidious psychology of slavery, and he commented on “the love of power, the voluptuousness of holding a human being in his absolute control.” For those who feared emancipation might unleash a terrible retribution and bring massive civil disorder, Emerson stressed the mild and orderly transition to freedom that occurred in the West Indies. Then, at last, he turned from the British to the Americans, who were now seen to be lagging woefully behind the times. At this point Emerson turns from his warm historical survey to the present moment and to a tone of plain anger. He was personally shocked and outraged by reports of northern blacks arrested on the docks of Massachusetts ships lying in southern ports. I have learned that a citizen of Nantucket Island, walking in New Orleans, found a freeborn citizen of Nantucket, a man, too, of great personal worth, and, as it happened, very dear to him, as having saved his own life, working chained in the streets of that city, kidnapped by such a process as this. Waldo Emerson was outraged that Massachusetts seemed to be able to do nothing to help its citizens, and he said so in blunt, HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER provocative language: “If such a damnable outrage can be committed on the person of a citizen with impunity, let the Governor break the broad seal of the state; he bears the sword in vain.” The congressional delegation from Massachusetts felt that unilateral action by Massachusetts or by the North would endanger the Union. Emerson’s reply was, “The Union is already at an end when the first citizen of Massachusetts is thus outraged.” The solution was not to be sought in further compromise and political juggling. America must follow England’s lead and free the slaves. And if Emerson had been able in his private life until now to accept some of the condescending and muddy racism that undercut the urgency of abolition by declaring the blacks an inferior race, he now explicitly broke with that rationale. He declared to his audience that “the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization.” He also saw that abolition was not simply something conceded by white people, which was the view of Thomas Clarkson’s book [which one of the three??]. “I add,” said Emerson, “that in part it is the earning of the blacks.” He was deeply impressed by the abilities of HAITI Toussaint Louverture and of Frederick Douglass. His private journal comments are just as strong as his public language. Referring specifically to his own conviction of the sufficiency of the individual, he said, “Here is the Anti-Slave. Here is Man; and if you have man, black or white is an insignificance. Why, at night all men are black.” It was also in his journal that he said, “The negro has saved himself, and the white man very patronizingly says I have saved you.” To his Concord audience Emerson said, “The black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization.” And he ended the speech not with a graceful appeal to history or good will but with a stiff and polarizing insistence that “there have been moments, I said, when men might be forgiven who doubted. Those moments are past.” The speech delighted the friends of abolition in the North. Thoreau helped with arrangements to publish the address. Soon the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier was writing to solicit Emerson’s further help at an antislavery convention. A letter from William Lloyd Garrison a few years later suggests what Emerson’s conversion meant to the cause: “You exercise a strong influence over many minds in this country which are not yet sufficiently committed to the side of the slave.... You are not afraid publicly and pointedly to testify against the enslavement of three million of our countrymen.” Emerson was solidly committed to abolition both personally and publicly from now on. His speeches on the subject would, if gathered together, fill a good-sized volume. He appeared on many platforms, but he was not now or ever comfortable as an activist, an advocate. As in the matter of the Cherokee removal, he would speak because he must, because no one else would, because he had convictions, because he believed in action. But it was just not congenial work. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The above act of historical revisionism by Robert D. Richardson, Jr. reminds us of nothing so much as of the alteration of Chinese photographs subsequent to the 1971 fall from grace of Lin Biao, the government official who had suggested the idea of “Mao’s Little Red Book,” from favor in Beijing. For many years the Chinese Communist Party would go to great expense to remove the presence of that inconvenient yellow man from every historic official photograph it could get its hands on (below is a copy from the 1960s that they simply couldn’t get their hands on, one that still shows Lin Biao standing beside Mao Tse-tsung, holding up his little red book).

Robert Richardson has altered the history of this significant 1844 Concord meeting in much the same manner, by entirely erasing that inconvenient black man. This doesn’t just happen in totalitarian countries! We’re so good here at self-censorship, that we don’t have any need for official censorship — we can get the job done all by ourselves.

Why did this history need to be so altered? Because if you listen to the Emerson oration, not with white ears but with black ears, it sounds very different. To white ears Emerson has seemed to have been benignly embracing the cause of anti-slavery. To black ears it is obvious that Emerson is acting as an agent provocateur, and attempting to goad Douglass, in his audience, to initiate the sort of servile insurrection that will get him killed — and the white backlash from which will solve America’s race problem once and for all, by removing all the black pawns from the American game.

How are we to understand Emerson? Although the man had advocated total emancipation of the American slaves after fair compensation to their owners, when someone brought him a petition to add his name to, calling for a national convention to get the ball rolling in support of total emancipation of slaves with fair compensation to the owners –precisely what he had advocated– he refused to take the pen in his hand. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER “There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate; one must be close to one’s land, passionately close in some way or other, and the only way to be close to America is to hate it; it is the only way to love America.” — Lionel Trilling HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Early in his life George William Curtis had spent two years at the Brook Farm community and school. then, in order to continue their association with Emerson, George and his older brother James Burrill Curtis had gone to live on a farm a mile north of Concord. The brothers worked for Captain Nathan Barrett and had a cottage adjoining his farmhouse, atop Punkatasset Hill. After spending part of a day with Hawthorne, George noted in his diary that the writer’s actual life was harmonious with the picture-perfect antique repose of his house, redeemed into the present by his and Mrs. Hawthorne’s infant and the wife’s tenderness and respect for her husband. His note in his diary in regard to Mr. Emerson’s address before the Antislavery Friends on this day August 1st, commemorating the 10th anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies, was merely to the effect that the address had been very commanding despite being nearly two hours long.

So Waldo began by pointing out that, actually, the institution of human slavery was in the best interest of no- HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER one, for wage-labor is more efficient and far safer:

WE are met to exchange congratulations on the anniversary of an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of reason; of the clear light; of that which makes us better than a flock of birds and beasts: a day, which gave the immense fortification of a fact, — of gross history, — to ethical abstractions. It was the settlement, as far as a great Empire was concerned, of a question on which almost every leading citizen in it had taken care to record his vote; one which for many years absorbed the attention of the best and most eminent of mankind.... If there be any man who thinks the ruin of a race of men a small matter, compared with the last decoration and completions of his own comfort, — who would not so much as part with his ice-cream, to save them from rapine and manacles, I think, I must not hesitate to satisfy that man, that also his cream and vanilla are safer and cheaper, by placing the negro nation on a fair footing, than by robbing them. If the Virginian piques himself on the picturesque luxury of his vassalage, on the heavy Ethiopian manners of his house- servants, their silent obedience, their hue of bronze, their turbaned heads, and would not exchange them for the more intelligent but precarious hired-service of whites, I shall not refuse to show him, that when their free-papers are made out, it will still be their interest to remain on his estate, and that the oldest planters of Jamaica are convinced, that it is cheaper to pay wages, than to own the slave. Simultaneous with Emerson and Douglass delivering these noteworthy speeches in Concord, in Pennsylvania Emerson’s friend, the Reverend William Henry Furness, was also taking the dangerous step of announcing himself as being in opposition to human slavery.

By way of radical contrast with Robert D. Richardson, Jr.’s putrid 1994 nobody-here-but-us-white-men account (reprinted above), here is how a more recent, much more reliable, and racially inclusive source, Gregory P. Lampe8 has analyzed this Concord meeting (the material appears on pages 236-9, and has been lightly edited to make it slightly less convoluted, and for conformity with the punctuation and spelling conventions of this Kouroo database): Frederick Douglass’s activities from mid-June to the end of July are difficult to determine. Neither The Liberator nor the National Anti-Slavery Standard advertised any of his lectures or documented his participation in any antislavery meetings during this period. According to Blassingame, ed. DOUGLASS PAPERS, SERIES ONE, 1:xciii, on June 28th Douglass attended the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society meeting in Methuen, Massachusetts. However, Douglass’s name does not appear in the minutes of the meeting, published in the Liberator of July 12th, and it is probable that he was not in attendance. Douglass was invited to attend an antislavery meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire from July 26th to 29th, but there is no indication of his presence in the accounts of the proceedings published in the Liberator of September 27th. Douglass had also been invited to be the chief speaker at the August 1st celebration in Providence, Rhode Island, but he did not attend, an outcome that greatly disappointed the organizers and left many of Providence’s blacks

8. Gregory P. Lampe. FREDERICK DOUGLASS: FREEDOM’S V OICE, 1818-1845. East Lansing MI: Michigan State UP, 1998 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER “much grieved” (Liberator of August 16th). On August 17th, Douglass wrote to the Liberator that he “deeply regretted” missing the meeting at Providence and explained his absence (Liberator of August 31st). On Thursday, August 1st, Douglass returned to Concord to participate in the commemoration of the anniversary of the emancipation of 800,000 slaves in the British West Indies. Despite a rain storm and troubles with securing a meeting place, reported a correspondent to the Liberator, the occasion was one “of deep and thrilling interest.” The meeting, initially scheduled for out-of-doors, convened at eleven o’clock in the Court House. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the featured speaker of the celebration, addressed the “large and spirited meeting” for more than two and a half hours, during which time “the whole audience gave the most undivided attention.” In the afternoon, Douglass was one of five speakers to appear before the meeting (Liberator of July 12th; National Anti-Slavery Standard of July 18th; Liberator of August 9th; National Anti-Slavery Standard of August 15th). The others speakers were William A. White, Samuel Joseph May, Moses Grandy, and Cyrus Pierce (National Anti-Slavery Standard of August 15th). Although there is no full text of Douglass’ speech, we do have a sketch of it by Laura Hosmer, a member of the committee of arrangements for the celebration. Because this is the sole account of Douglass’s address, it is worth printing in full. From it, we gain a sense both of Douglass’s message and the power of his delivery. According to Hosmer’s report in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Frederick Douglass had spoken with the deep feeling which a man of his strong mind, who had felt all the dread horrors of Slavery, must have on such an occasion; he rejoiced with a joy that was truly unspeakable, over the resurrection of so many thousands from that living grave in which they had lain buried for so many long, dreary years; he told of the unutterable joy which must have been felt by those poor bondsmen, when they received the boon of liberty —a joy which, he said, could only be conceived of by those who had, like himself, suffered as they had suffered —a joy which might be felt, but never could be told; and, said he, I rejoice with them, I rejoice with them, I REJOICE with them.” As he uttered these words, his every look and gesture showed how utterly inadequate language was to express the intensity of his feeling; his whole frame quivered with emotion, as he stood silent for a moment. “But,” said he, “while I rejoice with them, my thoughts will revert to my own country, and to the millions who are here suffering miseries from which they are now delivered.” He then depicted the state of things in our country, in language which I cannot remember to repeat, and with a power which I cannot imitate. When he had done speaking, the house was silent as if there were not a living being in it. As Hosmer’s account testifies, Douglass’s address made a powerful impression on the audience. The correspondent to the Liberator may have had Douglass’s speech in mind when he wrote, “We have been strengthened, we have been refreshed, and all I doubt not who participated with us on that day, will look back upon it as one of the bright spots on their anti-slavery course.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Certainly, Douglass’s masterful address had been one of the day’s “bright spots” (Liberator of August 9th and of August 23rd). In the oration Emerson referenced an unprovenanced tale, that “the Great Spirit, in the beginning, offered the black man, whom he loved better than the buckra or white, his choice of two boxes, a big and a little one. The black man was greedy, and chose the largest. ‘The buckra box was full up with pen, paper, and whip, and the negro box with hoe and bill; and hoe and bill for negro to this day.’” For information, since fortunately we aren’t as close to this material as once we were — here are images of a hoe plate, used primarily for chopping weeds from cultivated fields, and of a billhook, used primarily for chopping brush from uncultivated fields:

If Frederick Douglass was unacquainted with this unprovenanced tale of Emerson’s, he would surely have been acquainted with the use of the tools it mentioned. Imagine how he must have chuckled at this point in the Sage of Concord’s oration!

Imagine how the black man reacted, when Emerson characterized nice polite negroes and how they would nicely, politely hold themselves back in order to let the white man “go ahead,” and would modestly remind one another not to be pushy, never to dare to irritate The Man — “social position is not to be gained by pushing.”

Imagine how the black man reacted, when the white man pointed up the fact that the genius of the Saxon race, his own race, was friendly to liberty; that the enterprise, the very muscular vigor of his nation, was inconsistent with slavery — that the salient difference between the white race and the black race, which had resulted in the white race enslaving the black race rather than vice versa, was that the white race would never permit itself to be enslaved.

Imagine how the black man reacted, when the white man predicted that if the black man continued to be feeble, and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, then the black man was fated to continue to serve — and was fated to “be exterminated.”

Imagine how the black man reacted, when the white man suggested that only if the black man carried in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization, would he be able to “survive and play his part.”

Imagine how the black man reacted, when the white man described the occasion of this annual celebration of HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER the emancipation of the negroes of the British West Indies as reminding us all, that after playing for such a long time such a very low and subdued accompaniment, in the future “the black race can contend with the white [and] can strike in with effect, and take a master’s part in the music.”

Imagine how the black man reacted, when the white man spoke of “the arrival in the world of such men as Toussaint, and the Haytian heroes, or of the leaders of their race in Barbadoes and Jamaica,” and how important this was for the future success of the black race!

What a mixed message the black man received on that day! Here’s the message, in loud black letters:

IF YOU DON’T GET PUSHY YOU’LL GET EXTERMINATED

— BUT GET PUSHY AND YOU’LL BE EXTERMINATED.

This was the shadow side of the coin which the white American worshiped: “It is difficult to describe the rapacity with which the American rushes forward to receive the immense booty which fortune proffers to him. He is goaded onward by a passion more intense than love of life. Before him lies a boundless continent, and he urges onward as if time pressed, and he was afraid of finding no room for his exertions.” — Alexis de Tocqueville

By way of radical contrast, the sort of emancipation Emerson had on his front burner was offshore, with mainland emancipation definitely and comfortably on his back burner: “EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES”: But the crude element of good in human affairs must work and ripen, spite of whips, and plantation-laws, and West Indian interest. Conscience rolled on its pillow, and could not sleep. We sympathize very tenderly here with the poor aggrieved planter, of whom so many unpleasant things are said; but if we saw the whip applied to old men, to tender women; and, undeniably, though I shrink to say so, — pregnant women set in the treadmill for refusing to work, when, not they, but the eternal law of animal nature refused to work; — if we saw men’s backs flayed with cowhides, and “hot rum poured on, superinduced with brine or pickle, rubbed in with a cornhusk, in the scorching heat of the sun;” — if we saw the runaways hunted with blood-hounds into swamps and hills; and, in cases of passion, a planter throwing his negro into a copper of boiling cane-juice, — if we saw these things with eyes, we too should wince. They are not pleasant sights. The blood is moral: the blood is anti-slavery: it runs cold in the veins: the stomach rises with disgust, and curses slavery. Well, so it happened; a good man or woman, a country-boy or girl, it would so fall out, once in a while saw these injuries, and had the indiscretion to tell of them. The horrid story ran and flew; the winds blew it all over the world. They who heard it, asked their rich and great friends, if it was true, or only missionary lies. The richest and greatest, the prime minister of England, the king’s privy council were obliged to say, that it was too true. It became plain to all men, the more this business was looked HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER into, that the crimes and cruelties of the slave-traders and slave-owners could not be overstated. The more it was searched, the more shocking anecdotes came up, — things not to be spoken. Humane persons who were informed of the reports, insisted on proving them. Granville Sharpe was accidentally made acquainted with the sufferings of a slave, whom a West Indian planter had brought with him to London, and had beaten with a pistol on his head so badly, that his whole body became diseased, and the man, useless to his master, who left him to go whither he pleased. The man applied to Mr. William Sharpe, a charitable surgeon, who attended the diseases of the poor. In process of time, he was healed. Granville Sharpe found him at his brother’s, and procured a place for him in an apothecary’s shop. The master accidentally met his recovered slave, and instantly endeavored to get possession of him again. Sharpe protected the slave. In consulting with the lawyers, they told Sharpe the laws were against him. Sharpe would not believe it; no prescription on earth could ever render such iniquities legal. ‘But the decisions are against you, and Lord Mansfield, now chief justice of England, leans to the decisions.’ Sharpe instantly sat down and gave himself to the study of English law for more than two years, until he had proved that the opinions relied on of Talbot and Yorke, were incompatible with the former English decisions, and with the whole spirit of English law. He published his book in 1769, and he so filled the heads and hearts of his advocates, that when he brought the case of George Somerset, another slave, before Lord Mansfield, the slavish decisions were set aside, and equity affirmed. There is a sparkle of God’s righteousness in Lord Mansfield’s judgment, which does the heart good. Very unwilling had that great lawyer been to reverse the late decisions; he suggested twice from the bench, in the course of the trial, how the question might be got rid of: but the hint was not taken; the case was adjourned again and again, and judgment delayed. At last judgment was demanded, and on the 22d June, 1772, Lord Mansfield is reported to have decided in these words; Immemorial usage preserves the memory of positive law, long after all traces of the occasion, reason, authority, and time of its introduction, are lost; and in a case so odious as the condition of slaves, must be taken strictly; (tracing the subject to natural principles, the claim of slavery never can be supported.) The power claimed by this return never was in use here. We cannot say the cause set forth by this return is allowed or approved of by the laws of this kingdom; and therefore the man must be discharged. This decision established the principle that the “air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe,” but the wrongs in the islands were not thereby touched. Public attention, however, was drawn that way, and the methods of the stealing and the transportation from Africa, became noised abroad. The Quakers got the story. In their plain meeting-houses, and prim dwellings, this dismal agitation got entrance. They were rich: they owned for debt, or by inheritance, island property; they were religious, tender-hearted men and women; and they had to hear the news, and digest it as they could. Six Quakers met in London on the 6th July, 1783; William Dillwyn, Samuel Hoar, HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER George Harrison, Thomas Knowles, John Lloyd, Joseph Woods, “to consider what step they should take for the relief and liberation of the negro slaves in the West Indies, and for the discouragement of the slave-trade on the coast of Africa.” They made friends and raised money for the slave; they interested their Yearly Meeting; and all English and all American Quakers. John Woolman of New Jersey, whilst yet an apprentice, was uneasy in his mind when he was set to write a bill of sale of a negro, for his master. He gave his testimony against the traffic, in Maryland and Virginia. Thomas Clarkson was a youth at Cambridge, England, when the subject given out for a Latin prize dissertation, was, “Is it right to make slaves of others against their will?” He wrote an essay, and won the prize; but he wrote too well for his own peace; he began to ask himself, if these things could be true; and if they were, he could no longer rest. He left Cambridge; he fell in with the six Quakers. They engaged him to act for them. He himself interested Mr. Wilberforce in the matter. The shipmasters in that trade were the greatest miscreants, and guilty of every barbarity to their own crews. Clarkson went to Bristol, made himself acquainted with the interior of the slaveships, and the details of the trade. The facts confirmed his sentiment, “that Providence had never made that to be wise, which was immoral, and that the slave-trade — was as impolitic as it was unjust;” that it was found peculiarly fatal to those employed in it. More seamen died in that trade, in one year, than in the whole remaining trade of the country in two. Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox were drawn into the generous enterprise. In 1788, the House of Commons voted Parliamentary inquiry. In 1791, a bill to abolish the trade was brought in by Wilberforce, and supported by him, and by Fox, and Burke, and Pitt, with the utmost ability and faithfulness; resisted by the planters, and the whole West Indian interest, and lost. During the next sixteen years, ten times, year after year, the attempt was renewed by Mr. Wilberforce, and ten times defeated by the planters. The king, and all the royal family but one, were against it. These debates are instructive, as they show on what grounds the trade was assailed and defended. Every thing generous, wise, and sprightly is sure to come to the attack. On the other part, are found cold prudence, barefaced selfishness, and silent votes. But the nation was aroused to enthusiasm. Every horrid fact became known. In 1791, three hundred thousand persons in Britain pledged themselves to abstain from all articles of island produce. The planters were obliged to give way; and in 1807, on the 25th March, the bill passed, and the slave-trade was abolished.

Hinton Rowan Helper would be able to make significant use of Emerson’s Concord oration celebrating the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, in his infamous 1859 COMPENDIUM OF THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH. BY HINTON ROWAN HELPER OF NORTH CAROLINA. In the course of this, Helper would refer to Emerson as “the most practical and profound metaphysician in America.” Which raises an interesting point, in regard to an email which I have received from some person whose take on the matter required him to object that “Helper’s social assumptions would not be to the liking of Emerson.” I responded to this person’s communication, bluntly derogating the level of his scholarship: “I would suggest that your impression, that Hinton Rowan Helper’s social assumptions would not be to the liking of Waldo Emerson, can only be one that is based entirely on the perusal of exclusively secondary sources about Emerson’s thought. You have been misled. These secondary sources are quite tendentiously wrongheaded. Emerson was an abolitionist for the most racist of reasons; he believed that the institution of slavery gave these inferior people HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER a way to survive in ‘our’ superior culture, and he wanted to deny them that toehold so that they would no longer have white friends (slavemasters) to nurture and protect them, and would no longer be able to survive here and cause ‘us’ problems. What he most urgently wanted was an Aryan Nation. I have made the most careful chronological record of everything that Emerson wrote about race, taking full account of who he was writing to and in what circumstances, and of all recorded interactions between Emerson and persons of color, and I can assure you that the real Ralph Waldo Emerson’s racial agenda would have been fully satisfied, had all the persons of color in this nation died off at once — if only that mass death could in some way be managed so that it could not be laid on the moral doorstep of the white Americans. The difficulty with the Helper book was that Helper took the sort of argument that was being passed around among white men of action in private, and put this argument out where it never should have been put out (from the standpoint of their covert agenda), which is to say, out in public, out in written form, in black and white on the page. In other words, he frightened people by loudly and overtly proclaiming what they took to be the truth, and proclaiming it blatantly rather than restricting it to the males-only coffee-and-cigar hour in the study after dinner. He was indiscreet and this indiscretion was making it more difficult to arrange rather than easier to arrange, that the Americans of color ‘be disappeared’ without any white responsibility or culpability.”

(Needless to say, this correspondent did not persist in our email discussion.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1850

February: Herman Melville returned from England.

The Reverend Daniel Foster had been supplementing his income as a reverend in a Methodist church in Danvers, Massachusetts with a teaching position in the local schools, but his strong anti-slavery feelings had created conflicts with the School Board and he had been dismissed, and so he took over a church in Chester, Massachusetts and there got married with Deborah “Dora” T. Swift (aunt of Lindsey Swift, the Brook Farm historian).

The young man Hinton Rowan Helper’s indenture being completed, he moved to New-York to seek his fortune. Unfortunately, his idea of seeking a fortune would never seem to involve any great deal of hard work, and he would depend more upon being personally impressive — which indeed he was.

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Brad Dean’s Inquiry about Dora Swift Foster In March of 1851 a fellow named the Reverend Daniel Foster (1816- 1864) moved from Chester MA, to Concord MA, where he took over the pastorate of the Trinitarian Church. Foster had about a year before he married Deborah “Dora” T. Swift of Cambridge, and after he saved some money and she had a baby daughter, Foster brought his wife and newborn daughter, Alice, to Concord, where during the next couple of years Dora became fast friends with HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER one of the parishioners of the Trinitarian Church, Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau, who also became like a second mother to little Alice Foster. This friendship deepened over the next several years and became especially close after Daniel Foster died in the Civil War as captain of a regiment of U.S. Colored Troops. When Sophia died, she left many of the Thoreau family items –including the family dining table– to Dora Foster, who was perennially poor, before and particularly after her husband died. Dora lived from the mid-1860s until about 1890 as a resident of South Boston, where she was a member of St. Matthew’s Church. When she became an invalid, she moved in with relatives who lived in West New Brighton on Staten Island. She died there on Saturday, 2 July 1892. Because Dora had many Thoreau family items, I am very interested in tracking down her will to see if I can find out who inherited her stuff. I know that Dora was survived by Miss Annie Foster, a daughter, and that Annie Foster lived at 129 Marlborough Street in [South?] Boston at least as late as May 28, 1911, when she and her cousin the Brook Farm historian Lindsay Swift visited Concord and delivered addresses about Daniel Foster at the Trinitarian Church. Given all this, I have two questions: (1) Does anyone know probate law well enough to know where Dora Foster’s will would have been placed in probate — Boston or West New Brighton? and (2) Does anyone have any ideas on how I might track down the descendants of Daniel, Dora, and Annie Foster?

Fall: When Hinton Rowan Helper’s former employer came to visit him in New-York, the young man confessed to a guilty conscience and blurted out that for a number of years during his apprenticeship he had been pilfering small amounts. He had, however, he said, kept a meticulous record, and offered this man a personal signed IOU for $300 in return for a pledge of permanent secrecy as to his previous indiscretion and turpitude. (In 1857, angered and threatened of course by Helper’s published political attitudes, this former employer would reveal the existence of this IOU and the circumstances of its origin, so that Helper could ever-so-conveniently be condemned by Southern politicians as a mere thief.)

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1851

January 31, Friday: Bemused by the fact that a young man could not get on in New-York without having to work harder than he personally wanted ever to have to work, Hinton Rowan Helper sailed on the Stag Hound for the California gold fields. Would he find it easier to pick up gold off the ground in California than in the streets of New-York? –Stay tuned. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER May 25, Sunday: This was Waldo Emerson’s 48th birthday.

On some date just a bit earlier than this Sunday (we are not able to be exact about this date), Emerson had spoken in Cambridge before an audience of Harvard College authorities and students that was hostile because it knew Emerson had declared himself opposed to slavery: “The hisses, shouts, and cat-calls made it impossible for Mr. Emerson to go on. Through all this there never was a finer spectacle of dignity and composure than he presented. He stood with perfect quietness until the hubbub was over, and then went on with the next word. It was as if nothing had happened: there was no repetition, no allusion to what had been going on, no sign that he was moved, and I cannot describe with what added weight the next words fell.”

Perhaps it would have helped Emerson’s reputation, had he explained to this crowd that the reason why he was against slavery was that he did not feel there should be any place at all in American society for the black race. That although he had decided to be against enslaving them, he had not removed them from the category “not- us.” That, in effect, his good white audience ought not to distrust him for he was still as racist as he had always been. Emerson entered the following explanation in his journal sometime during May or June:

The absence of moral feeling in the whiteman is the very calamity I deplore. The captivity of a thousand negroes is nothing to me.

(Perhaps the above will help to explain why a stone racist like Hinton Rowan Helper would so adore this essayist.)

During this same period, he also made an entry indicating that he was distancing himself from the American public, on account of his morals, which were higher than theirs, higher even than the morals of the American leaders whose counsel was being found more acceptable than was his own counsel:

Webster truly represents the American people just as they are, with their vast material interests, materialized intellect, & low morals. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER The Emerson-worshiper Hinton Rowan Helper arrived full of golden expectation in San Francisco after a four- month seasick trip aboard the Stag Hound around the Horn. However, he would soon discover that to obtain the gold of California required “a greater sacrifice of moral and physical wealth than a single exchange of it afterwards can possibly restore.”

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

May 25, Sunday: A fine freshening air a little hazy that bathes & washes everything –saving the day from extreme heat. Walked to the hills south of Wayland. by the road by Dea. Farrar’s. 1st vista just beyond Menans? looking west –down a valley with a verdant-columned elm at the extremity of the vale –& the blue hills & horizon beyond These are the resting places in a walk. We love to see any part of the earth tinged with blue –cerulean the color of the sky. The celestial color. I wonder that houses are not oftener located mainly that they may command particular rare prospects –every convenince yielding to this. The farmer would never suspect what it was you were buying, & such sites would be the cheapest of any. A site where you might avail yourself of the art of nature for these thousand years Which could never be materially changed –or taken from you a noble inheritance for your children. The true sites for human dwellings are unimproved– They command no price in the market. Men will pay something to look into a travelling showman’s box –but not to look upon the fairest prospects on the earth. A vista where you have the near green horizon contrasted with the distant blue one terrestrial with celestial earth. The prospect of a vast horizon must be accessible in our neighborhood. Where men of enlarged views may be educated.– An unchangeable kind of wealth a real estate– There we found the celandine in blossom & the Ranunculus bulbosus which we afterward saw double in Wayland –having nine petals. The pyrus arbutifolia –variety melanocarpa –Gray makes also the variety erythrocarpa Is this the late red choke berry of the swamps –& is the former the earlier black one of the swamps? By Farrars’ the Nepeta Glechoma a kind of mint Linnaeus calls it G. Hederacea looks some what like catnep HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER The marsh marigold –caltha palustris improperly called cowslip.

The white oak Quercus alba. And the commonest scrub oak the bear or Black oak –Q. Illicifolia– The Chinquapin or Dwarf Chestnut oak the smallest of our oaks –Q. prinoides The crataegus coccinea? –or scarlet fruited Thorn? Another glorious vista with a wide horizon at the yellow Dutch House just over the Wayland line by the Black spruce Heavy & dark as night –which we could see 2 or 3 miles as a land mark –now at least before the deciduous trees have fully expanded their leaves it is remarkably black– It is more stoutly & irregularly branched than Holbrooks spruces has a much darker foliage –but the cone scales of both are slightly waved or notched are they then both black spruce? The cones are enough alike & the thickness of the leaves –their color enough unlike. Here is a view of the Jenkin’s House –the fish pole house & Wachuset beyond Noticed what I think must be a young poison sumack abundant by the roadside in woods –with last years berries –with small greenish yellow flowers but leaves not pinnatified 3 together From 1 to 2 ft high– What is it? Alnus serrulata the common alder with a greyish stem leaves smooth on both sides– Alnus incana the speckled alder downy on under side of leaves. The hard-berried plant seems to be Andromeda ligustrina? of Gray A. Paniculata of Bigelow –Lyonia Paniculata of Emerson Thyme leaved veronica little bluish white streak pettalled flower by roadsides –silene Pensylvanica What is the orange yellow aster-like flower of the meadows now in blossom with a sweet smelling stem when bruised? What the delicate pinkish & yellowish flower with hoary green stems & leaves of rocky hills. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Saw Bunker Hill monument & Charlestown from the wayland hills and across the vallies to Milton Hill–

Westward or W by S on island in a pond or in the river (!Which see!) A grand horizon. Probably saw the elm between Wayland & Weston which is seen so far in the horizon from the N W part of Sudbury. A good a rare place this must be to view the sudbury or Wayland meadows a little earlier. Came back across lots to the Black-spruce Now at 81/2 o clock PM –I hear the dreaming of the frogs– So it seems to me & so significantly passes my life away. It is like the dreaming of frogs in a summer evening.

June: Hinton Rowan Helper, ever a believer in “lawn order,” participated in a California-frontier lynch mob that hanged a pair of men who were by popular acclamation being suspected of having robbed a 2d man. “Such proceedings as these,” he would comment, “produced order throughout the state.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1852

December 11, Saturday: Frederick Law Olmsted set out on a 14-month tour from Virginia down through the Deep South into Texas. He had already decided that slavery was wrong before beginning this journalistic assignment of touring the slave states extended to him by a fellow Free-Soiler, Henry Raymond, editor of the New-York Daily Times. A Hartford-born scientific farmer and the son of a prosperous merchant, he had studied agricultural science and engineering at Yale. Having put a large part of his 130-acre farm on Staten Island into fruit trees, by the time he came to the plantation system of the South he was not inclined to make the usual sort of “city boy” idealistic mistakes about farming. He would send off his newspaper articles as he went along and subsequently rework these into three books, A JOURNEY IN THE SEABOARD SLAVE STATES in 1856, A JOURNEY THROUGH TEXAS in 1857, and A JOURNEY IN THE BACK COUNTRY in 1860. Then he would condense and considerably revise the initial three books and issue the material again in 1861as THE COTTON KINGDOM. He hoped to persuade the white planters that the enslavement of others wasn’t paying off for them – a mission not unlike that the indignant North Carolinian, Hinton Rowan Helper, intended for his polemical THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH which would appear shortly after Olmsted’s first book, but carried out by Olmsted in a considerably more subtle and indirect manner. Then in later years Olmsted would become a landscape architect, and design New York’s Central Park and the White City of the Chicago’s World Fair.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR DECEMBER 11th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

I think the slaves generally (no one denies that there are exceptions) have plenty to eat; probably are fed better than the proletarian class of any other part of the world. I think that they generally save from their ration of meal. My informant said that commonly as much as five bushels of meal was sent to town by his hands every week, to be sold for them. Upon inquiry, he almost always found that it belonged to only two or three individuals, who had traded for it with the rest; he added, that too often the exchange was for whisky, which, against his rules, they obtained of some rascally white people in the neighborhood, and kept concealed. They were very fond of whisky, and sometimes much injured themselves with it. To show me how well they were supplied with eggs, he said that once a vessel came to anchor, becalmed, off his place, and the captain came to him and asked leave to purchase some eggs of his people. He gave him permission, and called the cook to collect them for him. The cook asked how many she should bring. “Oh, all you can get,” he answered — and she returned after a time, with several boys assisting her, bringing nearly two bushels, all the property of the slaves, and which they were willing to sell at four cents a dozen. One of the smokers explained to me that it is very bad economy, not to allow an abundant supply of food to “a man’s force.” The negroes are fond of good living, and, if not well provided for, know how to provide for themselves. It is, also, but simple policy to have them well lodged and clothed. If they do not have comfortable cabins and sufficient clothing, they will take cold, and be laid up. He lost a very valuable negro, once, from having neglected to provide him with shoes. Lodgings The houses of the slaves are usually log-cabins, of various degrees of comfort and commodiousness. At one end there is a great open fire-place, which is exterior to the wall of the house, being made of clay in an inclosure, about eight feet square and high, of logs. The chimney is sometimes of brick, but more commonly of lath or split sticks, laid up like log-work and plastered with mud. They enjoy great roaring fires, and, as the common fuel is pitch pine, the cabin, at night when the door is open, seen from a distance, appears like a fierce furnace. The chimneys often catch fire, and the cabin is destroyed. Very little precaution can be taken against this danger. Several cabins are placed near together, and they are called “the quarters.” On a plantation of moderate size there will be but one “quarters.” The situation chosen for it has reference to convenience of obtaining water from springs and fuel from the woods. On some of the James River plantations there are larger houses, boarded and made ornamental. In these, eight families, each having a distinct sleeping-room and lock-up closets, and every two having a common kitchen or living-room, are accommodated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

He had had an Irish gang draining for him, by contract. He thought a negro could do twice as much work, in a day, as an Irishman. He had not stood over them and seen them at work, but judged entirely from the amount they accomplished: he thought a good gang of negroes would have got on twice as fast. He was sure they must have “trifled” a great deal, or they would have accomplished more than they had. He complained much, also, of their sprees and quarrels. I asked why he should employ Irishmen, in preference to doing the work with his own hands. “It’s dangerous work (unhealthy?), and a negro’s life is too valuable to be risked at it. If a negro dies, it’s a considerable loss, you know.” He afterwards said that his negroes never worked so hard as to tire themselves-always were lively, and ready to go off on a frolic at night. He did not think they ever did half a fair day’s work. They could not be made to work hard: they never would lay out their strength freely, and it was impossible to make them do it. This is just what I have thought when I have seen slaves at work-they seem to go through the motions of labor without putting strength into them. They keep their powers in reserve for their own use at night, perhaps. Mr. W. also said that he cultivated only the coarser and lower-priced sorts of tobacco, because the finer sorts required more painstaking and discretion than it was possible to make a large gang of negroes use. “You can make a nigger work,” he said, “but you cannot make him think.” Although Mr. W. was very wealthy (or, at least, would be considered so anywhere at the North), and was a gentleman of education, his style of living was very farmer-like, and thoroughly Southern. On their plantations, generally, the Virginia gentlemen seem to drop their full- dress and constrained town-habits, and to live a free, rustic, shooting- jacket life. We dined in a room that extended out, rearwardly, from the house, and which, in a Northern establishment, would have been the kitchen. The cooking was done in a detached log-cabin, and the dishes brought some distance, through the open air, by the servants. The outer door was left constantly open though there was a fire in an enormous old fire-place, large enough, if it could have been distributed sufficiently, to have lasted a New York seamstress the best part of the winter. By the door, there was indiscriminate admittance to negro children and fox-hounds, and, on an average, there were four of these, grinning or licking their chops, on either side of my chair, all the time I was at the table. A stout woman acted as head waitress, employing two handsome little mulatto boys as her aids in communicating with the kitchen, from which relays of hot corn-bread, of an excellence quite new to me, were brought at frequent intervals. There was no other bread, and but one vegetable served-sweet potato, roasted in ashes, and this, I thought, was the best sweet potato, also, that I ever had eaten; but there were four preparations of swine’s flesh, besides fried fowls, fried eggs, cold roast turkey, and opossum, cooked I know not how, but it somewhat resembled baked sucking-pig. The only beverages on the table were milk and whisky. I was pressed to stay several days with Mr. W., and should have been glad to have accepted such hospitality, had not another engagement prevented. When I was about to leave, an old servant was directed to get a horse, and go with me, as guide, to the rail-road station at Col. Gillin’s. He followed behind me, and I had great difficulty in inducing him to ride near enough to converse with me. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

I wished to ascertain from him how old the different stages of the old- field forest-growth, by the side of our road, might be; but, for a long time, he was, or pretended to be, unable to comprehend my questions. When he did so, the most accurate information he could give me was, that he reckoned such a field (in which the pines were now some sixty feet high) had been planted with tobacco the year his old master bought him. He thought he was about twenty years old then, and that now he was forty. He had every appearance of being seventy. He frequently told me there was no need for him to go any further, and that it was a dead, straight road to the station, without any forks. As he appeared very eager to return, I was at length foolish enough to allow myself to be prevailed upon to dispense with his guidance; gave him a quarter of a dollar for his time that I had employed, and went on alone. The road, which for a short distance further was plain enough, soon began to ramify, and, in half an hour, we were stumbling along a dark wood- path, looking eagerly for a house. At length, seeing one across a large clearing, we went through a long lane, opening gates and letting down bars, until we met two negroes, riding a mule, who were going to the plantation near the school-house, which we had seen the day before. Following them thither, we knew the rest of the way (Jane gave a bound and neighed, when we struck the old road, showing that she had beef lost, as well as I, up to the moment). It was twenty minutes after the hour given in the time-table for the passage of the train, when I reached the station, but it had not arrived; nor did it make its appearance for a quarter of an hour longer; so I had plenty of time to deliver Tom’s wife’s message and take leave of Jane. I am sorry to say she appeared very indifferent, and seemed to think a good deal more of Tom than of me. Mr. W. had told me that the train would, probably, be half an hour behind its advertised time, and that I had no need to ride with haste, to reach it. I asked Col. Gillin if it would be safe to always calculate on the train being half an hour late: he said it would not; for, although usually that much behind the time- table, it was sometimes half an hour ahead of it. So those, who would be safe, had commonly to wait an hour. People, therefore, who wished to go not more than twenty miles from home, would find it more convenient, and equally expeditious, taking all things into account, to go in their own conveyance-there being but few who lived so near the station that they would not have to employ a horse and servant to get to it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

Half an hour after this I arrived at the negro-quarter — a little hamlet of ten or twelve small and dilapidated cabins. Just beyond them was a plain farm-gate, at which several negroes were standing; one of them, a well-made man, with an intelligent countenance and prompt manner, directed me how to find my way to his owner’s house. It was still nearly a mile distant; and yet, until I arrived in its immediate vicinity, I saw no cultivated field, and but one clearing. On the edge of this clearing, a number of negroes, male and female, lay stretched out upon the ground near a small smoking charcoal pit. Their master afterwards informed me that they were burning charcoal for the plantation blacksmith, using the time allowed them for holidays — from Christmas to New Year’ — to earn a little money for themselves in this way. He paid them by the bushel for it. When I said that I supposed he allowed them to take what wood they chose for this purpose, he replied that he had five hundred acres covered with wood, which he would be very glad to have any one burn, or clear off in any way. Cannot some Yankee contrive a method of concentrating some of the valuable properties of this old field pine, so that they may be profitably brought into use in more cultivated regions? Charcoal is now brought to New York from Virginia; but when made from pine it is not very valuable, and will only bear transportation from the banks of the navigable rivers, whence it can be shipped, at one movement, to New York. Turpentine does not flow in sufficient quantity from this variety of the pine to be profitably collected, and for lumber it is of very small value. Mr. W.’s house was an old family mansion, which he had himself remodeled in the Grecian style, and furnished with a large wooden portico. An oak forest had originally occupied the ground where it stood; but this having been cleared and the soil worn out in cultivation by the previous proprietors, pine woods now surrounded it in every direction, a square of a few acres only being kept clear immediately about it. A number of the old oaks still stood in the rear of the house, and, until Mr. W. commenced his improvements, there had been some in its front. These, however, he had cut away, as interfering with the symmetry of his grounds, and in place of them had planted ailanthus trees in parallel rows. On three sides of the outer part of the cleared square there was a row of large and comfortable-looking negro-quarters, stables, tobaccohouses, and other offices, built of logs. Mr. W. was one of the few large planters, of his vicinity, who still made the culture of tobacco their principal business. He said there was a general prejudice against tobacco, in all the tide-water region of the State, because it was through the culture of tobacco that the once fertile soils had been impoverished; but he did not believe that, at the present value of negroes, their labor could be applied to the culture of grain, with any profit, except under peculiarly favorable circumstances. Possibly, the use of guano might make wheat a paying crop, but he still doubted. He had not used it, himself. Tobacco required fresh land, and was rapidly exhausting, but it returned more money, for the labor used upon it, than anything else; enough more, in his opinion, to pay for the wearing out of the land. If he was well- paid for it, he did not know why he should not wear out his land. His tobacco-fields were nearly all in a distant and lower part of his plantation; land which had been neglected before his time, in a great measure, because it had been sometimes flooded, and was, much of the year, too wet for cultivation. He was draining and clearing it, and it now brought good crops. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report: Free-labor Farm in Virginia I have been visiting a farm, cultivated entirely by free-labor. The proprietor told me that he was first led to disuse slave-labor, not from any economical considerations, but because he had become convinced that there was an essential wrong in holding men in forced servitude with any other purpose than to benefit them alone, and because he was not willing to allow his own children to be educated as slave-masters. His father had been a large slaveholder, and he felt very strongly the bad influence it had had on his own character. He wished me to be satisfied that Jefferson uttered a great truth when he asserted that slavery was more pernicious to the white race than the black. Although, therefore, a chief part of his inheritance had been in slaves, he had liberated them all. Most of them had, by his advice, gone to Africa. These he had frequently heard from. Except a child that had been drowned, they were, at his last account, all alive, in general good health, and satisfactorily prospering. He had lately received a letter from one of them, who told him that he was “trying to preach the Gospel,” and who had evidently greatly improved, both intellectually and morally, since he left here. With regard to those going North, and the common opinion that they encountered much misery, and would be much better off here, he said that it entirely depended on the general character and habits of the individual: it was true of those who were badly brought up, and who had acquired indolent and vicious habits, especially if they were drunkards, but, if of some intelligence and well-trained, they generally represented themselves to be successful and contented. He mentioned two remarkable cases, that had come under his own observation, of this kind. One was that of a man who had been free, but, by some fraud and informality of his papers, was re-ënslaved. He ran away, and afterwards negotiated, by correspondence, with his master, and purchased his freedom. This man he had accidentally met fifteen years afterwards, in a Northern city; he was engaged in profitable and increasing business, and showed him, by his books, that he was possessed of property to the amount of ten thousand dollars. He was living a great deal more comfortably and wisely than ever his old master had done. The other case was that of a colored woman, who had obtained her freedom, and who became apprehensive that she also was about to be fraudulently made a slave again. She fled to Philadelphia, where she was nearly starved, at first. A little girl, who heard her begging in the streets to be allowed to work for bread, told her that her mother was wanting some washing done, and she followed her home. The mother, not knowing her, was afraid to trust her with the articles to be washed. She prayed so earnestly for the job, however-suggesting that she might be locked into a room until she had completed it — that it was given her. So she commenced life in Philadelphia. Ten years afterwards he had accidentally met her there; she recognized him immediately, recalled herself to his recollection, manifested the greatest joy at seeing him, and asked him to come to her house, which he found a handsome three- story building, furnished really with elegance; and she pointed out to him, from the window, three houses in the vicinity that she owned and rented. She showed great anxiety to have her children well educated, and was employing the best instructors for them which she could procure in Philadelphia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

This gentleman, notwithstanding his anti-slavery sentiments, by no means favors the running away of slaves, and thinks the Abolitionists have done immense harm to the cause they have at heart. He wishes Northerners would mind their business, and leave Slavery alone, say but little about it —nothing in the present condition of affairs at the South— and never speak of it but in a kind and calm manner. He would not think it right to return a fugitive slave; but he would never assist one to escape. He has several times purchased slaves, generally such as his neighbors were obliged to sell, and who would otherwise have been taken South. This he had been led to do by the solicitation of some of their relatives. He had retained them in his possession until their labor had in some degree returned their cost to him, and he could afford to provide them with the means of going to Africa or the North, and a small means of support after their arrival. Having received some suitable training in his family, they had, without exception, been successful, and had frequently sent him money to purchase the freedom of relatives or friends they had left in slavery. He considered the condition of slaves to have much improved since the Revolution, and very perceptibly during the last twenty years. The original stock of slaves, the imported Africans, he observed, probably required to be governed with much greater severity, and very little humanity was exercised or thought of with regard to them. The slaves of the present day are of a higher character; in fact, he did not think more than half of them were full-blooded Africans. Public sentiment condemned the man who treated his slaves with cruelty. The owners were mainly men of some cultivation, and felt a family attachment to their slaves, many of whom had been the playmates of their boyhood. Nevertheless, they were frequently punished severely, under the impulse of temporary passion, often without deliberation, and on unfounded suspicion. This was especially the case where they were left to overseers, who, though sometimes men of intelligence and piety, were more often coarse, brutal, and licentious; drinking men, wholly unfitted for the responsibility imposed on them. He had read UNCLE TOM’S CABIN; mentioned several points in which he thought it wrong —that Uncle Tom was too highly painted, for instance; that such a character could not exist in, or spring out of Slavery, and that no gentleman of Kentucky or Virginia would have allowed himself to be in the position with a slave-dealer in which Mr. Shelby is represented— but he acknowledged that cases of cruelty and suffering, equal to any described in it, might be found. In his own neighborhood, some time ago, a man had been whipped to death; and he recollected several that had been maimed for life, by harsh and hasty punishment; but the whole community were indignant when such things occurred, and any man guilty of them would be without associates, except of similar character. The opinions of this gentleman must not, of course, be considered as representative of those of the South in general, by any means; but as to facts, he is a competent, and, I believe, a wholly candid and unprejudiced witness. He is much respected, and on terms of friendship with all his neighbors, though they do not like his views on this subject. He told me, however, that one of them, becoming convinced of their correctness some time ago, freed his slaves, and moved to Ohio. As to UNCLE TOM, it is generally criticised very severely, and its representations of Slavery indignantly denied. I observe that it is not placarded outside the booksellers’ stores, though the whole fleet of gunboats that have been launched after it show their colors bravely. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

It [UNCLE TOM’S CABIN] must, however, be a good deal read here, as I judge from the frequent allusions I hear made to it. With regard to the value of slave-labor, this gentleman is confident that, at present, he has the advantage in employing freemen instead of it. It has not been so until of late, the price of slaves having much advanced within ten years, while immigration has made free white laborers more easy to be procured. He has heretofore had some difficulty in obtaining hands when he needed them, and has suffered a good deal from the demoralizing influence of adjacent slave-labor, the men, after a few months’ residence, inclining to follow the customs of the slaves with regard to the amount of work they should do in a day, or their careless mode of operation. He has had white and black Virginians, sometimes Germans, and latterly Irish. Of all these, he has found the Irish on the whole the best. The poorest have been the native white Virginians; next, the free blacks: and though there have been exceptions, he has not generally paid these as high as one hundred dollars a year, and has thought them less worth their wages than any he has had. At present, he has two white natives and two free colored men, but both the latter were brought up in his family, and are worth twenty dollars a year more than the average. The free black, he thinks, is generally worse than the slave, and so is the poor white man. He also employs, at present, four Irish hands, and is expecting two more to arrive, who have been recommended to him, and sent for by those he has. He pays the Irishmen $120 a year, and boards them. He has had them for $100; but these are all excellent men, and well worth their price. They are less given to drinking than any men he has ever had; and one of them first suggested improvements to him in his farm, that he is now carrying out with prospects of considerable advantage. House-maids, Irish girls, he pays $3 and $6 a month. He does not apprehend that in future he shall have any difficulty in obtaining steady and reliable men, that will accomplish much more work than any slaves. There are some operations, such as carting and spreading dung, and all work with the fork, spade, or shovel, at which his Irishmen will do, he thinks, over fifty per cent more in a day than any negroes he has ever known. On the whole, he is satisfied that at present free-labor is more profitable than slave-labor, though his success is not so evident that he would be willing to have attention particularly called to it. His farm, moreover, is now in a transition state from one system of husbandry to another, and appearances are temporarily more unfavorable on that account. The wages paid for slaves, when they are hired for agricultural labor, do not differ at present, he says, from those which he pays for his free laborers. In both cases the hiring party boards the laborer, but, in addition to money and board, the slave-employer has to furnish clothing, and is subject, without redress, to any losses which may result from the carelessness or malevolence of the slave. He also has to lose his time if he is unwell, or when from any cause he is absent or unable to work. The slave, if he is indisposed to work, and especially if he is not treated well, or does not like the master who has hired him, will sham sickness — even make himself sick or lame — that he need not work. But a more serious loss frequently arises, when the slave, thinking he is worked too hard, or being angered by punishment or unkind treatment, “getting the sulks,” takes to “the swamp,” and comes back when he has a mind to. Often this will not be till the year is up for which he is engaged, when he will return to his owner, who, glad to find his property safe, and that it has not died in the Swamp, or gone to Canada, forgets to punish him, and immediately sends him for another year to a new master. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

“But, meanwhile, how does the negro support life in the swamp?” I asked. “Oh, he gets sheep and pigs and calves, and fowls and turkeys; sometimes they will kill a small cow. We have often seen the fires, where they were cooking them, through the woods, in the swamp yonder. If it is cold, he will crawl under a fodder-stack, or go into the cabins with some of the other negroes, and in the same way, you see, he can get all the corn, or almost anything else he wants.” “He steals them from his master?” “From any one; frequently from me. I have had many a sheep taken by them.” “It is a common thing, then?” “Certainly, it is, very common, and the loss is sometimes exceedingly provoking. One of my neighbors here was going to build, and hired two mechanics for a year. Just as he was ready to put his house up, the two men, taking offense at something, both ran away, and did not come back at all, till their year was out, and then their owner immediately hired them out again to another man.” These negroes “in the swamp,” he said, were often hunted after, but it was very difficult to find them, and, if caught, they would run again, and the other negroes would hide and assist them. Dogs to track them he had never known to be used in Virginia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

Recreation and Luxury among the Slaves Saturday, Dec. 25. From Christmas to New-Year’s Day, most of the slaves, except house servants, enjoy a freedom from labor; and Christmas is especially holiday, or Saturnalia, with them. The young ones began last night firing crackers, and I do not observe that they are engaged in any other amusement to-day; the older ones are generally getting drunk, and making business for the police. I have seen large gangs coming in from the country, and these contrast much in their general appearance with the town negroes. The latter are dressed expensively, and frequently more elegantly than the whites. They seem to be spending money freely, and I observe that they, and even the slaves that wait upon me at the hotel, often have watches, and other articles of value. The slaves have a good many ways of obtaining “spending money,” which, though in law belonging to their owner, as the property of a son under age does to his father, they are never dispossessed of, and use for their own gratification, with even less restraint than a wholesome regard for their health and moral condition may be thought to require. A Richmond paper, complaining of the liberty allowed to slaves in this respect, as calculated to foster an insubordinate spirit, speaks of their “champagne suppers.” The police broke into a gambling cellar a few nights since, and found about twenty negroes at “high play,” with all the usual accessories of a first-class “Hell.” It is mentioned that, among the number taken to the watch-house, and treated with lashes the next morning, there were some who had previously enjoyed a high reputation for piety, and others of a very elegant or foppish appearance. Passing two negroes in the street, I heard the following: “Workin’ in a tobacco factory all de year roun’, an’ come Christmas, only twenty dollars! Workin’ mighty hard, too-up to 12 o’clock o’ night very often — an’ then to hab a nigger oberseah!” “A nigger!” “Yes — dat’s it, yer see. Wouldn’t care if ’twarnt for dat. Nothin’ but a dirty nigger! orderin’ ’round, jes’ as if he was a wite man!” It is the custom of tobacco manufacturers to hire slaves and free negroes at a certain rate of wages per year. A task of 45 lbs. per day is given them to work up, and all that they choose to do more than this they are paid for — payment being made once a fortnight; and invariably this over- wages is used by the slave for himself, and is usually spent in drinking, licentiousness and gambling. The man was grumbling that he had saved but $20 to spend at the holidays. One of the manufacturers offered to show me, by his books, that nearly all gained by overwork $5 a month, many $20, and some as much as $28. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1854

April 1, Saturday: Dr. Thaddeus William Harris’s “Larvae of the Crane Fly” was appearing in this month’s issue of the New England Farmer.

Having found prospecting for gold to involve a whole lot of hard work in what looked suspiciously like dirt, and being of the personal attitude that to do hard work was to be suspected of the dreadfully slavish and contemptible “strong back weak mind” syndrome, Hinton Rowan Helper had abandoned the gold fields of California. On this date he arrived at a port on the Caribbean coast of Central America and embarked for the final legs of his journey home to North Carolina. Did he remember the dirt of North Carolina as being less dirty, the work of North Carolina as being less hard? Well, but maybe he could make some easy clean money by writing to warn others that the streets of California were not exactly paved with gold. Note carefully how his attitude about writing correlated with his attitude about labor correlated with his attitude about persons of color. For Helper, to be pro-slavery was to be pro-Negro and to be pro-Negro was to be pro-slavery. Because these loathsome blacks were being used for manual labor, manual labor itself had acquired an irremovable taint, and even a white man, if he was so situated as to need to work for his living, was being treated “as if he was a loathsome beast, and shunned with the utmost disdain.” Writing about the loathsome black man and how he is wronging us became for Helper a way of avoiding being condemned as equally loathsome on account of his unrelenting poor-boy need to obtain money in order to live.

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went on the Assabet River to Dodge’s Brook and thence to Jacob B. Farmer’s.

In San Francisco, an ordinance for the suppression of houses of ill-fame went into effect. This ordinance abolished the erotic dance known as the fandango, and shuttered the dancing and bawdy houses along Dupont Street, Jackson Street, and Pacific Street. CALIFORNIA

Ap. 1st The tree sparrows — hyemalis — & song sparrows are particularly lively & musical in the yard this rainy & truly April day. The air rings with them. The robin now begins to sing sweet powerfully— Pm up Assabet to Dodge’s Brook — thence to Farmer’s. April has begun like itself. It is warm & showery — while I sail away with a light SW wind toward the Rock— Sometimes the sun seems just ready to burst out — yet I know it will not— The meadow is becoming bare It resounds with the sprayey notes of blackbirds— The birds sing this warm showery day after a fortnight’s cold (yesterday was wet too), with a universal burst & flood of melody. Great flocks of hyemalis [Dark-eyed Junco Junco hyemalis] &c pass overhead like schools of fishes in the water many abreast. The white maple stamens are beginning to peep out from the wet & weather-beaten buds. The earliest alders are just ready to bloom — to show their yellow — on the first decidedly warm & sunny day. The water is smooth at last and dark. Ice no longer forms on the oars. It is pleasant to paddle under the dripping hemlocks this dark day. They make more of a wilderness impression than pines. The lines of saw dust from Barrets mill at different heights on the steep wet bank under the hemlocks — rather enhance the impression of freshness & wildness, as if it were a new country. Saw a painted tortoise on the bottom— The bark of Poplar boughs which have been held in the ice along the sides of the river the past winter are gnawed probably by muskrats. Saw floating a good- sized rooster without a head the red stump sticking out — probably killed by an owl. Heard a bird whose note was very much like that of the purple finch — loud & clear. First smelled the musk-rat. Yesterday & to-day I hear the cackle of the flicker so agreeable from association. It brings the year about. From afar, on some blasted tree, it makes all the vale ring its swelling flicker (?). Saw at farmer his snow-grubs (the same I had seen v. back) Haris in this weeks NE Farmer thinks on comparing them with Eng. plates, that they are the larvae of one of the species of Crane-fly Tipula. I saw some — still in F’s pasture. Did they not come out from the roots of the grass prematurely in the winter & so become food for birds? The ground in Farmer’s garden was in some places whitened with the droppings of the snowbirds after seeds of weeds — F. hyemalis & others. The hyemalis is in the largest flocks of any at this season— You see them come drifting over a rising ground just like snowflakes before a north-east wind. I was surprised to see how Farmers young pears 3 or 4 feet high on quince stocks had been broken down by the snow-drifts broken over & over apparently the snow freezing over them and then at last by its weight breaking HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

Ingenuity Of The Negro Sitting with a company of smokers last night, one of them, to show me the manner in which a slave of any ingenuity or cunning would manage to avoid working for his master’s profit, narrated the following anecdote. He was executor of an estate in which, among other negroes, there was one very smart man, who, he knew perfectly well, ought to be earning for the estate $150 a year, and who could do it if he chose, yet whose wages for a year, being let out by the day or job, had amounted to but $18, while he had paid for medical attendance upon him $45. Having failed in every other way to make him earn anything, he proposed to him that he should purchase his freedom and go to Philadelphia, where he had a brother. He told him if he would earn a certain sum ($400 I believe), and pay it over to the estate for himself, he would give him his free papers. The man agreed to the arrangement, and by his overwork in a tobacco factory, and some assistance from his free brother, soon paid the sum agreed upon, and was sent to Philadelphia. A few weeks afterwards he met him in the street, and asked him why he had returned. “Oh, I don’t like dat Philadelphy, massa; ant no chance for colored folks dere; spec’ if I’d been a runaway, de wite folks dere take care o’ me; but I couldn’t git anythin’ to do, so I jis borrow ten dollar of my broder, and cum back to old Virginny.” “But you know the law forbids your return. I wonder that you are not afraid to be seen here; I should think Mr.______(an officer of police) would take you up.” “0h! I look out for dat, Massa, I juss hire myself out to Mr.______himself, ha! ha! He tink I your boy.” And so it proved, the officer, thinking that he was permitted to hire himself out, and tempted by the low wages at which he offered himself, had neglected to ask for his written permission, and had engaged him for a year. He still lived with the officer, and was an active, healthy, good servant to him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

Qualities as a Laborer A well-informed capitalist and slave-holder remarked, that negroes could not be employed in cotton factories. I said that I understood they were so in Charleston, and some other places at the South. “It may be so, yet,” he answered, “but they will have to give it up.” The reason was, he said, that the negro could never be trained to exercise judgment; he cannot be made to use his mind; he always depends on machinery doing its own work, and cannot be made to watch it. He neglects it until something is broken or there is great waste. “We have tried reward and punishments, but it makes no difference. It’s his nature and you cannot change it. All men are indolent and have a disinclination to labor, but this is a great deal stronger in the African race than in any other. In working niggers, we just always calculate that they will not labor at all except to avoid punishment, and they will never do more than just enough to save themselves from being punished, and no amount of punishment will prevent their working carelessly and indifferently. It always seems on the plantation as if they took pains to break all the tools and spoil all the cattle that they possibly can, even when they know they’ll be directly punished for it.” As to rewards, he said, “They only want to support life, they will not work for anything more; and in this country it would be hard to prevent their getting that.” I thought this opinion of the power of rewards was not exactly confirmed by the narrative we had just heard, but I said nothing. “If you could move,” he continued, “all the white people from the whole seaboard district of Virginia and give it up to the negroes that are on it now, just leave them to themselves, in ten years time there would not be an acre of land cultivated, and nothing would be produced, except what grew spontaneously.” The Hon. Willoughby Newton, by the way, seems to think that if it had not been for the introduction of guano, a similar desolation would have soon occurred without the Africanization of the country. He is reported to have said: I look upon the introduction of guano, and the success attending its application to our barren lands, in the light of a special interposition of Divine Providence, to save the northern neck of Virginia from reverting entirely into its former state of wilderness and utter desolation. Until the discovery of guano —more valuable to us than the mines of California— I looked upon the possibility of renovating our soil, of ever bringing it to a point capable of producing remunerating crops, as utterly hopeless. Our up-lands were all worn out, and our bottom-lands fast failing, and if it had not been for guano, to revive our last hope, a few years more and the whole country must have been deserted by all who desired to increase their own wealth, or advance the cause of civilization by a proper cultivation of the earth. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

Improvement of the Negro in Slavery “But are they not improving?” said I; “that is a point in which I am much interested, and I should be glad to know what is your observation? Have they not, as a race, improved during the last hundred years, do you not think?” “Oh, yes indeed, very greatly. During my time —I can remember how they were forty years ago— they have improved two thousand per cent.! Don’t you think so?” he asked another gentleman. “Yes; certainly.” “And you may find them now, on the isolated old plantations in the back country, just as I recollect them when I was a boy, stupid and moping, and with no more intelligence than when they first came from Africa. But all about where the country is much settled their condition is vastly ameliorated. They are treated much better, they are fed better, and they have much greater educational privileges.” Educational Privileges “Educational privileges?” I asked, in surprise. “I mean by preaching and religious instruction. They have the Bible read to them a great deal, and there is preaching for them all over the country. They have preachers of their own; right smart ones they are, too, some of them.” “Do they?” said I. “I thought that was not allowed by law.” “Well, it is not — that is, they are not allowed to have meetings without some white man, is present. They must not preach unless a white man hears what they say. However, they do. On my plantation, they always have a meeting on Sundays, and I have sometimes, when I have been there, told my overseer, — ‘You must go up there to the meeting, you know the law requires it;’ and he would start as if he was going, but would just look in and go by; he wasn’t going to wait for them.” A Distinguished Divine He then spoke of a minister, whom he owned, and described him as a very intelligent man. He knew almost the whole of the Bible by heart. He was a fine-looking man — a fine head and a very large frame. He had been a sailor, and had been in New Orleans and New York, and many foreign ports. “He could have left me at any time for twenty years, if he had wished to,” he said. “I asked him once how he would like to live in New York? Oh, he did not like New York at all! niggers were not treated well there - there was more distinction made between them and white folks than there was here. ‘Oh, dey ain’t no place in de worl like Ole Virginny for niggers, massa,’ says he.” Another gentleman gave similar testimony. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

How they are Fed I said I supposed that they were much better off, more improved intellectually, and more kindly treated in Virginia than further South. He said I was mistaken in both respects — that in Louisiana, especially, they were more intelligent, because the amalgamation of the races was much greater, and they were treated with more familiarity by the whites; besides which, the laws of Louisiana were much more favorable to them. For instance, they required the planter to give slaves 200 pounds of pork a year: and he gave a very apt anecdote, showing the effect of this law, but which, at the same time, made it evident that a Virginian may be accustomed to neglect providing sufficient food for his force, and that they sometimes suffer greatly for want of it. I was assured, however, that this was very rare —that, generally, the slaves were well provided for —always allowed a sufficient quantity of meal, and, generally, of pork —were permitted to raise pigs and poultry, and in summer could always grow as many vegetables as they wanted. It was observed, however, that they frequently neglected to provide for themselves in this way, and live mainly on meal and bacon. If a man does not provide well for his slaves, it soon becomes known, he gets the name of a “nigger killer,” and loses the respect of the community. The general allowance of food was thought to be a peck and a half of meal, and three pounds of bacon a week. This, it was observed, is as much meal as they can eat, but they would be glad to have more bacon; sometimes they receive four pounds, but it is oftener that they get less than three. It is distributed to them on Saturday nights; or, on the better managed plantations, sometimes, on Wednesday, to prevent their using it extravagantly, or selling it for whisky on Sunday. This distribution is called the “drawing,” and is made by the overseer to all the heads of families or single negroes. Except on the smallest plantations, where the cooking is done in the house of the proprietor, there is a cook-house, furnished with a large copper for boiling, and an oven. Every night the negroes take their “mess,” for the next day’s breakfast and dinner, to the cook, to be prepared for the next day. Custom varies as to the time it is served out to them; sometimes at morning and noon, at other times at noon and night. Each negro marks his meat by cuts, so that he shall know it from the rest, and they observe each other’s rights with regard to this, punctiliously. After breakfast has been eaten early in the cabins, at sunrise or a little before in winter, and perhaps a little later in summer, they go to the field. At noon dinner is brought to them, and, unless the work presses, they are allowed two hours’ rest. Very punctually at sunset they stop work and are at liberty, except that a squad is detached once a week for shelling corn, to go to the mill for the next week’s drawing of meal. Thus they work in the field about eleven hours a day on an average. Returning to the cabins, wood “ought to have been” carted for them; but if it has not been, they then go to the woods and “tote” it home for themselves. They then make a fire —a big, blazing fire at this season, for the supply of fuel is unlimited— and cook their own supper, which will be a bit of bacon fried, often with eggs, corn-bread baked in the spider after the bacon, to absorb the fat, and perhaps some sweet potatoes roasted in the ashes. Immediately after supper they go to sleep, often lying on the floor or a bench in preference to a bed. About two o’clock they very generally rouse up and cook and eat, or eat cold, what they call their “mornin’ bit;” then sleep again till breakfast. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

Clothing As to the clothing of the slaves on the plantations, they are said to be usually furnished by their owners or masters, every year, each with a coat and trousers, of a coarse woolen or woolen and cotton stuff (mostly made, especially for this purpose, in Providence, R. I.), for Winter, trousers of cotton osnaburghs for Summer, sometimes with a jacket also of the same; two pairs of strong shoes, or one pair of strong boots and one of lighter shoes for harvest; three shirts; one blanket, and one felt hat. The women have two dresses of striped cotton, three shifts, two pairs of shoes, etc. The women lying-in are kept at knitting short sacks, from cotton which, in Southern Virginia, is usually raised, for this purpose, on the farm, and these are also given to the negroes. They also purchase clothing for themselves, and, I notice especially, are well supplied with handkerchiefs which the men frequently, and the women nearly always, wear on their heads. On Sundays and holidays they usually look very smart, but when at work, very ragged and slovenly. At the conclusion of our bar-room session, some time after midnight, as we were retiring to our rooms, our progress up stairs and along the corridors was several times impeded, by negroes lying fast asleep, in their usual clothes only, upon the floor. I asked why they were not abed, and was answered by a gentleman, that negroes never wanted to go to bed; they always preferred to sleep upon the floor. Fraternity As I was walking in the outskirts of the town this morning, I saw squads of negro and white boys together, pitching pennies and firing crackers in complete fraternization. The white boys manifested no superiority, or assumption of it, over the dark ones. An old, palsied negro-woman, very thinly and very raggedly clad, met me and spoke to me. I could not, from the trembling incoherency of her voice, understand what she said, but she was evidently begging, and I never saw a more pitiable object of charity at the North. She was, perhaps, a free person, with no master and no system to provide for her. I saw, for the first time in my life, two or three young white women smoking tobacco in clay pipes. From their manner it was evidently a well- formed habit, and one which they did not suspect there was occasion for them to practice clandestinely, or be ashamed of. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:

Religious Condition With regard to the moral and religious condition of the slaves, I cannot, either from what I observe, or from what is told me, consider it in any way gratifying. They are forbidden by law to meet together for worship, or for the purpose of mutual improvement. In the cities, there are churches especially for them, in which the exercises are conducted by white clergymen. In the country, there is usually a service, after that for the whites especially, in all the churches which, by the way, are not very thickly scattered. In one parish, about twenty miles from Richmond, I was told that the colored congregation in the afternoon is much smaller than that of the whites in the morning; and it was thought not more than one-fifth of the negroes living within a convenient distance were in the habit of attending it; and of these many came late, and many more slept through the greater part of the service. A goodly proportion of them, I am told, “profess religion,” and are received into the fellowship of the churches; but it is evident, of the greater part even of these, that their idea of religion, and the standard of morality which they deem consistent with a “profession” of it, is very degraded. That they are subject to intense excitements, often really maniacal, which they consider to be religious, is true; but as these are described, I cannot see that they indicate anything but a miserable system of superstition, the more painful that it employs some forms and words ordinarily connected with true Christianity. A Virginia correspondent of the N. Y. Times, writing upon the general religious condition of the State, and of the comparative strength and usefulness of the different churches, says: The Baptists also number (in Eastern Virginia) 44,000 colored members. This makes a great difference. Negroes join the church —perhaps in a great majority of cases— with no ideas of religion. I have but little confidence in their religious professions. Many of them I hope are very pious; but many of them are great scoundrels —perhaps the great majority of them— regardless of their church profession as a rule of conduct. They are often baptized in great numbers, and the Baptist Church (so exemplary in so much) is to blame, I fear, in the ready admission it gives to the negroes. The Baptist Church generally gets the negroes — where there are no Baptists, the Methodist. Immersion strikes their fancy. It is a palpable, overt act, that their imagination can take hold of. The ceremony mystically impresses them, as the ceremonies of Romanism affect the devotees of that connection. They come up out of the water, and believe they see “the Lord.” In their religion, negroes are excessively superstitious. They have all sorts of “experiences,” and enjoy the most wonderful revelations. Visions of the supernatural are of nightly occurrence, and the most absurd circumstances are invested with some marvelous significance. I have heard that the great ordeal, in their estimation, a “seeker” had to pass, was being held over the infernal flames by a thread or a hair. If the thread does not break, the suspendee is “in the Lord.” It is proper, therefore, I think, to consider this circumstance, in estimating the strength of a Church, whose communicants embrace such a number of negroes. Of the Methodists, in Eastern Virginia, some six or seven thousand are colored. This condition of the slaves is not necessarily a reproach to those whose duty it more particularly is to instruct and preach the true Gospel to them. It is, in a great degree, a necessary result of the circumstances of their existence. The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER them down.

I hear the jingle of the hyemalis from within the house — sounding like a trill.

April 9, Sunday: Henry Thoreau was surprised to note that Walden Pond was completely clear of ice. Checking around, at first he reasoned that it must have opened sometime between the 6th and 9th, but he finally decided that the critical date must have been around the 7th:

WALDEN: In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in ’46, the 25th of March; in ’47, the 8th of April; in ’51, the 28th of March; in ’52, the 18th of April; in ’53, the 23rd of March; in ’54, about the 7th of April.

April 9. Saw several more yellow redpolls [Palm Warbler Dendroica palmarum] with their rich, glowing yellow breasts by the causeway sides.

The steamer carrying Hinton Rowan Helper, the Star of the West, arrived in New-York harbor, and our stone racist began his trek back to North Carolina and what he hoped was going to turn out to be literary fame — from the publication of some really informative and amusing and chauvinist crowd-pleasing California journals.

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Austria, France, Great Britain, and Prussia signed a protocol in Vienna pledging to preserve the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1855

Hinton Rowan Helper’s 1st book was THE LAND OF GOLD. REALITY VERSUS FICTION, which warned against

white men going to California with any great expectations. Since the book was being published in Maryland and had been paid for in advance, the printer using his own political judgment simply did not set into type from the manuscript with which he had been provided any of the references to Helper’s controversial attitude of antislavery racism. Helper was of course enraged at these unexpected deletions, but he could do nothing — the printer already had his money.

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Cassius M. Clay, by virtue of his contention that the slaveholder was the natural enemy not of the slave but of the yeomanry of poor whites, had actually been a forerunner of Helper’s attitude that the slavemasters actually were worse moral cases than the two supposed thieves he had helped lynch in California: “Thieves practice deceit on the wise; slaveholders take advantage of the ignorant.” Helper’s THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT would be begun out of these antislave and antislavery diatribes which the Baltimore printer had culled out of THE LAND OF GOLD. REALITY VERSUS FICTION as impossible of publication in the South: “I have ceased to be the submissive victim of an unmitigated despotism.” By way of this Baltimore HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER printer, the slavemasters were attempting to dictate to Helper what he would and what he would not be allowed to think — and Helper wasn’t about to put up with such a suppression of his thought.

In the mid-1850s James Shepherd Pike, another white racist abolitionist opportunist of the ilk of Hinton Rowan Helper, joined the Republican Party out of a “sincere belief that the Negro could not and should not be incorporated into the American democratic system.” He desired to have the Gulf States set aside as a reservation for the black tribe from Africa. He desired also, he said, that the black man immediately be allowed to vote — so that early on he would demonstrate, for all to see, his utter incapacity to take part in a civilized process. (Later, in 1871 when the prospect of black voters became more imminent, he would withdraw from this idea of allowing the black man to vote.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER THE LAND OF GOLD, FROM CALIFORNIA AS I SAW IT, 1849-1900

The land of gold; reality versus fiction. By Hinton R. Helper

CHAPTER VII. THE CHINESE IN CALIFORNIA.

THE national habits and traits of Chinese character, to which they cling with uncompromising tenacity in this country, are strikingly anomalous and distinct from those of all other nations. There is a marked identity about their features, person, manners and costume, so unmistakable that it betrays their nationality in a moment. So stereotyped are even the features and form of this singular people, that we cannot fail in their identity in the rudest cut that pretends to represent them. Particular fashions and modes of dress give them no concern whatever. One common rule seems to guide them in all their personal decorations. All their garments look as if they were made after the same pattern, out of the same material, and from the same piece of cloth. In short, the similarity in their garb, features, physical proportions and deportment is so great that one Chinaman looks almost exactly like another, but very unlike any body else. Let us now place ourselves in front of one of these xanthous [sic] children of the flowery land, and survey him somewhat minutely. Every one is acquainted with his method of dressing his head, which is closely shaven, except a small spot on the crown, about the size of the palm of the hand. Into this slender lock of hair thus permitted to grow upon the apex of his cranium, he interweaves long strands of sable silk, which form a cue that nearly reaches the ground. His hat, which possesses a brim of enormous width, is manufactured out of ratan [sic] or bamboo splints, and has an indentation made in the top expressly for the accommodation of his cue. He very seldom, however, wears this appendage tucked up in his hat, but generally allows it to trail about his back and legs, as young girls sometimes do ribbons. This pig-tail he loves as he does his life; and he would as willingly have his right arm amputated as part with it. Notwithstanding he carries it behind him, it is his character — the badge of his respectability; and Boodh or Josh alone could prevail upon him to cut it off. His coat, which is fashioned very much like a pea-jacket, is made of crow-colored cotton cloth, of flimsy texture, and buttons loosely around him as low down as convenience will permit. His pantaloons, the legs of which are a trifle smaller than a medium-sized meal-bag, are composed of the same stuff as his coat, and terminate at about the middle of his shins. His shoes or sandals — minus socks, for he never wears any — are hewn out of solid wood, and taper towards the toe nearly to a sharp point. As he moves along before HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER us in these uncouth habiliments — his feet inclosed in rude wooden shoes, his legs bare, his breeches loosely flapping against his knees, his skirtless, long-sleeved, big-bodied pea- jacket, hanging in large folds around his waist, his broad- brimmed chapeau rocking carelessly on his head, and his cue suspended and gently sweeping about his back — I can compare him to nothing so appropriately as to a tadpole walking upon stilts! Ludicrous and absurd as this comparison may appear to some, no one who has seen him will say that it is incorrectly applied. Such, then, is something of the outline of the Chinaman; and, with but few exceptions, may be considered as illustrative of the entire race as seen in California. The few exceptions are the mandarins, who robe themselves in long figured gowns, and some of the wealthier classes, who wear silk and satin goods, instead of cotton fabrics. But the description given above will suit at least nine out of every ten. According to the most reliable estimates, there are at the present time about forty thousand Chinese in California; and every vessel that arrives from the Celestial Empire brings additional immigrants. From a fourth to a fifth of these reside in San Francisco; the balance are scattered about over various parts of the State — mostly in the mines. A few females —say one to every twelve or fifteen males— are among the number; among these good morals are unknown, they have no regard whatever for chastity or virtue. You would be puzzled to distinguish the women from the men, so inconsiderable are the differences in dress and figure. The only apparent difference is, that they are of smaller stature and have smoother features. They are not generally neat in their outward habit; but on certain occasions, particularly on holidays, the elite doff their every-day costume, equip themselves in clean attire, and braid their hair into a kind of crest, which, as it is worn upon the head, bears a strong resemblance to the tuft of feathers upon the noddle of a peacock. Those who are from the extreme northern parts of the Chinese empire, are the ugliest and most rugged featured human beings I ever saw. What the majority of them do for a livelihood is more than I can tell, as they have but few visible occupations. The laundry business affords those who live in San Francisco, and other cities, the most steady and lucrative employment; and in passing their premises, the eye is often attracted to such “Celestial” signs as the following: “Kum Kee. Washer.” “Ahi Fe. Launder.” “Wong Cho. Washing and Ironing — $3 per Doz.” Catching and drying fish is another business in which they engage, but do not carry it on extensively; others are engaged in mercantile pursuits; and here and there you will find one in a public house, filling the place of a cook or a waiter. But, though most of them are held as mere slaves by their wealthier countrymen, it goes desperately against the grain with them to take the situation of servants among white people, as they are constitutionally haughty and conceited, and believe themselves to be superior to us in all respects. So exalted an opinion have they of themselves that they think they are the most central, civilized and enlightened people on earth, and that they are the especial favorites of heaven — hence they are sometimes called “Celestials.” They look upon us and all other white-skinned nations as “outside barbarians,” and think we are unduly presumptuous if we do not pay them homage! Out of the cities, HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER more of them are engaged in mining than in any other occupation; but, as I intimated before, the majority of them lead a very inactive and unproductive life. Much physical exertion, however, is not required to secure them a maintenance; for their aliment, if possible, costs them less than their dress, which is by no means expensive. Indeed, so sparing are they in their meals, that it is seldom they eat any thing but boiled rice; and even this, which they bring with them from China, is very inferior to that raised in the Carolinas. It is an amusing spectacle to see one of them feeding on this grain. Holding a bowl of the rice in such a manner that the nearer edge of it almost touches his chin, and grasping two chopsticks, about the shape and size of penholders, between his fingers and thumb, he feeds himself with a lively and dexterous motion of the hand, not very unlike a musician playing upon a jewsharp, and continues the feat without intermission until he has finished. He seems to cram the food down his throat with these chopsticks, rather than let it undergo the usual process of mastication. The ardor and haste with which he executes the performance, remind one of a provident farmer when he pitches new-made sheaves of provender into a hay-mow, just previous to a thunder-storm. The Americans salute them all indiscriminately by the easy and euphonious appellation of “John,” to which they reply as readily as if they were addressed by their true names; and they return the compliment by applying the same term to us, equally indiscriminately.A great number of them think “John” is the only name white people have; and if they have occasion to speak to an American or European woman, they call her “John,” too! But their own vernacular cognomens, like their language and habits, sound certainly very odd to occidental ears. The following may be taken as fair specimens: Kak Chow, Chum Fi, Yah Wah, Si Ta, Hom Fong, Dack Mung, Gee Foo. They are deplorably addicted to wasting time in games of chance; and there are a dozen and a half gambling houses in San Francisco under their especial control and direction. But neither Americans nor Europeans participate in the sports or fortunes of their tables; they themselves are the exclusive gamblers in these eighteen dens of rascality. Their money is chiefly composed of brass and copper coins, stamped with the characters of their alphabet. Hardened rice and stamped slices of pasteboard are also current among them as mediums of exchange. Is this Chinese immigration desirable? I think not; and, contrary to the expressed opinions of many of the public prints throughout the country, contend that it ought not to be encouraged. It is not desirable, because it is not useful; or, if useful at all, it is so only to themselves — not to us. No reciprocal or mutual benefits are conferred. In what capacity do they contribute to the advancement of American interests? Are they engaged in any thing that adds to the general wealth and importance of the country? Will they discard their clannish prepossessions, assimilate with us, buy of us, and respect us? Are they not so full of duplicity, prevarication and pagan prejudices, and so enervated and lazy, that it is impossible for them to make true or estimable citizens? I wish their advocates would answer me these questions; if they will do it satisfactorily, I will interrogate them no further. Under the existing laws of our government, they, as well as all other foreigners, are permitted to work the mines in California as HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER long as they please, and as much as they please, without paying any thing for the privilege, except a small tax to the State. Even this has but recently been imposed, and half the time is either evaded or neglected. The general government, though it has sacrificed so much blood and treasure in acquiring California, is now so liberal that it refuses to enact a law imposing a tax upon foreign miners; and as a matter of course, it receives no revenue whatever from this source. But the Chinese are more objectionable than other foreigners, because they refuse to have dealing or intercourse with us; consequently, there is no chance of making any thing of them, either in the way of trade or labor. They are ready to take all they can get from us, but are not willing to give any thing in return. They did not aid in the acquisition or settlement of California, and they do not intend to make it their future home. They will not become permanent citizens, nor identify their lives and interests with the country. They neither build nor buy, nor invest capital in any way that conduces to the advantage of any one but themselves. They have thousands of good-for- nothing gewgaws and worthless articles of virtu for sale, and our people are foolish enough to buy them; but their knowledge of the laws of reciprocity is so limited, that they never feel in any need of American commodities. Though they hold themselves aloof from us, contemn and disdain us, they have guaranteed to them the same privileges that we enjoy; and are allowed to exhaust the mines that should be reserved for us and our posterity — that is, if they are worth reserving at all. Their places could and should be filled with worthier immigrants — Europeans, who would take the oath of allegiance to the country, work both for themselves and for the commonwealth, fraternize with us, and, finally, become a part of us. All things considered, I cannot perceive what more right or business these semi-barbarians have in California than flocks of blackbirds have in a wheatfield; for, as the birds carry off the wheat without leaving any thing of value behind, so do the Confucians gather the gold, and take it away with them to China, without compensation to us who opened the way to it. Still they are received with a flattering welcome. They are taken by the hand with an obsequious grasp, as if their favor was earnestly desired; and the impression is at once made upon their minds, that not only their own presence, but also that of as many more of their kindred as can be persuaded to come, is coveted by us. Their mining implements and boots (the only articles of merchandise they purchase from us) are sold to them at even less rates than to our own countrymen, more from curiosity than from any other cause. For some unaccountable reason, they are treated with a degree of deference and civility which is really surprising. To humor their arrogance and presumption, I have frequently seen Americans, in crowded places, relinquish the side-walk to them, and betake themselves to the middle of a rough and muddy street. Moreover, they are petted as if they were really what they preposterously fancy themselves — the most elevated and exalted of the human race. But I am inclined to look upon them as an inauspicious element of society — a seed of political dissensions. They have neither the strength of body nor the power of mind to cope with us in the common affairs of life; and as it seems to be a universal law that the stronger shall rule the weaker, it will be required HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER of them, ere long, to do one of two things, namely — either to succumb, to serve us, or to quit the country. Which will they do? Our people will not always treat them with undue complaisance. Their real merits and demerits will be developed, and such stations as their natural endowments qualify them to fill will be assigned them. They must work for themselves, or we will make them work for us. No inferior race of men can exist in these United States without becoming subordinate to the will of the Anglo-Americans, or foregoing many of the necessaries and comforts of life. They must either be our equals or our dependents. It is so with the negroes in the South; it is so with the Irish in the North; it was so with the Indians in New England; and it will be so with the Chinese in California. The Indians, it is true, would not submit to be enslaved; but they had to suffer exile, hunger and death as a consequence of their intractability. Certain it is, that the greater the diversity of colors and qualities of men, the greater will be the strife and conflict of feeling. One party will gain the ascendency [sic], and dominate over the other. Our population was already too heterogeneous before the Chinese came; but now another adventitious ingredient has been added; and I should not wonder at all, if the copper of the Pacific yet becomes as great a subject of discord and dissension as the ebony of the Atlantic. However, the discussion and consideration of these matters more properly devolve upon our public functionaries, who, I presume, if loyal to their constituents and their country, will not lightly regard them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1857

Hinton Rowan Helper’s polemical compilation of census data THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT was published in Baltimore, expanding upon what we now have come to regard as a pleasant

THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION conceit –the idea that oppression actually is unprofitable to the oppressor– and proclaiming also the pleasant conceit that Waldo Emerson, who had originally espoused this idea in the 1844 “EMANCIPATION IN THE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER BRITISH WEST INDIES”, was America’s “most practical and profound metaphysician.” Hoo boy!

This Emerson-admirer was an egregious case of what you would term an Antislavery Racist. –Which is to say, he was a Southern white man, from North Carolina, who owned no slaves, whose fixation was that he was being victimized. It wasn’t the blacks who were being harmed by slavery, it was real decent folks, white folks like him who were being harmed by slavery. All these darkies, who belonged to other people, were impacting his life! He hated the nigger who was doing him wrong, he hated the slavemaster who was doing him wrong. What he needed most urgently was a lily-white, pure America of which he could be proud, where he could stand tall. Slavery was a tainted and archaic social system that was standing in the way of white people’s cultural and material progress. Blacks were a tainted and inferior group who had no business being over here, in our brave New World, in the first place.9

“History, among its many ironies, often places enemies in life into various positions of posthumous conjunction.” — Stephen Jay Gould 9. Hinton Rowan Helper. THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT. Baltimore, Maryland, 1857 This interesting book has been republished in Cambridge MA in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Bailey, Hugh C. HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST-RACIST (University AL: 1965). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This antislavery racism, which did not want slaves to exist because it did not want blacks to exist, is to be compared and contrasted with the proslavery racism of the Irishman John Mitchel, who, as long as blacks did exist, needed for them to exist as slaves. In this year Mitchel gave up trying to become a farmer and created the Southern Citizen.

According to Noel Ignatiev’s HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE, “To be acknowledged as white, it was not enough for the Irish to have a competitive advantage over Afro- Americans in the labor market; in order for them to avoid the taint of blackness it was necessary that no Negro be allowed to work in occupations where Irish were to be found.”

According to the jokes that were going the rounds in those days among non-Irish white racists (the bulk of the population, actually), the Irish were “Negroes turned inside out” while the American free blacks were “smoked Irish.”

It has been well said, that inside the charmed Caucasian chalk circle it is the sum of what you are not –not Indian, not Negro, not a Jew, not Irish, etc.– that make you what you are. And, that’s as true now as it was then. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER A crisis would break out in the discussions of this attitude about how to achieve progress, in December 1859 during the uproar over the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry by abolitionists.

Speaking of progress, in this year in England, Herbert Spencer’s article “Progress: its Law and Cause” began to apply his one big idea, a principle that he had derived from K.E. von Baer, that the biological development of an organism proceeds from a homogeneous state to a heterogeneous state, to the solar system, to animal species, to human society, to industry, to art, to language, to science, and to the kitchen sink. This infatuation eventually led to his friend Thomas Henry Huxley commenting about him that Spencer’s idea of a tragedy was “a deduction killed by a fact.”

Mary Ann Shadd Cary gave birth to a daughter, Sarah. In this period her gazette The Provincial Freeman was becoming encumbered in debt.

In this year George Fitzhugh’s CANNIBALS ALL! OR, SLAVES WITHOUT MASTERS was printed in Richmond VA by the firm of A. Morris. This author would oppose secession until civil war began, arguing that a slaveholding Confederacy could not survive until the advanced capitalist countries had likewise abandoned capitalist competition and its bourgeois individualism. After the loss of the war both Helper and Fitzhugh would becoming more and more negrophobic, more and more idiosyncratic, and sink into obscurity. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER June 26, Friday: The 2d day of the Spiritualist testing in Apartment Number 12 in the Albion building on Tremont Street in beautiful downtown Boston — and there were no better results than on the previous day.

In Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln spoke against the Dred Scott decision.

This man had no rights that any white American was bound to respect. None at all. Nope.

The 1st edition of Hinton Rowan Helper’s polemical compilation of census data THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT was published in Baltimore, expanding upon what we now have come to regard as a pleasant conceit –the idea that oppression actually is unprofitable to the oppressor– and proclaiming also the pleasant conceit that Waldo Emerson, who had originally espoused this idea in the 1844 “EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES”, was America’s “most practical and profound metaphysician.” Hoo boy! What Helper was proposing amounted to a comprehensive racial boycott by all whites against all persons of color. These coloreds couldn’t help but be unfair low-price low-quality competition for decent, honest, clean white HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER workingmen such as him. He proposed a total ostracization of any white man so unaware of the needs of white people as to utilize the labor of a nonwhite. No union with slaveholders! It would become a crime to so much as possess a copy of this racist book in the American South.

There was a blurb by Horace Greeley in the New-York Tribune and Weekly Tribune. When Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia read Helper’s statistical study, he considered that its intent was “to array man against man in our own States.” Helper’s attitude was plain. He minced no words. He recommended to all white Americans that for fundamental economic reasons an abolitionist is your “best and only true” friend. I will quote passim in the manner in which it is customary to quote from such a treatise on attitude as MEIN KAMPF, in illustration of the plainness of Helper’s message:10 You must either be for us or against us.... [The white masses are going to] have justice peaceably or by violence.... Do you aspire to become the victims of white nonslaveholding vengeance by day, and of barbarous massacre by the negroes at night?... [Slavery is] a perpetual license to murder.... In nine cases out of ten [slaves are] happy to cut their masters’ throats.

10. Anyone who desires to evaluate the accuracy and representativeness of the constructed paragraph of quotation is urged to consult the original, which is a quick and entertaining read if one pays attention to the textual paragraphs while ignoring the enormous quantities of utterly irrelevant and tendentious and pretentious statistical tabulation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION This Emerson-admirer was an egregious case of what you would term an Antislavery Racist. —Which is to say, he was a Southern white man, from North Carolina, who owned no slaves, whose fixation was that of the victim. It wasn’t the blacks who were being harmed by slavery, it was real decent folks like him who were being harmed by slavery. All these slaves, who belonged to other people, were impacting his life! He hated the nigger who was doing him wrong, He hated the slavemaster who was doing him wrong. What he needed most urgently was a lily-white, pure America of which he could be proud, where he could stand tall. Slavery was a tainted and archaic social system that was standing in the way of white people’s cultural and material progress. Blacks were a tainted and inferior group who had no business being here in our brave New World in the first place.11

The Democrats immediately attempted to neutralize Helper’s dangerous racist abolitionism by issuing Gilbert J. Beebe’s A REVIEW AND REFUTATION OF HINTON ROWAN HELPER’S “IMPENDING CRISIS”. They charged that their political opponents, the Republicans, were using this treatise as their “text-book.”

A crisis would break out in the discussions of this attitude about how to achieve progress, in December 1859 during the uproar over the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry by abolitionists.

Speaking of progress, in this year in England, Herbert Spencer’s article “Progress: its Law and Cause” began to apply his one big idea, a principle that he had derived from K.E. von Baer, that the biological development of an organism proceeds from a homogeneous state to a heterogeneous state, to the solar system, to animal species, to human society, to industry, to art, to language, to science, and to the kitchen sink. This 11. This interesting book has been republished in Cambridge MA in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Hugh C. Bailey’s HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST- RACIST (University of Alabama, 1965). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER ideology-driven infatuation eventually led to his friend Thomas Henry Huxley commenting about him that Spencer’s idea of a tragedy was “a deduction killed by a fact.”

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).

Hinton Rowan Helper “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER July 13, Monday: Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune reviewed at length Hinton Rowan Helper’s THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT.

Greeley characterized Helper as “a spokesman — one who utters no stammering, hesitating nor uncertain sound, who possesses a perfect mastery of his mother tongue, who speaks as well from a long study and full knowledge of his subject as from profound convictions, and in whose vocabulary the words fear and doubt seem to have no place.” In Autumn 1850 Helper the fearless had voluntarily confessed to a former employer that during his teenage indenture he had pilfered small amounts, and had offered to this former employer a personal IOU for $300. In return this former employer had pledged permanent secrecy, but upon reading these reviews of his former apprentice’s abolitionist attitude, this wronged former employer would reveal Helper’s youthful indiscretion — so he could be condemned by Southern politicians as not a thinker, as nothing more than a petty thief. Here is Helper’s plan which these Southrons found so outrageous as to justify any retaliatory HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER response: • The non-slaveholding whites must be organized for independent political action. • They must then exclude the slaveholders from political power. Never should there be another vote “to the Trafficker in Human Flesh.” • The non-slaveholders must cease all co-operation and fellowship with slaveholders in every phase of society — politics, religion, etc. • All patronage of slaveholders and slaveholding establishments such as slaveholding merchants, lawyers, doctors, hotels, must cease, as well as receiving and granting audiences to slaveholders. • No recognition must be granted to pro-slavery men except as “Ruffians, outlaws, and Criminals.” • All subscriptions to pro-slavery newspapers must be abruptly cancelled. • The greatest possible encouragement must be given to “Free White Labor.” • All employment of slaves by non-slaveholders must cease. • “Immediate Death to slavery,” or if this is impossible, there must be an “unqualified Proscription of its Advocates” during the period of its existence. • A tax of $60 should be levied on every slaveholder for each slave that is in his possession or that he holds between the present time and July 4, 1863. The returns from this tax should be used to transport the “Blacks” to Liberia or to colonize them in Central or South America or in some “Comfortable Settlement” in the United States. • An additional tax of $40 per year should be levied on every owner for each slave he holds after July 4, 1863. The returns from this fund should be given to the Negroes held in slavery or their next of kin to be used as they see fit. (This should be raised to $100 per year if complete abolition has not taken place by 1869. If this does not end the institution in one or two years, the tax should be placed so high as to kill it before July 4, 1876.)

Helper believed that slaves should be compensated for their prior years of servitude, but he did not believe that their labor had been actually worth all that much. Over and above their keep, this careful statistician calculated, it would be enough to compensate the liberated slaves at 26 cents for each year of life that they had labored under conditions of servitude. That is to say, a black slave’s entire lifetime of labor was worth, over and above what it cost to feed and clothe him or her, approximately as much as three or four weeks of the labor of an Irishman working at the laying of railroad track. An entire lifetime of labor in America would not be considered as in itself of sufficient value to purchase at the going rates a steerage ticket back to Africa.

Hinton Rowan Helper, obviously, was no slave to his own statistics. For instance, the census of 1850 had counted exactly 347,525 slaveholders, but Helper needed to minimize the size of this despotic class in accordance with “the greatest good to the greatest number” in order to proclaim the exaggerated nature of their undue political influence, so he found reason to round up this 347,525 figure to 200,000. The elaborate statistical argument mounted by Helper is largely bunkum. He was able to value the Northern hay crop alone, for instance, as of more market worth than all the cash crops of the Southlands, by presuming that all of it was available to be sold despite the fact that most of it of necessity went uncut each year (he was counting every blade of grass, he confessed, even of “the Western prairie”), and despite the fact that, of that grass for which there was human labor available to cut it and stack it, most never would make it to market simply because it was of course being fed to the farm livestock during the Northern winters. Over and above all this, Helper completely disregarded unhelpful complications such as the offsetting value of Southern ensilage made not from grass but from the stripped leaves of Indian corn — in other words, his nice calculations were entirely tendentious and untrustworthy, were merely a front and legitimation and cover story for his bad attitude. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s sermon summarized the history of the slavery quarrel at the Washington church. In defense of his “converting the pulpit into a political forum,” he produced from his pocket and proceeded to wave before his parishioners a pamphlet, prepared in that very church five years earlier. The pamphlet was the text of a sermon which had been preached there by a Reverend Lunt. This pro- slavery sermon had attacked Senator William Henry Seward of New York for his “higher law” oration. The very existence of such a pamphlet demonstrated the hypocrisy of the parishioners who were then attacking their shepherd: for they “did not disapprove of the introduction of politics into the pulpit, so long as the minister said smooth things.” And Conway was off on his summer vacation in the White Mountains, by way of Boston and Concord. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1858

March 20, Saturday: In a speech before the US Senate, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts cited Hinton Rowan Helper, of all people, as an authority on the national racial and economic situation.

In the morning Henry Thoreau went on the river and Jacob B. Farmer informed him that on the previous day, dropped in a footpath, he had found a bay-wing’s egg. Thoreau mentioned that he had not yet seen a bay-wing [Vesper Sparrow Pooecetes gramineus] that season.

March 20: On that same tree by Conant’s orchard, I see a flock of cherry-birds [Cedar Waxwing Bombycilla cedrorum] with that alert, chieftain-like look, and hear their seringo note, as if made by their swift flight through the air. They have been seen a week or two.

April 5, Monday: Incensed at Massachusetts Senator Wilson’s speech of March 20th in praise of Helperism, Senator Asa Biggs of North Carolina responded in the US Senate with an attack upon the personal character of Hinton Rowan Helper. That turncoat Southern white nongentleman, he revealed, rather than being any sort of authority on the national racial and economic situation, was just another “mumper” (con artist). He had, Senator Biggs insisted, changed his name from “Helfer,” and the reason that he had changed his name was that he had been caught in the South committing a petty theft! When he would be told of this senatorial assault upon his personal integrity, Helper would arm himself with a Colt revolver and a Bowie knife and set out for the District of Columbia to take vengeance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER April 12, Monday: William D. Brown paid Henry Thoreau $3.00 to survey an Acton woodlot near Damon’s Factory. Part of this lot was cut during 1857-1858 and the lot was sold to Richard Warner.

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/15.htm

Hinton Rowan Helper sought to assault Senator Asa Biggs of his home state of North Carolina for having accused him, on April 5th on the floor of the US Senate, of having changed his name from “Helfer” and of having committed petty theft. However, his Colt revolver and Bowie knife were confiscated and he was taken under arrest. A number of the prominent Republican legislators, amused at the sight of one of their Southern Democratic colleagues being assaulted by one of his constituents, raised a fund of $1,000 and posted bail for this racist abolitionist Southern Republican.

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

(Cassius M. Clay, who would become a Major General of the US Volunteers in the civil war, was at this point an enthusiastic supporter and distributor of Helperist literature. –As was Senator Andrew Johnson.)

April 12, 1858: A. M. — Surveying part of William P. Brown’s wood-lot in Acton, west of factory. Returning on the railroad, the noon train down passed us opposite the old maid Hosmer’s house. In the woods just this side, we came upon a partridge [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge)] standing on the track, between the rails over which the cars had just passed. She had evidently been run down, but though a few small feathers were scattered along for a dozen rods beyond her, and she looked a little ruffled, she was apparently more disturbed in mind than body. I took her up and carried her one side to a safer place. At first she made no resistance, but at length fluttered out of my hands and ran two or three feet. I had to take her up again and carry and drive her further off, and left her standing with head erect as at first, as if beside herself. She was not lame, and I suspect no wing was broken. I did not suspect that this swift wild bird was ever run down by the cars. We have an account in the newspapers of every cow and calf that is run over, but not of the various wild creatures who meet with that accident. It may be many generations before the partridges learn to give the cars a sufficiently wide berth. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER December: This issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine had an interesting article on birdsong. The Reverend Samuel Joseph May, accompanied by the abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond of Salem, Massachusetts and the Reverend William Henry Channing of Boston, embarked upon the Arabia for a tour of England and Europe: I’ve seen the Pope!!!

The radical abolitionist John Brown was a friend of John Otis Wattles, and especially of Augustus Wattles. The brothers agreed with Brown’s purposes but not with his violent means. When Brown needed sanctuary after a Missouri slaveholder was killed during his raid into Missouri to free 11 slaves, Augustus took him into his home in Moneka, Kansas even though the Missouri governor, Robert M. Stewart, was insisting that both Brown and the slaves be returned to Missouri. During his stay, Brown wrote to the Lawrence Republican, comparing his raid into Missouri with the massacre at Marais des Cygnes near a settlement named Trading Post, in which a raiding party from Missouri had crossed into Kansas Territory and killed 5 men suspected of being against human slavery, and badly injuring 5 others. Wanting to protect the Wattles family from any retribution that would have followed had the proslavery element known that Augustus Wattles was giving him sanctuary, Brown pretended that he was sending the letter from Trading Post.

Hinton Rowan Helper replied to Lysander Spooner: My dear Sir, Above, in brief, is my candid criticism of the circular in regard to which you have done me the honor to request my opinion. It is possible that I may be mistaken, but I feel as well assured as I can of anything not absolutely certain, that the result of the Lopez expedition to ___, some years since, was a brilliant triumph, compared with the result that would inevitably follow the attempt to carry out your present plan of operations in the faith. The circular in its present form can never be more serviceable in accomplishing the great object you have in view, Here at the south it will effect no good – it might do harm, at the South it would certainly strengthen the chains of slavery. I sincerely trust that you will not distribute it, or, to say the least, that you will withhold it from the public until the next presidential campaign. For several months past I have had it in contemplation to issue a circular especially designed to reach the South in the right way; and if I am not failed or prejudiced in my aims and efforts, I think I shall, in connection with other southerners, who are willing and anxious to cooperate with me, be successful in accomplishing more in the direction within the next two or three years than has been accomplished within the last fifteen. My friend, Prof. Fredrick, has seen your circular, and fully concurs in the opinion which I have expressed in reference to the same. Neither the Professor nor myself, however, desire to be taken as criticisms to go by. Probably, it would be well for you to consult others. Yours very truly, H.R. Helper Box 1077 New York, Dec. 1858 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER December 1, Wednesday: In a circular which appeared in the New-York Tribune, we can learn that one of the supporters of racist Helperism was Horace Greeley. Other such supporters, with not only encouragement but also money, were Samuel Eliot Sewall and [Reverend Samuel Joseph May? Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr.?] of Boston. HINTON ROWAN HELPER HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1859

We should begin to consider, at this point, why our civil war broke out when it did. For this year 1859 happens to have been was the 1st year in which the value of US industrial products exceeded that of its agricultural products. Would you suppose that maybe it was just a curious coincidence, a happenstance, that a couple of years after this happened, the industrial region of our nation and the agricultural region of our nation, destabilized in their historical power relationship with one another, would begin to engage in an armed conflict?

During this year the Illinois legislature chose Stephen A. Douglas for the federal Senate over Abraham Lincoln, by a vote of 54 to 46 — but this was not because the Illinois legislature was experiencing any distress at Lincoln’s racism.

There was a report from Arkansas that 3 white men there had been hanged when they had been found to have in their possession literature by the troublesome antislavery racist Hinton Rowan Helper. In London, in this year, the US Minister was approached by a representative of Her Majesty’s government, on behalf of a visiting white Englishman who had been caught distributing Helperite materials in Virginia. The US Minister refused to intercede on behalf of Her Majesty’s government in the internal criminal affairs of the State of Virginia. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

(Get this, just as it wasn’t enough to be a white man in the southern states of the United States of America, it also wasn’t enough to be a racist — being the wrong kind of white racist could get one into really big trouble in the fastest way.)

William Still started a press campaign to end racial discrimination on Philadelphia’s railroad cars. After John Brown and his insurrection at Harpers Ferry failed, Still would shelter some of his men and help them escape capture.

January 31, Monday: Irrlichter op.218, a waltz by Johann Strauss, was performed for the initial time, in the Sophiensaal, Vienna.

Hinton Rowan Helper responded again to Lysander Spooner: 19 East 35th Street New York, Jany 31, 1859 Dear Spooner: You may have thought that my criticism of your circular to the Non-Slaveholders of the South was rather severe; but I gave you my candid opinion, and by reference to the inclosed Boston correspondence of the Tribune, in today’s issue, you will find that the writer’s views of the document differ but very little from my own, I am yet decidedly of the opinion that your circular is calculated to strengthen slavery rather than weaken it, and I regret that you did not withhold it from the public. Still, I know you intentions were good & we are all liable to make mistakes. I know nothing about the authorship of the inclosed slip. Please send me another circular. Prof. Fredrick has the one you sent me. Yours Truly, H.R. Helper HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Representative Kilgore moved that the rules of the US House of Representatives be suspended so he could submit a resolution in support of the existing ban upon the African slave-trade. The House then voted not to suspend its rules — and he was unable to submit it. This is what he had been trying to submit: “Whereas the laws prohibiting the African slave trade have become a topic of discussion with newspaper writers and political agitators, many of them boldly denouncing these laws as unwise in policy and disgraceful in their provisions, and insisting on the justice and propriety of their repeal, and the revival of the odious traffic in African slaves; and whereas recent demonstrations afford strong reasons to apprehend that said laws are to be set at defiance, and their violation openly countenanced and encouraged by a portion of the citizens of some of the States of this Union; and whereas it is proper in view of said facts that the sentiments of the people’s representatives in Congress should be made public in relation thereto: Therefore — “Resolved, That while we recognize no right on the part of the federal government, or any other law-making power, save that of the States wherein it exists, to interfere with or disturb the institution of domestic slavery where it is established or protected by State legislation, we do hold that Congress has power to prohibit the foreign traffic, and that no legislation can be too thorough in its measures, nor can any penalty known to the catalogue of modern punishment for crime be too severe against a traffic so inhuman and unchristian. “Resolved, That the laws in force against said traffic are founded upon the broadest principles of philanthropy, religion, and humanity; that they should remain unchanged, except so far as legislation may be needed to render them more efficient; that they should be faithfully and promptly executed by our government, and respected by all good citizens. “Resolved, That the Executive should be sustained and commended for any proper efforts whenever and wherever made to enforce said laws, and to bring to speedy punishment the wicked violators thereof, and all their aiders and abettors.” HOUSE JOURNAL, 35th Congress, 2d session, pages 298-9. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: Early in December 1856, the subject reached Congress; and although the agitation was then new, fifty-seven Southern Congressmen refused to declare a re-opening of the slave-trade “shocking to the moral sentiment of the enlightened portion of mankind,” and eight refused to call the reopening even “unwise” and “inexpedient.”12 Three years later, January 31, 1859, it was impossible, in a House of one hundred and ninety-nine members, to get a two-thirds vote in order even to consider Kilgore’s resolutions, which declared “that no legislation can be too thorough in its measures, nor can any penalty known to the catalogue of modern punishment for crime be too severe against a traffic so inhuman and unchristian.”13 Congressmen and other prominent men hastened with the rising tide.14 Dowdell of Alabama declared the repressive acts “highly

12. HOUSE JOURNAL, 34th Congress, 3d session, pages 105-10; CONGRESSIONAL GLOBE, 34th Congress, 3d session, pages 123-6; Cluskey, POLITICAL TEXT-BOOK (14th edition), page 589. 13. HOUSE JOURNAL, 35th Congress, 2d session, pages 298-9. Cf. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 45. 14. Cf. REPORTS OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, especially the 26th, pages 43-4. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER offensive;” J.B. Clay of Kentucky was “opposed to all these laws;”15 Seward of Georgia declared them “wrong, and a violation of the Constitution;”16 Barksdale of Mississippi agreed with this sentiment; Crawford of Georgia threatened a reopening of the trade; Miles of South Carolina was for “sweeping away” all restrictions;17 Keitt of South Carolina wished to withdraw the African squadron, and to cease to brand slave-trading as piracy;18 Brown of Mississippi “would repeal the law instantly;”19 Alexander Stephens, in his farewell address to his constituents, said: “Slave states cannot be made without Africans.... [My object is] to bring clearly to your mind the great truth that without an increase of African slaves from abroad, you may not expect or look for many more slave States.”20 Jefferson Davis strongly denied “any coincidence of opinion with those who prate of the inhumanity and sinfulness of the trade. The interest of Mississippi,” said he, “not of the African, dictates my conclusion.” He opposed the immediate reopening of the trade in Mississippi for fear of a paralyzing influx of Negroes, but carefully added: “This conclusion, in relation to Mississippi, is based upon my view of her present condition, not upon any general theory. It is not supposed to be applicable to Texas, to New Mexico, or to any future acquisitions to be made south of the Rio Grande.”21 John Forsyth, who for seven years conducted the slave-trade diplomacy of the nation, declared, about 1860: “But one stronghold of its [i.e., slavery’s] enemies remains to be carried, to complete its triumph and assure its welfare, — that is the existing prohibition of the African 22 Slave-trade.” Pollard, in his BLACK DIAMONDS, urged the importation of Africans as “laborers.” “This I grant you,” said he, “would be practically the re-opening of the African slave trade; but ... you will find that it very often becomes necessary to evade the letter of the law, in some of the greatest measures of social happiness and patriotism.”23

January 31: P.M.– Up river across Cyanean Meadow. Now we have quite another kind of ice. It has rained hard, converting into a very thin liquid the snow which had fallen on the old ice, and this, having frozen, has made a perfectly smooth but white snow ice. It is white like polished marble (I call it marble ice), and the trees and hill are reflected in it, as not in the other. It is far less varied than the other, but still is very peculiar and interesting. You notice the polished surface much more, as if it were the marble floor of some stupendous hall. Yet such is its composition it is not quite so hard and metallic, I think. The skater probably makes more of 3 scratch. The other was hard and crystalline. As I look south just before sunset, over this fresh and shining ice, I notice that its surface is divided, as it were, into a great many contiguous tables in different planes, somewhat like so many different facets of a polyhedron as large as the earth itself. These tables or planes are bounded by cracks, though without any appreciable opening, and the different levels are betrayed by the reflections of the light or sky being interrupted at the cracks. The ice formed last night is a day old, and these cracks, as I find, run generally from northeast to southwest across the entire meadow, some twenty-five or thirty rods, nearly at right angles with the river, and are from five 15. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 43. He referred especially to the Treaty of 1842. 16. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 43; CONGRESSIONAL GLOBE, 35th Congress, 2d session, Appendix, pages 248-50. 17. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 44. 18. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 44; 27TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, pages 13-4. 19. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 44. 20. Quoted in Lalor, CYCLOPÆDIA, III. 733; Cairnes, THE SLAVE POWER (New York, 1862), page 123, note; 27TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 15. 21. Quoted in Cairnes, THE SLAVE POWER, page 123, note; 27TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 19. 22. 27TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 16; quoted from the Mobile Register. 23. Edition of 1859, pages 63-4. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER to fifteen feet apart, while there are comparatively few cracks crossing them in the other direction. You notice this phenomenon looking over the ice some rods before you; otherwise might not observe the cracks when upon them. It is as if the very globe itself were a crystal with a certain number of facets. When I look westward now to the flat snow-crusted shore, it reflects a strong violet color. Also the pink light reflected from the low, flat snowy surfaces amid the ice on the meadows, just before sunset, is a constant phenomenon these clear winter days. Whole fields and sides of hills are often the same, but it is more distinct on these flat islands of snow scattered here and there over the meadow ice. I also see this pink in the dust made by the skaters. Perhaps the green seen at the same time in ice and water is produced by the general yellow or amber light of this hour, mingled with the blue of the reflected sky?? Surely the ice is a great and absorbing phenomenon. Consider how much of the surface of the town it occupies, how much attention it monopolizes! We do not commonly distinguish more than one kind of water in the river, but what various kinds of ice there are! Young Heywood told me that the trout which he caught in Walden was twenty-seven inches long and weighed five pounds, but was thin, not in good condition. (He saw another.) It was in the little cove between the deep one and the railroad.

Spring: The Kansas General Association of the Congregational Church met in Lawrence in the Kansas Territory and proposed that the town create a university. The citizens of the town pledged $15,000 in cash toward what was to be named “Monumental College” (most of that being the gift by Amos Adams Lawrence) plus 151 town lots in Lawrence and elsewhere, plus 170 rural acres adjoining the town, plus 1,200 acres in other parts of the Kansas Territory. It would be up to the Congregationalists to appoint the trustees. Meanwhile, however, the trustees of the “Lawrence University” fund had managed to complete a foundation for their college’s structure. Their completion date for the structure was April, but it would not be until October that they would even lay their cornerstone, into which they would place a copy of the Presbyterian Confession of Faith.

Hinton Rowan Helper’s THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT was endorsed by 68 of the 92 Republicans in the US House of Representatives. Some of them would later have occasion to protest that HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER they had never read the book, and had endorsed Helperism only because it had been recommended to them, but what they were putting their names to at this point was fairly straightforward: We, the undersigned, Members of the House of Representatives, do cordially endorse the opinion, and approve the enterprise, set forth in the foregoing circular.

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Which is to say, although they may have had occasion later to regret this (just as Germans would have occasion later to regret having endorsed the blatant opinions found in MEIN KAMPF, and to protest that they had not fully grasped that Führer Adolf Hitler meant exactly what he had said he meant), at the time these government officials knew full well the nature of the desperate doctrine of racial hatred which they were endorsing. There’s just no getting around this. RACE POLITICS

In this timeframe, until early June, Senator Jefferson Davis would be undergoing and recuperating from eye surgery. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER May: That spring, 68 of the 92 Republicans in the US House of Representatives had fairly straightforwardly endorsed the straightforward doctrine of racial hatred contained in Hinton Rowan Helper’s THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT: We, the undersigned, Members of the House of Representatives, do cordially endorse the opinion, and approve the enterprise, set forth in the foregoing circular.

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

In this month, Richard Owen was lecturing on the gorilla.

In this month, six months before the date of the postponed raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, James Redpath, an old friend of John Brown from the Kansas Territory, was publishing a book he had been secretly authoring on the basis of what he had been learned from the incautious Brown, entitled THE ROVING EDITOR; OR, TALKS WITH SLAVES IN THE SOUTHERN STATES (NY: A.B. Burdick). Redpath’s book described a plan for a race war in the slave states with assistance by armed white raiders from free territory, and it was dedicated to Captain John Brown: You, Old Hero! believe that the slave should be aided and urged to insurrection and hence do I lay this tribute at your feet.24

24. Joel Silbey has contended, in “The Civil War Synthesis in American History,” that postbellum American historians have been misconstruing antebellum American politics by viewing them in conjunction with our knowledge of the bloodbath that followed. It is only after the fact that we can “know” that the US Civil War amounted to a sectional dispute, North versus South. We avoid learning that before the fact, it was undecided whether this conflict was going to shape up as a race conflict, a class conflict, or a sectional conflict. We avoid knowing that the raid on Harpers Ferry might have resulted in a race war, in which peoples of color would be exterminated in order to create an all-white America, or might have resulted in a class war, in which the laboring classes might have first destroyed the plantation owners’ equity by killing his slaves, and then gone on to purge the nation of the white plantation owners themselves, with their privileged-class endowments. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Some of these Republicans who had endorsed Helper’s racist book would later claim that they had not read it. Did no-one in the federal government read this book by Redpath, and on the basis of what they learned instigate a clandestine government investigation of the activities of the Secret “Six” conspiracy as so broadly hinted at therein?

Did not a single person in our federal government have the intelligence that God gave a great ape? –Or, might there perchance be some other explanation for these curious facts, some explanation involving a fully intentional obtuseness?

June 21, Tuesday: Hinton Rowan Helper declared, in the preface which he was preparing to his new book 25 COMPENDIUM OF THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH. BY HINTON ROWAN HELPER OF NORTH CAROLINA, in regard to such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, that26 it is all well enough for women to give the fiction of slavery; men should give the facts. MISOGYNY

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

This clownish author also needed to ensure that his readers would understand that it was no part of his abolitionist stance to display any special friendliness or sympathy for the blacks.

(OK, Hinton, fellow, I guess we’ve all grasped that now. My gosh, you’re a handsome white man. :-)

June 21. Tuesday. P. M.–To Derby’s pasture behind and beyond schoolhouse. Meadow-sweet. Hedge-hyssop out. In that little pool near the Assabet, above our bath-place there, Glyceria pallida well out in water and Carex lagopodioides just beginning. That grass covering dry and dryish fields and hills, with curled or convolute radical leaves, is apparently Festuca ovina, and not Danthonia as I thought it. It is now generally conspicuous. Are any of our simpler forms the F. tenella? Vide July 2d, 1860. You see now the Eupatoreum purpureum pushing up in rank masses in the low grounds, and the lower part of the uppermost leaves, forming a sort of cup, is conspicuously purplish.

25. This interesting book has been republished in Miami FL in 1969. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Bailey, Hugh C. HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST- RACIST (University AL: 1965). 26. Remember Sgt. Joe Friday? “All I want is the facts, Mam.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER October 16, Sunday-October 18, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau was working on his natural history materials. ROSS/ADAMS COMMENTARY

The raid by the John Brown forces on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia involved 5 persons of color and 13 whites. Of the persons of color, 2 were killed during the raid, John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Shields Green were captured and would be hanged and one managed to escape. That is to say, back from the West, Captain Brown committed the treason of attempting to free men and women from their rightful masters by seizing the weapons at the federal arsenal, and of course the owners of these men and women, who had a perfect right to resist being deprived of the use of their property, of course resisted being deprived, and therefore of course there were deaths during his raid upon this locale where the government to which he owed loyalty was manufacturing its weapons of slaughter. Although Brown did not effectively free the slaves of the sovereign state of Virginia –except of course that he freed those who listened to him and took up pikes and were gunned down– he was able effectively to sacrifice the lives of other people to his own enthusiasms. That has to count as a personal “win” of sorts! For instance, the 1st to be killed by the raiders at Harpers Ferry was HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Hayward Shepard, a free black who happened to be in harm’s way because he was serving as the baggage handler between the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad terminal and the Winchester & Harpers Ferry Railroad Terminal (the old man failed to respond appropriately to the raiders’ orders). There were 21 fighters with Brown in the raid, and of these 10 were killed outright, 5 were captured for trial and would be hanged, and 7 escaped, of which 2 would later be captured and tried and hanged. Although the US government did effectively save the contents of their arsenal from these bold insurrectionaries, shortly thereafter the weapons of the arsenal would be seized by the insurrectionary Governor Wise of Virginia, who had as perfect a right to them as anyone, and he would distribute these weapons to Confederate troops.

[NOTE: There was every reason to believe that if Governor Wise of Virginia could get his hands on Frederick HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Douglass, the black leader would hang alongside the white leader.

Douglass was at the moment in Philadelphia. The telegraph operator there would seek out Douglass and warn him, so that he would have three full hours in which to effect his escape — before the telegram ordering his arrest needed to be handed over to the local sheriff. Douglass, in fleeing went first to familiar haunts, the Hoboken, New Jersey lodgings of Ottilie Assing, and only from there to Rochester and then to Ontario, and

England. On the dock in Rochester, embarking for Ontario, William Parker would press into Douglass’s hand what was purported to be the pistol dropped by Gorsuch when he had been shot dead in Christiana (actually, it seems that the man had been unarmed with anything more deadly than a curiously foolish moral courage).]

This sort of situation has been described many times, and you will forgive me if I here repeat one of the early descriptions of this sort of situation:

More weapons, more murder. –Lao Tzu HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Harpers Ferry from Brown’s overlook in Maryland

Brown’s Sharps carbine, his “Henry Ward Beecher’s Bible,” was captured with him after the Harpers Ferry skirmish, along with that famous George Washington sword he had just stolen from

<__ George Washington’s sword (in the famous Leutze painting). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER a plantation, and to which he had as much right as its current owner (or, for that matter, its original owner).

After they would take Captain John Brown’s Sharps rifle away from him at Harpers Ferry, they would allow this little boy to pose with it. Grow up, son, and be a Christian like us: kill people, own slaves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Although Charles Plummer Tidd opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry, he nevertheless took part both in the

raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown escaped, and made their way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania.

(Tidd would visit Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and take part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at the arsenal.)

Owen Brown was 35 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid. He escaped on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. It was due largely to his psychological grit, and physical endurance despite a withered arm, that the little group of survivors of which he was the leader did reach safety. He and Charles Plummer Tidd would find work and safety under assumed names, on an oil well crew in Crawford County, Pennsylvania. After the civil war he would grow grapes for some time in Ohio in association with two of his brothers, before migrating to California. He would be the only one of the 5 escaped raiders not to participate in the civil war, and would be the last of the raiders when he died on January 8th, 1889 near Pasadena at his mountain home “Brown’s Peak.” He never married. A marble monument now marks his mountain grave. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Perhaps this white corpse is meant to be Oliver Brown, usefully lying dead in the foreground of a contemporary news illustration? (This wouldn’t have been a depiction of Dangerfield Newby, also shot down at the bridge, since he was a very tall man with a splendid physique and since his mulatto body was abused by the attackers, who among other things snipped off its ears as trophies before they herded some hogs to root on it.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER John E. Cook was sent out by Captain Brown to collect weapons, and instead climbed into a tree and observed the fight.

When John Brown sent his son Watson Brownout to negotiate, he was gunned down by the citizens of Harpers Ferry.

(He would manage to crawl back to the shelter of the engine house and live on, groaning, his head cradled in Edwin Coppoc’s lap, for a considerable period. He would expire on October 18, 1859. His widow Isabella M. Thompson Brown would remarry with his brother Salmon Brown.)

John Henry Kagi became trapped along with John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER River, they came under a crossfire and Kagi was the first killed, his body being left to float in the river.

A monument would be erected by the citizens of Oberlin, Ohio in honor of their three free citizens of color who had died in the raid or been hanged, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., Lewis Sheridan Leary, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

Captain John Brown sent William Thompson out from the engine house to negotiate under flag of truce, and the mob of citizens placed him under arrest, took him to the local hotel barroom, discussed what to do, dragged him into the street, executed him by shooting him in the head, and dumped his body into the Potomac River.27 Thompson’s brother Dauphin Adolphus Thompson also was killed during the raid.

Dauphin

William

27. An interesting fact about this case is that it just about got a young lady into serious trouble. According to a letter of explanation she would provide to the local paper, Miss C.C. Fouke was the daughter of the tavernkeeper at Harpers Ferry, operating at the local hotel. The story had gone around, after the fact, that on the 2d day of the raid in her father’s saloon in the hotel she had thrown her body in front of this Brown conspirator William Thompson while the mob was debating whether or not to off him. Rather than be classed with Pocahontas or with Florence Nightingale, Miss Fouke attempted to explain the rationale for her conduct to the public at large. She had indeed thrown her body between the mob and the captive, she freely confessed, but she had done so, she needed to point out, “without touching him,” and she insisted also that her action was not motivated by any concern that this man was about to be shot in the head, but rather because her sister-in-law was resting in the next room and should not be disturbed as she was ailing — and/or out of a conviction that the man before being offed should be tried by a court of law. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson was pinned against the wall by a bayonet-thrust of one of the Marines. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER “One of the prisoners described Anderson as turning completely over against the wall in his dying agony. He lived a short time, stretched on the brick walk without, where he was subjected to savage brutalities, being kicked in body and face, while one brute of an armed farmer spat a huge quid of tobacco from his vile jaws into the mouth of the dying man, which he first forced open.” (You see, these people were incorrectly perceiving him to be not a white man but a light mulatto. When opportunistic medical students would go to transport his remains to their college in Winchester, Virginia for use as a dissection specimen, their treatment of this “light mulatto” corpse was so casual as to be recorded by a bystander: “In order to take him away handily they procured a barrel and tried to pack him into it. Head foremost, they rammed him in, but they could not bend his legs so as to get them into the barrel with the rest of the body. In their endeavor to accomplish this feat, they strained so hard that the man’s bones or sinews fairly cracked.”)

In the engine house at Harpers Ferry, Edwin Coppoc surrendered with Captain John Brown.

(He would be tried by a jury of his white male peers immediately after the conclusion of the trial of Captain Brown. He would be sentenced to death on November 2, 1859. From prison before his hanging, he would write to his adoptive mother, of a nonresistant-abolitionist Quaker farm family, that he was HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER “sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun.”

He would be hung with John E. Cook on December 16, 1859. The body would be buried in Winona after a funeral attended by the entire town. Later the body would be reburied in Salem OH.)

You will remember that in July 1854, when Moncure Daniel Conway graduated from Harvard Theological School and was ordained, his classmate William H. Leeman had not graduated with him. This fellow had drunk some illicit alcohol Conway had smuggled onto campus and then refilled Conway’s illicit bottles with water, and so student Conway had turned him in to the college administration. Leaman had been refused graduation on grounds of moral turpitude, and warned not to make any attempt to preach. At this point he reappears, or his mutilated body reappears — salvaged from the waters after being used for target practice, and thrown into the common pit on the bank of the Shenandoah River upstream from Harpers Ferry.28

28. See pages 87-8 and 240-1 of d’Entremont, where this account of Leaman was put together for the first time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Barclay Coppoc escaped from Harpers Ferry.

“We were together eight days before [John E. Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [John Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated and I went on through with the box to Ohio on the cars.” (Osborn Perry Anderson, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Jackson Meriam would travel separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Barclay Coppoc would go from there to Iowa, with Virginia agents in close pursuit. He would be back in Kansas in 1860, helping to run off some Missouri slaves, and would nearly lose his life in a 2d undertaking of this kind. On July 24, 1861 he would become a 1st Lieutenant in Colonel Montgomery’s regiment, the 3d Kansas Infantry. Eventually he would be killed by the fall of a train into the Platte river from a trestle forty feet high, the supports of which had been burned away by Confederates.)

Francis Jackson Meriam was not killed or captured in the raid on Harpers Ferry because he had been left at the HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Kennedy farmhouse, in one of his fits of despair.

He was a great drag on the other escapees as they hiked through the woods as he needed to stop and rest every mile or so.

To the great relief of the others, Meriam boarded a train in the town of Shippensburg heading for Philadelphia. Eventually Thoreau would put him on a train headed for Canada. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, had been shot dead at the age of 20 while serving as a sentinel at the river bridge.

His and 9 other corpses left by the Provisional Army were “subjected to every indignity that a wild and madly excited people could heap upon them.” A horrified reporter could only rationalize: “It may be thought that there was cruelty and barbarity in this; but the public mind had been frenzied by the outrages of these men, who, being outlaws, were regarded as food for carrion birds, and not as human creatures.” The corpses the Provisional Army needed burial but Harpers Ferry residents refused to allow their cemetery to be used for these who had sought to create servile insurrection. Two men, hired for $5 from the public purse to dispose of the corpses, heaved the bodies into the bed of a common wagon –witnesses recalled the welter of sprawling limbs– and carted them over the bridge to the opposite bank of the Shenandoah River, where a burial site was selected on the bank half a mile above the town. Without any ceremony the corpses were dumped into a shallow common pit.

By a week after the execution of John Brown, our nation would be teetering on the edge of civil war. The disruption, however, was not directly related to John Brown’s raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, but had to do instead with Helperism and its attitude of antislavery racism. The struggle was over the Speakership in the new US House of Representatives. Neither of the primary parties had the requisite 119 votes to win this position, and so a decision would be reachable only after there had been some considerable defection on one side or the other, from party discipline. The Republicans had proposed Representative John Sherman for this important position, and the Democrats were countering that no one who had endorsed Helperism, a concoction of recommended murder and treason, could possibly be considered for such a vital and influential role. If Representative Sherman got the job, the Southern states would be forced to withdraw their representatives from the halls of the US federal government. In endorsing Hinton Rowan Helper’s book during the spring of this year, the South’s attitude was, Sherman had endorsed treason and murder.

By the 2d day of the debate over the speakership, a linkage was being suggested between Helper’s ideas and John Brown’s actions. The illegality of the actions was coming to be considered to have been a direct expression of this strange belief system, according to which there was a “higher law” to which humans owed their primary obedience. The idea that there was a law higher than human law was considered an utterly presumptuous and iniquitous doctrine.

October 16. Sunday. P.M.– Paddle to Puffer’s and thence walk to Ledum Swamp and Conant’s Wood. A cold, clear, Novemberish day. The wind goes down and we do not sail. The button-bushes are just bare, and the black willows partly so, and the mikania all fairly gray now. I see the button-bush balls reflected on each side, and each wool-grass head and recurved withered sedge or rush is also doubled by the reflection. The Scirpus lacustris is generally brown, the Juncus militaris greener. It is rather too cool to sit still in the boat unless in a sunny and sheltered place. I have not been on the river for some time, and it is the more novel to me this HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER cool day. When I get to Willow Bay I see the new musquash-houses erected, conspicuous on the now nearly leafless shores. To me this is an important and suggestive sight, as, perchance, in some countries new haystacks in the yards; as to the Esquimaux the erection of winter houses. I remember this phenomenon annually for thirty years. A more constant phenomenon here than the new haystacks in the yard, for they were erected here probably before man dwelt here and may still be erected here when man has departed. For thirty years I have annually observed, about this time or earlier, the freshly erected winter lodges of the musquash along the riverside, reminding us that, if we have no gypsies, we have a more indigenous race of furry, quadrupedal men maintaining their ground in our midst still. This may not be an annual phenomenon to you. It may not be in the Greenwich almanac or ephemeris, but it has an important place in my Kalendar. So surely as the sun appears to be in Libra or Scorpio, I see the conical winter lodges of the musquash rising above the withered pontederia and flags. There will be some reference to it, by way of parable or otherwise, in my New Testament. Surely, it is a defect in our Bible that it is not truly ours, but a Hebrew Bible. The most pertinent illustrations for us are to be drawn, not from Egypt or Babylonia, but from New England. Talk about learning our letters and being literate! Why, the roots of letters are things. Natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings, and yet American scholars, having little or no root in the soil, commonly strive with all their might to confine themselves to the imported symbols alone. All the true growth and experience, the living speech, they would fain reject as “Americanisms.” It is the old error, which the church, the state, the school ever commit, choosing darkness rather than light, holding fast to the old and to tradition. A more intimate knowledge, a deeper experience, will surely originate a word. When I really know that our river pursues a serpentine course to the Merrimack, shall I continue to describe it by referring to some other river no older than itself which is like it, and call it a meander? It is no more meandering than the Meander is musketaquidding. As well sing of the nightingale here as the Meander. What if there were a tariff on words, on language, for the encouragement of home manufactures? Have we not the genius to coin our own? Let the schoolmaster distinguish the true from the counterfeit. They go on publishing the “chronological cycles” and “movable festivals of the Church” and the like from mere habit, but how insignificant are these compared with the annual phenomena of your life, which fall within your experience! The signs of the zodiac are not nearly of that significance to me that the sight of a dead sucker in the spring is. That is the occasion for an immovable festival in my church. Another kind of Lent then begins in my thoughts than you wot of. I am satisfied then to live on fish alone for a season. Men attach a false importance to celestial phenomena as compared with terrestrial, as if it were more respectable and elevating to watch your neighbors than to mind your own affairs. The nodes of the stars are not the knots we have to untie. The phenomena of our year are one thing, those of the almanac another. For October, for

instance, instead of making the sun enter the sign of the scorpion, I would much sooner make him enter a musquash-house. Astronomy is a fashionable study, patronized by princes, but not fungi. “Royal Astronomer.” The snapping turtle, too, must find a place among the constellations, though it may have to supplant some doubtful characters already there. If there is no place for him overhead, he can serve us bravely underneath, HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER supporting the earth. This clear, cold, Novemberish light is inspiriting. Some twigs which are bare and weeds begin to glitter with hoary light. The very edge or outline of a tawny or russet hill has this hoary light on it. Your thoughts sparkle like the water surface and the downy twigs. From the shore you look back at the silver-plated river. Every rain exposes new arrowheads. We stop at Clamshell and dabble for a moment in the relics of a departed race. Where we landed in front of Puffer’s, found a jug which the haymakers had left in the bushes. Hid our boat there in a clump of willows, and though the ends stuck out, being a pale green and whitish, they were not visible or distinguishable at a little distance. Passed through the sandy potato-field at Witherell’s cellar-hole. Potatoes not dug; looking late and neglected now; the very vines almost vanished on some sandier hills. When we emerged from the pleasant footpath through the birches into Witherell Glade, looking along it toward the westering sun, the glittering white tufts of the Andropogon scoparius, lit up by the sun, were affectingly fair and cheering to behold. It was already a cheerful Novemberish scene. A narrow glade stretching east and west between a dense birch wood, now half bare, and a ruddy oak wood on the upper side, a ground covered with tawny stubble and fine withered grass and cistuses. Looking westward along it, your eye fell on these lit tufts of andropogon [Vide Nov. 8th.], their glowing half raised a foot or more above the ground, a lighter and more brilliant whiteness than the downiest cloud presents (though seen on one side they are grayish) [Vide (by chance) same date, or October 16th, 1858]. Even the lespedezas stand like frost-covered wands, and now hoary goldenrods and some bright-red blackberry vines amid the tawny grass are in harmony with the rest; and if you sharpen and rightly intend your eye you see the gleaming lines of gossamer (stretching from stubble to stubble over the whole surface) which you are breaking. How cheerful these cold but bright white waving tufts! They reflect all the sun’s light without a particle of his heat, or yellow rays. A thousand such tufts now catch up the sun and send to us its light but not heat. His heat is being steadily withdrawn from us. Light without heat is getting to be the prevailing phenomenon of the day now. We economize all the warmth we get now. The frost of the 11th, which stiffened the ground, made new havoc with vegetation, as I perceive. Many plants have ceased to bloom, no doubt. Many Diplopappus linariifolius are gone to seed, and yellowish globes. Such are the stages in the year’s decline. The flowers are at the mercy of the frosts. Places where erechthites grows, more or less bare, in sprout-lands, look quite black and white (black withered leaves and white down) and wintry. At Ledum Swamp, feeling to find the Vaccinium Oxycoccus berries, I am struck with the coldness of the wet sphagnum, as if I put my hands into a moss in Labrador, – a sort of winter lingering the summer through there. To my surprise, now at 3.30 P.M., some of the sphagnum in the shade is still stiff with frost, and when I break it I see the glistening spiculae. This is the most startling evidence of winter as yet. For only on the morning of the 11th was there any stiffening of the ground elsewhere. Also in the high sedgy sprout-land south of this swamp, I see hoary or frost-like patches of sedge amid the rest, where all is dry; as if in such places (the lowest) the frost had completely bleached the grass so that it now looks like frost. I think that that is the case. It is remarkable how, when a wood has been cut (perhaps where the soil was light) and frosts for a long while prevent a new wood from springing up there, that fine sedge (Carex Pennsylvanica?) will densely cover the ground amid the stumps and dead sprouts. It is the most hardy and native of grasses there. This is the grass of the sprout-lands and woods. It wants only the sun and a reasonably dry soil. Then there are the grasses and sedges of the meadows, but the cultivated fields and the pastures are commonly clothed with introduced grasses. The nesaea is all withered, also the woodwardia The ledum and Andromeda Polifolia leaves have fallen. The Kalmia glauca is still falling. The spruce, also, has fallen. The ledum smells like a bee, – that peculiar scent they have. C., too, perceives it. See a hairy woodpecker on a burnt pitch pine. He distinctly rests on his tail constantly. With what vigor he taps and bores the bark, making it fly far and wide, and then darts off with a sharp whistle! I remark how still it is to-day, really Sabbath-like. This day, at least, we do not hear the rattle of cars nor the whistle. I cannot realize that the country was often as still as this twenty years ago. Returning, the river is perfectly still and smooth. The broad, shallow water on each side, bathing the withered grass, looks as if it were ready to put on its veil of ice at any moment. It seems positively to invite the access of frost. I seem to hear already the creaking, shivering sound of ice there, broken by the undulations my boat makes. So near are we to winter. Then, nearer home, I hear two or three song sparrows on the button-bushes sing as in spring, – that memorable tinkle, – as if it would be last as it was first. The few blackish leaves of pontederia rising above the water now resemble ducks at a distance, and so help to conceal them now that they are returning. The weeds are dressed in their frost jackets, naked down to their close-fitting downy or flannel shirts. Like athletes they challenge the winter, these bare twigs. This cold refines and condenses us. Our spirits are strong, like that pint of cider in the middle of a frozen barrel. The cool, placid, silver-plated waters at even coolly await the frost. The musquash is steadily adding to his winter lodge. There is no need of supposing a peculiar instinct telling him how high to build his cabin. He has had a longer experience in this river-valley than we. Evergreens, I should say, fall early, both the coniferous and the broad-leaved. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER That election-cake fungus which is still growing (as for some months) appears to be a Boletus. I love to get out of cultivated fields where I walk on an imported sod, on English grass, and walk in the fine sedge of woodland hollows, on an American sward. In the former case my thoughts are heavy and lumpish, as if I fed on turnips. In the other I nibble groundnuts. Your hands begin to be cool, rowing, now. At many a place in sprout-lands, where the sedge is peculiarly flat and white or hoary, I put down my hand to feel if there is frost on it. It must be the trace of frost. Since the frost of the 11th, the grass and stubble has received another coat of tawny. That andropogon bright feathery top may be put with the clematis seed and tail. Only this cold, clear sky can light them up thus. The farmer begins to calculate how much longer he can safely leave his potatoes out. Each ball of the button-bush reflected in the silvery water by the riverside appears to me as distinct and important as a star in the heavens viewed through “optic glass.” This, too, deserves its Kepler and Galileo. As nature generally, on the advent of frost, puts on a russet and tawny dress, so is not man clad more in harmony with nature in the fall in a tawny suit or the different hues of Vermont gray? I would fain see him glitter like a sweet-fern twig between me and the sun. A few green yellow lily pads lie on the surface waiting to be frozen in. All the Lycopodium complanatum I see to-day has shed its pollen.

October 16, Sunday, night: Senator James Murray Mason was enjoying the federal Congress being out of session, at home with his family in Winchester, Virginia. This town was 20 easy miles away from Harpers Ferry along the Baltimore & Ohio RR tracks. Senator Mason would arrive in Harpers Ferry soon after Captain John Brown’s surrender, and interrogate the wounded old man in the presence of his mortally wounded son and in the presence of officer-in-charge Robert E. Lee.

His idea of an investigation procedure was “Follow the money.” Mason would immediately begin to spread the necessary lie, that “not a man, black or white, joined them [emphasis his] after they came into Virginia, or gave them aid or assistance in any form.” The totality of the evidence he would be able to summon for the truth of this emphatic and utterly necessary assertion was that “The fact is undoubted.”29

Subsequent historians have of course dutifully followed his lead in copying from one textbook into the next textbook the assertion that no Virginia slaves had joined this sudden, unannounced, unexpected attempt HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER at the creation of a servile insurrection. The thought has been just too utterly dangerous to contemplate — therefore the fact has had to correspond to the thought.

How to explain this? It is easily understood once one comes to recognize that the thing that really frosted sensible guys like Mason was not the prospect of race war, of a servile insurrection led by charismatics of the likes of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, but the prospect of class war.30 This guy had read Hinton Rowan Helper’s book THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT, and he knew very well who the real enemy was. The real enemy would be anyone who would use the race hatred of the poor whites of the South to set these poor whites against those rich whites of the South who were enjoying “ownership” over black Americans. Therefore the 1st question in the mind of a guy like Senator Mason would have been, not “Was Brown trying to key off a servile insurrection?” but a somewhat more complicated one, a question on the order of: “Was Brown’s servile insurrection intended to key off a genocide in which all these armed poor whites who had been so carefully taught to hate the nigger, by the simple expedient of forming into mobs and suddenly slaughtering all the black property of the rich whites of the South, would be able at last to drag our

29. Jean Libby of the Department of African American Studies at City College of San Francisco has had the following to offer in regard to the participation of local African Americans in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry during John Brown’s raid. She uses Osborn Perry Anderson’s A VOICE FROM HARPER’S FERRY, written in 1860, as the basis of her research. The only specific deaths (the ultimate test of joining) of local slaves and free blacks are those in at least two primary sources. She published these in 1979 in BLACK VOICES FROM HARPERS FERRY. There is also “Mean To Be Free: John Brown’s Black Nation Campaign,” a videotape. These are referenced in FROM SLAVERY TO SALVATION: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF REV. THOMAS W. HENRY OF THE A.M.E. CHURCH,” UP of Mississippi: The local slaves —and the substantial free black population in the area— really did fight with and for Brown as asserted by Osborne Anderson and by Frederick Douglass, that was researched and published with new information in 1974 by Benjamin Quarles in ALLIES FOR FREEDOM. He cited the request for reparations from the slaveholder, William Fuller, who had hired Jim as a coachman to Lewis Washington (the famous sword of George Washington was surrendered to Osborne Anderson). He cited the denial of indemnity from the Commonwealth of Virginia because “he had joined the rebels with a good will” (page 100). He was armed, as was the free man of color who died with him, mentioned by Washington in his US Senate deposition as “a free man, visiting his wife,” but otherwise unnamed — and described by him, of course, as an unwilling prisoner of Brown. After the raid, the slaveholders of the area portrayed the local population as contented and fearful in order to contain further insurrection. The population distribution in the county, according to Stephen Oates in TO PURGE THIS LAND WITH BLOOD, was 9 whites to 1 black. To have fifty people participate, some die, some captured, some escape, and some melt back into the slave society was a strong indication of local support that would have grown had Brown not been surrounded. When I began researching these fifty, inspired by Osborne Anderson’s primary source account, the cover was cracked when I charted each local slave named in the indictment against Brown, who was convicted of conspiring with them to commit insurrection. Jim, Sam, Mason, and Catesby [the slaves of Lewis Washington]; Henry, Levi, Ben, Jerry, Phil, George, and Bill [the slaves of John Allstadt], and others unknown. These unknown I believe to have shown to be the slaves of George Turner, killed by Brown's army. Men of fighting age appear on the 1860 census as fugitive from his farm. He had probably come into Harpers Ferry to look for them. Their added numbers humanize the reported but unidentified dead on Brown's side, all in one area, in the Shenandoah River in a direct line to Turner’s farm. When names are placed with an historically anonymous group they can be found. Professor Quarles told me, when I asked him for advice in 1977, that there is always something new to be found. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER proud and righteous slavemasters down into the gutter with them?”

October 28, Friday: Hinton Rowan Helper was under suspicion in New-York and, indeed, back home, and wrote again to Lysander Spooner: 43 Pine Street, New York, Oct. 28, 1859 Lysander Spooner, Esq. Dear Sir: Some persons here, and many, I suppose, in the South, are of the opinion that I was one of the prime movers in the Harpers Ferry Folly. I had nothing to do, and never expect to have anything to do, with any such ill-advised proceeding. It is impossible for us to achieve victory on the Brown basis. I hope we shall have no more such foolhardy expeditions. Let all good Antislavery men reserve their strength until the final struggle comes, which is, perhaps, not far off. Meanwhile please favor me, if you can, with a copy (or, if you will lend me the letter, I’ll return it to you if you desire it) of the letter I wrote you some time since disapproving your circular. I wish to show a friend here exactly what I said on the subject. H.R. Helper

Frederick Douglass wrote from Canada to Charles Wesley Slack in Boston advising that he would be unable to speak in Boston on November 1st. Slack was the organizer of the Fraternity Course, a popular series of lectures sponsored by Theodore Parker’s Congregational parish, and Douglass’s scheduled topic had been “Self Made Men.”

Confidential My Dear Sir: Seventeen Marshalls are on the look out for me in the States, and to avoid arrest I

30. Joel Silbey has contended, in “The Civil War Synthesis in American History,” that postbellum American historians have been misconstruing antebellum American politics by viewing them in conjunction with our knowledge of the bloodbath that followed. It is only after the fact that we can “know” that the US Civil War amounted to a sectional dispute, North versus South. We avoid learning that before the fact, it was undecided whether this conflict was going to shape up as a race conflict, a class conflict, or a sectional conflict. We avoid knowing that the raid on Harpers Ferry might have resulted in a race war, in which peoples of color would be exterminated in order to create an all-white America, or might have resulted in a class war, in which the laboring classes might have first destroyed the plantation owners’ equity by killing his slaves, and then gone on to purge the nation of the white plantation owners themselves, with their privileged-class endowments. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER must avoid a journey to Boston —....

I should have written before — but for the hope that the clouds that now overshadow me would pass away— Instead of this they grow darker every hour— In haste yours Truly Frederick Douglass

October 28: Goldenrods and asters have been altogether lingering some days. Walnuts commonly fall, and the black walnuts at Smith’s are at least half fallen. They are of the form and size of a small lemon and– what is singular–have a rich nutmeg fragrance. They are now turning dark-brown. Gray says it is rare in the Eastern but very common in the Western States. Is it indigenous in Massachusetts? [Emerson says it is, but rare.] If so, it is much the most remarkable nut that we have. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER December 5, Monday: In spite of the ban of March 19th, 1854, the Russian Musical Society gave its initial concert, in St. Petersburg (they avoided the ban largely by having friends in high places). Most of the music was conducted by Anton Rubinstein, who played the solo part in his own Piano Concerto no.3.

Senator Jefferson Davis arrived in Washington DC from Mississippi as the federal Congress convened.

When the 1st session of the new senate began, Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia, the senator who had written the Fugitive Slave Law, rose and announced that he was sponsoring a resolution to inquire into the gesture that had been made toward servile insurrection by the guerrillas of Captain John Brown in the shape of a raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.

HARPERS FERRY, FROM THE POTOMAC SIDE

HARPERS FERRY, FROM THE BLUE RIDGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER He asserted that all he wanted was the facts. Where did the money for this come from? Had they received any of their aid and comfort out of collusion from officials of the federal government? He was willing to speculate that New England would be discovered by this Select Committee on the Invasion of Harpers Ferry to have been behind this, and that its ideological foundation had been in Hinton Rowan Helper’s “vile, false, truthless” THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT, an appeal to class warfare arraying the Southern poor white trash against the rich Southern slavemasters. Fortunately, Helper had failed, for the reason that, Mason suggested, the poor white trash of Virginia actually loved and admired their state in the same way that the black slaves of Virginia loved and admired their owners. The black slaves had proved this by not joining Brown, and the poor white trash had proved this by uniting under the leadership of Colonel Robert E. Lee to capture Brown.

The Senate unanimously approved Mason’s inquiry into the Secret “Six” conspiracy.

December 5: P.M.–Down Turnpike to Smith’s Hill. Rather hard walking in the snow. There is a slight mist in the air and accordingly some glaze on the twigs and leaves, and thus suddenly we have passed from Indian summer to winter. The perfect silence, as if the whispering and creaking earth were muffled (her axle), and the stillness (motionlessness) of the twigs and of the very weeds and withered grasses, as if they were sculptured out of marble, are striking. It is as if you had stepped from a withered garden into the yard of a sculptor or worker in marble, crowded with delicate works, rich and rare. I remark, half a mile off, a tall and slender pitch pine against the dull-gray mist, peculiarly monumental. I noticed also several small white oak trees full of leaves by the roadside, strangely interesting and beautiful. Their stiffened leaves were very long and deeply cut, and the lighter and glazed under sides being almost uniformly turned vertically toward the northwest, as a traveller turns his back to the storm, though enough of the redder and warmer sides were seen to contrast with them, it looked like an artificial tree hung with many-fingered gauntlets. Such was the disposition of the leaves, often nearly in the same plane, that it looked like a brown arbor-vitae. See four quails running across the Turnpike. How they must be affected by this change from warm weather and bare ground to cold and universal snow! Returning from the post-office at early candle-light, I noticed for the first time this season the peculiar effect of lights in offices and shops seen over the snowy streets, suggesting how withdrawn and inward the life in the former, how exposed and outward in the latter. His late career–these six weeks, I mean–has been meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing more miraculous in all history. Nothing could his enemies do but it redounded to his infinite advantage, the advantage of his cause. They did HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER not hang him at once; they reserved him to preach to them. And here is another great blunder: they have not hung his four followers with him; that scene is still to come, and so his victory is prolonged. No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the Manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child between his prison and the gallows? The preachers, the Bible men, they who talk about principle and doing to others as you would that they should do unto you,–how could they fail to recognize him, by far the greatest preacher of them all, with the Bible on his lips, and in his acts, the embodiment of principle, who actually carried out the golden rule? All whose moral sense is aroused, who have a calling from on high to preach, have sided with him. It may prove the occasion, if it has not proved it already, of a new sect of Brownites being formed in our midst. I see now, as he saw, that he was not to be pardoned or rescued by men. That would have been to disarm him, to restore to him a material weapon, a Sharp’s rifle, when he had taken up the sword of the spirit,–the sword with which he has really won his greatest and most memorable victories. Now he has not laid aside the sword of the spirit. He is pure spirit himself, and his sword is pure spirit also. On the day of his translation, I heard, to be sure, that he was hung, but I did not know what that meant,–and I felt no sorrow on his account; but not for a day or two did I even hear that he was dead, and not after any number of days shall I believe it. Of all the men who are said to be my contemporaries, it seems to me that John Brown is the only one who has not died. I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he was. He is not confined to North Elba nor to Kansas. He is no longer working in secret only. John Brown has earned immortality. Men have been hung in the South before for attempting to rescue slaves, and the North was not much stirred by it. Whence, then, this wonderful difference? We were not so sure of their devotion to principle. We have made a subtle distinction, have forgotten human laws, and do homage to an idea. The North is suddenly all Transcendental. It goes behind the human law, it goes behind the apparent failure, and recognizes eternal justice and glory. It is more generous than the spirit which actuated our forefathers, for it is a revolution in behalf of another, and an oppressed, people. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER December 6, Tuesday: Charles Lawrence Robinson was elected as Kansas governor under the Wyandotte Constitution. “BLEEDING KANSAS”

Loaded pistols were being flourished on the floor of the House of Representatives. Here is how Peter Wallenstein has parsed the situation in his article “Incendiaries All”: Thus it was that, while the House was debating the speakership, Senator [Alfred] Iverson of Georgia went wild. Charging Northern senators with duplicity, he noted that they “disclaim for themselves and their people any sympathy whatever with Brown and his acts and his intentions. And yet, sir, look at what is transpiring this very day in this very Capital.” By supporting John Sherman, the Republican party was “this day attempting to raise to the third office in this Government a man who has openly indorsed sentiments more incendiary in their character than anything that John Brown has ever uttered.” REPUBLICAN PARTY

The troublesome sentiments that this Ohio congressman John Sherman of the Republican Party (pictured above) had been endorsing happen to have been those of the notorious Southern racist-abolitionist admirer of HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Waldo Emerson, Hinton Rowan Helper.

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

In his journal, Henry Thoreau was making a distinction between the uncredentialed earnestness of the writing of John Brown and the credentialed lack of earnestness of the writing, by way of invidious contrast, of such recognized masters as Washington Irving and Benjamin Franklin:31

December 6: P.M. – To Walden and Baker Bridge, in the shallow snow and mizzling rain. It is somewhat of a lichen day. The bright-yellow sulphur lichens on the walls of the Walden road look novel, as if I had not seen them for a long time. Do they not require cold as much as moisture to enliven them? What surprising forms and colors! Designed on every natural surface of rock or tree. Even stones of smaller size which make the walls are so finished, and piled up for what use? How naturally they adorn our works of art! See where the farmer has set up his post-and-rail fences along the road. The sulphur lichen has, as it were, at once leaped to occupy the northern side of each post, as in towns handbills are pasted on all bare surfaces, and the rails are more or less gilded with them as if it had rained gilt. The handbill which nature affixes to the north side of posts and trees and other surfaces. And there are the various shades of green and gray beside. Though it is melting, there is more ice left on the twigs in the woods than I had supposed. The mist is so thick that we cannot quite see the length of Walden as we descend to its eastern shore. The reflections of the hillsides are so much the more unsubstantial, for we see even the reflected mist veiling them. You see, beneath these whitened wooded hills and shore sloping to it, the dark, half mist-veiled water. For two rods in width next the shore, where the water is shallowest and the sand bare, you see a strip of light greenish two or three rods in width, and then dark brown (with a few green streaks only) where the dark sediment of ages has accumulated. And, looking down the pond, you see on each side successive wooded promontories –with their dim reflections– growing dimmer and dimmer till they are lost in the mist. The more distant shores are a mere dusky line or film, a sort of concentration of the mistiness. In the pure greenish stripe next the shore I saw some dark-brown objects above the sand, which looked very much like sea turtles in various attitudes. One appeared holding its great head up toward the surface. They were very weird-like and of indefinite size. I supposed that they were stumps or logs on the bottom, but was surprised to find that they were a thin and flat collection of sediment on the sandy bottom, like that which covered the bottom generally further out. When the breeze rippled the surface some distance out, it looked like a wave coming in, but it never got in to the shore. No sooner has the snow fallen than, in the woods, it is seen to be dotted almost everywhere with the fine seeds and scales of birches and alders, – no doubt an ever-accessible food to numerous birds and perhaps mice. Thus it is alternate snow and seeds. Returning up the railroad, I see the great tufts of sedge in Heywood’s meadow curving over like locks of the

31. The importance of being earnest. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER meadow’s hair, above the snow.

These browned the meadow considerably. Then came a black maze, of alders moistened by the rain, which made a broad black belt between the former brown and the red-brown oaks higher up the hillside. The white pines now, seen through the mist, the ends of their boughs drooping a little with the weight of the glaze, resemble very much hemlocks, for the extremities of their limbs always droop thus, while pines are commonly stiffly erect or ascendant. Came upon a round bed of tansy, half a dozen feet in diameter, which was withered quite black, as seen above the snow, – blacker than any plant I remember. This reminded me that its name was by some thought to be from or immortality, from its not withering early, but in this case it suggested its funereal reputation. JOHN BROWN What a transit that of his horizontal body alone, but just cut down from the gallows-tree! We read that at such a time it passed through Philadelphia, and by Saturday night had reached New York. Thus like a meteor it passed through the Union from the Southern regions toward the North. No such freight have the cars borne since they carried him southward alive.32 What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see what a work this comparatively unread and unlettered man has written within six weeks! Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well? He has written in prison, not a History of the World like Raleigh, for his time was short, but an American book which shall live longer than that. The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, goes almost unobserved. Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but the art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind it. This unlettered man’s speaking and writing is standard English. Some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and Americanisms before, he has made standard American. “It will pay.” It suggests that the one great rule of composition –and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this– is to speak the truth. This first, this second, this third. This demands earnestness and manhood chiefly.33 I felt that he, a prisoner in the midst of his enemies and under sentence of death, if consulted as to his next step, could answer more wisely than all his countrymen beside. He best understood his position; he contemplated it most calmly. All other men, North and South, were beside themselves. Our thoughts could not revert to any greater or wiser or better men with whom to compare him, for he was above them all. The man this country was about to hang was the greatest and best in it.34 Commonly men live according to a formula, and are satisfied if the order of law is observed, but in this instance they returned to original perceptions and there was a revival of old religion; and they saw that what was called order was confusion, what was called justice, injustice, that the best was deemed the worst. Most Northern men, and not a few Southern ones, have been wonderfully stirred by Brown’s behavior and words. They have seen or felt that they were great, heroic, noble, and that there has been nothing quite equal to them in this country, if in the recent history of the world. But the minority have been unmoved by them. They have only been surprised and provoked by the attitude of their neighbors. They have seen that Brown was brave and believed that he had done right, but they have not detected any further peculiarity in him. Not being accustomed to make fine distinctions or to appreciate noble sentiments, they have read his speeches and letters as if they read them not, – they have not known when they burned. They have not felt that he spoke with authority, and hence they have only remembered that the law must be executed. They remember the old formula; they do not hear the new revelation. The man who does not recognize in Brown’s words a wisdom and nobleness, and therefore an authority, superior to our laws, is a modern Democrat. This is the test by which to try him. He is not willfully but constitutionally blind, and he is consistent with himself. Such has been his past life. In like manner he has read history and his Bible, and he accepts, or seems to accept, the last only as an established formula, and not because he has been convicted by it. You will not find kindred sentiments in his commonplace-book.35 And in these six weeks what a variety of themes he has touched on! There are words in that letter to his wife, respecting the education of his daughters, which deserve to be framed and hung over every mantelpiece in the land. Compare their earnest wisdom with that of Poor Richard!36

“He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene, 32. Cape Cod, and Miscellanies, page 449; Misc., Riv. 247. 33. Cape Cod, and Miscellanies, pages 446-448; Misc., Riv. 244, 245. 34. Cape Cod, and Miscellanies, pages 441, 442; Misc., Riv. 237, 238. 35. Cape Cod, and Miscellanies, pages 443, 444; Misc., Riv. 240, 241. 36. Cape Cod, and Miscellanies, page 447; Misc., Riv. 244, 245. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER ...... Nor called the gods with vulgar spite, To vindicate his helpless right; But bowed his comely head Down, as upon a bed.”37

Years are no longer required for a revolution of public opinion; days, nay hours, produce marked changes. Fifty who were ready to say, on going into some meeting in honor of him, that he ought to be hung, will not say it when they come out. They hear his words read, every one of which “conveys the perfect charm;” they see the earnest faces of the congregation; and perhaps they join in singing the hymn in his praise. What confessions it has extorted from the cold and conservative! Witness the Newton letter. The order of instruction has been reversed. I hear that the preacher says that his act was a failure, while to some extent he eulogizes the man. The class-teacher, after the services, tells his grown-up pupils that at first he thought as the preacher does now, hut now he thinks that John Brown was right. But it is understood that the pupils are as much ahead of the teacher as he is ahead of the priest; and the very little boys at home ask their parents why God did not save him. They, whether in the church or out of it, who adhere to the spirit and abandon the letter, and who are accordingly called infidel, have been foremost in this movement.38 I took out my boots, which I have not worn since last spring, with the mud and dust of spring still on them, and went forth in the snow. That is an era, when, in the beginning of the winter, you change from the shoes of summer to the boots of winter.

December 7, Wednesday: The Reverend William Henry Furness wrote from Philadelphia to Charles Wesley Slack in Boston, accepting a preaching engagement conditional upon his finding a replacement for his own pulpit.

The Quakers of Springdale, Iowa, aware at this point of what John Brown and his men had been up to after they had drilled and prepared and planned in their midst, and horrified at what had happened, made haste to restate their testimony for peace. Their Monthly Meeting appointed “a large and representative committee” including Friends Joel Bean, Henry Rowntree, Israel Negus, Laurie Tatum, James Schooley, and Samuel Macy to respond to “an impression abroad that the Friends in this neighborhood have improperly encouraged a war spirit”: We have endeavored to consider the subject confided to us in all its bearings and are united in the conclusion, that any publication (in the way of defense) on the part of the [Monthly Meeting] is unnecessary.... We believe our principals [sic] of peace were never dearer to most of our members than now. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

37. Cape Cod, and Miscellanies, page 449; Misc., Riv. 247. 38. Cape Cod, and Miscellanies, pages 442, 443; Misc., Riv. 238, 239. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER I have been unable to find a record of the Iowa Quakers having completed a process of Quaker disownment in regard to those in their meeting who had been helping Captain John Brown and supplying him with firepower.

The United Sons of Freedom, to Governor Henry A. Wise: St. Louis Dec. 7th 1859 To His Excelency Gov[ernor]. H.A. Wise Dear Sir At a meeting of the United Sons of Freedom of St. Louis, helled at their meeting room, on the 7th Dec. it was unanimously resolved that we present you with a leather medal for the energetic manner in which you have discharged your duty, as Gov[ernor]. of the State of Virginia in the late Harper’s Ferry difficulty; and rest assured that we appreciate you very much for your bravery in haveing two thousand brave sons of Virginia present at the execution of the Hero of the North, and the lover of our motto, Give us liberty or give us death We feel proud to think that the lover of our motto died so noble and we shall always treasure his memory as long one of our greatest men, who loved his country better than life Oh! you are a noble representative of the State of Virginia. Just think you would not permit a lady to accompany Mrs. Brown to her last interview with her husband, but we trust that his spirit has arrived at that haven from whose bounds no traveler returns, when the wicked cease from trouble and the wary are at rest We subscribe your humble servants William Lewis, President J.P. Cutler, Sec[retar]y

Here is how Peter Wallenstein has parsed the continuing tense situation on the floor of the House of Representatives in his article “Incendiaries All”:39 [Representative Albert Iverson continued] to link John Brown, Hinton Rowan Helper, and [Congressman] John Sherman [of Ohio]. “When you say that you do not sympathize with Brown and his acts, when you say that you do not intend to interfere with slavery in the southern States, when you say that you intend to observe the constitutional rights of the southern people, you, at the same time, go to the polls banding together in political organizations, and elevate to political power the very men who inculcate these treasonable sentiments. Then, what are all your disclaimers worth?” Warming to his theme, the senator from Georgia raised the stakes. “And yet the Republican Party proposes to elevate to a high office a man who has ... attempted to circulate a pamphlet containing the most treasonable and the most insurrectionary sentiments, ... exciting insurrection and advising our slaves to fire our dwellings and put their knives to our throats.” For such a crime, Iverson noted, Brown had already been hanged, and anyone who endorsed Hinton Helper’s book should be hanged as well. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR DECEMBER 7th]

December 10, Saturday: From his cell in Charles Town, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., who had remained entirely silent throughout his trial, wrote to his brother: Charlestown, Va. Dec. 10, 1859: MY DEAR BROTHER:— I now take my pen to write you a few lines to let you know how I am, and in answer to your kind letter of the 5th instant. Dear Brother, I am, it is true, so situated at present as scarcely to know how to commence writing; not that my mind is filled with fear or that it has become shattered in view of my near approach to death. Not that I am terrified by the gallows which I see staring me in the face, and upon which I am so soon to stand and suffer death for doing what George Washington, the so-called father of his great but slavery-cursed country, was made a hero for doing, while he lived, and when dead his name was immortalized, and his great and noble deeds in behalf of freedom taught by parents to their children. And now, brother, for having lent my [faith?] to a General no less brave, and engaged in a cause no less honorable and glorious, I am to suffer death. Washington entered the field to fight for the freedom of the American people- not for the white men alone, but for both black and white. Nor were they white men alone who fought for the freedom of this country. The blood of black men flowed as freely as that of white men. Yes, the very first blood that was spilt was that of a negro. It was the blood of that heroic man, (though black he was,) Crispus Attucks. And some of the very last blood shed was that of black men. To the truth of this, history, though prejudiced is compelled to attest. It is true that black men did an equal share of the fighting for American Independence, and they were assured by the whites that they should share equal benefits for so doing. But after having performed their part honorably, they were by the whites most treacherously deceived- they refusing to fulfill their part of the contract. But this you know as well as I do, and I will therefore make no more in reference to the claims which we, as colored men, have on the American people. It was a sense of the wrongs which we have suffered that prompted the noble but unfortunate Captain Brown and his associates to attempt to give freedom to a small number, at least of those who are now held by cruel and unusual laws, and by no less cruel and unjust men. To this freedom they were entitled by every known principal of justice and humanity, and for the enjoyment of it God created them. And how dear brother, could I die in a more noble cause? Could I, brother die in a manner and for a cause which would induce true and honest men more to honor me and angels more readily to receive me to their happy home of everlasting joy above? I imagine that I hear you and all of you mother, father, sisters and brothers, say- “No there is not a cause for which we with less sorrow, could see 39. This interesting book THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT has been republished in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the black victims by their very presence were victimizing the nice white folks who were victimizing them (identical in every respect to the later Nazi attitude of outrage in regard to the German Jews they were so systematically persecuting), see Bailey, Hugh C. HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST- RACIST (University of Alabama: 1965). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER you die.” Believe me when I tell you, that though shut up in prison and under sentence of death, I have spent some very happy hours here. And were it not that I know that the heart of those to whom I am attached by the nearest and most endearing ties of blood relationship- yea, by the closest and strongest ties that God has instituted- will be filled with sorrow, I would almost as [unintelligible] die now as at any time, for I feel that I am now prepared to meet my Maker. Dear brother, I want you and all of you to meet me in Heaven. Prepare your soul for death. Be ready to meet your God at any moment, and then, though we meet no more on earth, we shall meet in Heaven where parting is no more. Dear William and Fred, be good boys- mind your mother and father- love and honor them- grow up to be good men, and feat the Lord your God. Now, I want you, dear brothers, to take this advice and follow it; remember, it comes from your own brother, and is written under most peculiar circumstances. Remember it is my dying advice to you, and I hope you will, from that love you have for me, receive it. You may think I have been treated very harshly since I have been here, but it is not so. I have been treated exceedingly well- far better than I expected to be. My jailor is a most kind-hearted man, and has done all he could, consistent with duty, to make me and the rest of the prisoners comfortable. Capt. John Avis is a gentle man who has a heart in his bosom as brave as any other. He met us at the Ferry and fought us as a brave man would do. But since we have been in his power has protected us from insults and abuse which cowards would have heaped upon us. He has done as a brave man and gentleman only would do. Also one of his aids, Mr. John Sheats, has been very kind to us and has done all he could to serve us. And now, Henry, if fortune should ever throw either of them in your way, and you can confer the least favor on them, do it for my sake. Give my love to all my family, and now my dear brothers, one and all, I pray to God we may meet in Heaven. Good bye. I am now, and shall remain, your affectionate brother, John Copeland OBERLIN COLLEGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER A depiction of “Emperor” Shields Green appeared in Leslie’s Weekly:

During the specific uproar over the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry, a public crisis of sorts had broken out in our general discussions about how to achieve progress in our nation. This public crisis had to do with the materials contained in Hinton Rowan Helper’s polemical compilation of census data published in Baltimore in 1857, titled THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT. This admirer of the thought processes of Waldo Emerson was an egregious case of what we might term an Antislavery Racist. —Which is to say, he was a Southern white man, from North Carolina, who owned no slaves, whose fixation was that of the victim. It wasn’t the blacks who were being harmed by slavery, it was real decent folks like him who were being harmed by slavery. All these slaves, who belonged to other people, were impacting his life! He hated the nigger who was doing him wrong, He hated the slavemaster who was doing him wrong. What he needed most urgently was a lily-white, pure America of which he could be proud, where he could stand tall. Slavery was a tainted and archaic social system that was standing in the way of white people’s cultural and material progress. Blacks were a tainted and inferior group who had no business being here in our New World in the first place.40

“History, among its many ironies, often places enemies in life into various positions of posthumous conjunction.” — Stephen Jay Gould

40. This interesting book has been republished in Cambridge MA in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Bailey, Hugh C. HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST- RACIST (University AL: 1965). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Here is how Peter Wallenstein has parsed the situation in his article “Incendiaries All”: Different as they were, then, THE IMPENDING CRISIS and Harpers Ferry brought similar messages to proslavery Southerners. Regardless of whether either Brown or Helper in fact spoke for mainstream Northern public opinion, each appeared to garner widespread approval across the North, and each had declared war on slavery in the South. Each represented, at least in part, the dreaded triple threat against slavery — from nonslaveholding whites in the South, from the slaves themselves, and from outside forces. Each, too, pointed up the need and offered the opportunity to unify white Southerners against all such threats, an observation that could come from a variety of perspectives. Thus, as a letter from one Southern slaveholder [a Southern Whig, to Congressman John Sherman] put the matter in December [10] 1859, “John Brown and Helper may do more to build up the Democratic party than anything that has happened for years.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1860

Frederick Douglass was not being overly impressed by the new Republican Party and its reliance upon the thinking of Hinton Rowan Helper. In a letter to his “British Anti-Slavery Friends” in this year, he explained that in the USA these Republicans were “only negatively anti-slavery.” He specified to them precisely what he meant by such a strange locution: It is opposed to the political power of slavery, rather than to slavery itself. Douglass was registering the Irish Catholic American hatred of American blacks, especially the ones who were free, and as one might expect, he was responding in kind: Irish Catholics, and especially Irish Americans, are not simply ignored or critiqued, they are systematically cast out of Douglass’s circle. — Richard Hardack, “The Slavery of Romanism: The Casting Out of the Irish in the Work of Frederick Douglass,” page 116, LIBERATING SOJOURN His rhetoric was full of drunken Irish, usually caught in the act of voting while needing to be propped up by two able-bodied helpers, but that wasn’t the worst of it for Douglass was not merely a victim of but also a master at racist rhetoric: [W]e want no black Ireland in America. We want no aggrieved class. [T]hese people lacked only a black skin and wooly hair, to complete their likeness to the plantation Negro. The open, uneducated mouth, ..., [etc., etc.]

By this point the manumitted mulatto West Ford, reputed to be the only son of George Washington, had made himself the 2d richest person of color in Fairfax County near Washington DC. Isn’t America wonderful!

Hinton Rowan Helper’s THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT, which had been published in 1857 in Baltimore, was republished in New-York (it having been found to be quite impossible to publish such material any longer out of Baltimore) with factual corrections as to the US economy (as if mere facts had anything to do with anything, in this contest of racial attitudes and orientations), and with (temporary) suppression of some of the more extreme of the pending consequences of this racist abolitionist attitude. This new 1860 edition was being published under the title COMPENDIUM OF THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH. BY HINTON ROWAN HELPER OF NORTH CAROLINA.41 The cost of publication was 16 cents the copy,

41. Hinton Rowan Helper. THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT. ENLARGED EDITION. New York, 1860. This book has been republished in Miami FL in 1969. His earlier book has been republished in Cambridge MA in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Bailey, Hugh C. HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST-RACIST (University AL: 1965). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER and the book was expected to sell at 25 cents the copy. (Most copies would be distributed at cost.)

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

The book expanded upon what we now have come to regard as a pleasant conceit –the idea that oppression actually is unprofitable to the oppressor– and favorably quoting Waldo Emerson among other of our nation’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER prime politicians and metaphysicians.

This Emerson-admirer was an egregious case of what you would term an Antislavery Racist. –Which is to say, he was a Southern white man, from North Carolina, who owned no slaves, whose fixation was that he and other white men like him were victims of society. It wasn’t the blacks who were being harmed by slavery, it was real decent folks like him who were being harmed by slavery. All these slaves, who belonged to other people, were impacting his life! He hated the nigger who was doing him wrong, he hated the slavemaster who was doing him wrong, what he needed most urgently was a lily-white, pure America of which he could be proud, an America where he could stand tall. Slavery was a tainted and archaic social system that was standing in the way of white people’s cultural and material progress. Blacks were a tainted and inferior group who had no business being here in our New World in the first place. His new book was pretty much of a piece with the masterpiece he had issued as of 1857, THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT. This author needed to ensure in his preface that his readers were going to understand, that it was no part of his abolitionist stance to display any special friendliness or sympathy for the blacks.

(OK, Hinton, fellow, I guess we’ve all grasped that now.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

“History, among its many ironies, often places enemies in life into various positions of posthumous conjunction.” — Stephen Jay Gould Meanwhile, The National Democratic Quarterly Review in Washington DC was attempting to neutralize Helper’s racist abolitionism by issuing Louis Shade’s A BOOK FOR THE “IMPENDING CRISIS!” APPEAL TO THE COMMON SENSE AND PATRIOTISM OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES. “HELPERISM” ANNIHILATED! THE “IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT” AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

Meanwhile, the South was attempting to neutralize Helperism by publication of Samuel M. Wolfe’s HINTON ROWAN HELPER’S IMPENDING CRISIS DISSECTED.

Meanwhile, an economist’s argument for holding the sections of the nation together was being offered by Thomas Prentice Kettell’s SOUTHERN WEALTH AND NORTHERN PROFITS AS EXHIBITED IN STATISTICAL FACTS AND OFFICIAL FIGURES: SHOWING THE NECESSITY OF UNION TO THE FUTURE PROSPERITY AND WELFARE OF THE REPUBLIC.

January 16, Monday: Martin Robison Delany explored further inland following the old trade route of the Oyo empire, a full 225 miles inland.

At about the midpoint of this month some 100,000 copies of Hinton Rowan Helper’s racist COMPENDIUM OF 42 THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH. BY HINTON ROWAN HELPER OF NORTH CAROLINA were being put out for distribution throughout the Northern states — not south of the Mason/Dixon line, of course, for there was absolutely no freedom of speech or of the press being tolerated anywhere there (Helper was referring to the imaginary wall around the South which kept out such incendiary literature as an “iron curtain”). Wherever it could be effectively distributed, William Lloyd Garrison was assisting with the distribution of this racist work.

January 16: P.M. — Down Boston road around Quail Hill. Very warm, — 45° at 2 P.M. There is a tender crust on the snow, and the sun is brightly reflected from it. Looking toward Billerica from the cross-road near White’s, the young oaks on the top of a hill in the horizon are very red, perhaps seven or eight miles off and directly opposite to the sun, far more red, no doubt, than they would appear near at hand, really bright red; but nowhere else that I perceive. It is an aerial effect, depending on their distance and elevation and being opposite to the sun, and also contrasted with the snowy ground. Looking from Smith’s Hill on the Turnpike, the hills eight or ten miles west are white, but the mountains thirty miles off are blue, though both may be equally white at the same distance. I see a flock of tree sparrows [American Tree Sparrow Spizella arborea] busily picking something from the surface of the snow amid some bushes. I watch one attentively, and find that it is feeding on the very fine brown chaffy-looking seed of the panicled andromeda. It understands how to get its dinner, to make the plant give down, perfectly. It flies up and alights on one of the dense brown panicles of the hard berries, and gives it a vigorous shaking and beating with its claws and bill, sending down a shower of the fine chaffy-looking seed 42. This book has been republished in Miami FL in 1969. His earlier book has been republished in Cambridge MA in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Bailey, Hugh C. HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST-RACIST (University AL: 1965). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER on to the snow beneath. It lies very distinct, though fine almost as dust, on the spotless snow. It then hops down and briskly picks up from the snow what it wants. How very clean and agreeable to the imagination, and withal abundant, is this kind of food! How delicately they fare! These dry persistent seed-vessels hold their crusts of bread until shaken. The snow is the white table-cloth on which they fall. No anchorite with his water and his crust fares more simply. It shakes down a hundred times as much as it wants at each shrub, and shakes the same or another cluster after each successive snow. How bountifully Nature feeds them! No wonder they come to spend the winter with us, and are at ease with regard to their food. These shrubs ripen an abundant crop of seeds to supply the wants of these immigrants from the far north which annually come to spend the winter with us. How neatly and simply it feeds! This shrub grows unobserved by most, only known to botanists, and at length matures its hard, dry seed-vessels, which, if noticed, are hardly supposed to contain seed. But there is no shrub nor weed which is not known to some bird. Though you may have never noticed it, the tree sparrow comes from the north in the winter straight to this shrub, and confidently shakes its panicle, and then feasts on the fine shower of seeds that falls from it.

January 30, Monday: Recognizing, after any number of votes in which he had failed to win the necessary 119 supporters, that his endorsement of Helperism had destroyed any possibility of his becoming Speaker of the House, Representative Sherman withdrew his name. The Republicans in the House selected another person, not even a member of their party, a member instead of Know-Nothings, William R. Pennington of New Jersey, as their candidate for the Speakership. However, Pennington had been a Sherman supporter during the previous ballots, which made his name virtually as unacceptable to them as Sherman’s: “The endorser of an endorser is just as accountable, in the eyes of the law, as the principle.” In subsequent ballots Pennington would be unable to achieve the necessary 119, until the Democratic candidate, to break the logjam and allow government to continue, withdrew from the contest. HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Henry Thoreau instanced for the 20th time (Dr. Bradley P. Dean noticed) a cloud form category of Luke Howard: “Fair with a few cumuli of indefinite outline in the north and south, and dusky under sides. A gentle west wind and a blue haze.”

Jan. 30. 2 P.M.—To Nut Meadow and White Pond road. Thermometer 45°. Fair with a few cumuli of indefinite outline in the north and south, and dusky under sides. A gentle west wind and a blue haze. Thaws. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER The river has opened to an unusual extent, owing to the very long warm spell, — almost all this month. Even from Hubbard’s Bridge up and down it is breaking up, is all mackerelled, with lunar-shaped openings and some like a thick bow.

They [ARE] from one to twelve feet long. Yesterday’s slight snow is all gone, leaving the ice, old snow, and bare ground; and as I walk up the river-side, there is a brilliant sheen from the wet ice toward the sun, instead of the crystalline rainbow of yesterday. Think of that (of yesterday), — to have constantly before you, receding as fast as you advance, a bow formed of a myriad crystalline mirrors on the surface of the snow!! What miracles, what beauty surrounds us! Then, another day, to do all your walking knee-deep in perfect six-rayed crystals of surpassing beauty but of ephemeral duration, which have fallen from the sky. The ice has so melted on the meadows that I see where the musquash has left his clamshells in a heap near the riverside, where there was a hollow in the bank. The small water-bugs are gyrating abundantly in Nut Meadow Brook. It is pleasant also to see the very distinct ripple-marks in the sand at its bottom, of late so rare a sight. I go through the piny field northwest of M. Miles’s. There are no more beautiful natural parks than these pastures in which the white pines have sprung up spontaneously, standing at handsome intervals, where the wind chanced to let the seed lie at last, and the grass and blackberry vines have not yet been killed by them. There are certain sounds invariably heard in warm and thawing days in winter, such as the crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows, and sometimes the gobbling of turkeys. The crow, flying high, touches the tympanum of the sky for us, and reveals the tone of it. What does it avail to look at a thermometer or barometer compared with listening to his note? He informs me that Nature is in the tenderest mood possible, and I hear the very flutterings of her heart. Crows have singular wild and suspicious ways. You will [SEE] a couple flying high, as if about their business, but lo, they turn and circle and caw over your head again and again for a mile; and this is their business, — as if a mile and an afternoon were nothing for them to throw away. This even in winter, when they have no nests to be anxious about. But it is affecting to hear them cawing about their ancient seat (as at F. Wheeler’s wood) which the choppers are laying low. I saw the other day (apparently) mouse (?)-tracks which had been made in slosh on the Andromeda Ponds and then frozen, — little gutters about two inches wide and nearly one deep, looking very artificial with the nicks on the sides.

I sit on the high hilltop south of Nut Meadow, near the pond. This hazy day even Nobscot is so blue that it looks like a mighty mountain. See how man has cleared commonly the most level ground, and left the woods to grow on the more uneven and rocky, or in the swamps. I see, when I look over our landscape from any eminence as far as the horizon, certain rounded hills, amid the plains and ridges and cliffs, which have a marked family likeness, like eggs that belong to one nest though scattered. They suggest a relation geologically. Such are, for instance, Nashoba, Annursnack, Nawshawtuct, and Ponkawtasset, all which have Indian names, as if the Indian, too, had regarded them as peculiarly distinct. There is also Round Hill in Sudbury, and perhaps a hill in Acton. Perhaps one in Chelmsford. They are not apparently rocky. The snow-flea seems to be a creature whose summer and prime of life is a thaw in the winter. It seems not merely to enjoy this interval like other animals, but then chiefly to exist. It is the creature of the thaw. Moist snow is its element. That thaw which merely excites the cock to sound his clarion as it were calls to life the snow-flea.

February: In a course of lectures on the “Social Destiny of Man” delivered at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, Dr. Albert T. Bledsoe, professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia and a published proslavery ideologue, critiqued the excessive individualism of abolitionists as constituting a threat to the Union and projected that secession might be expected as the result of their efforts.

Iowa Representative Samuel Curtis introduced a bill that would pass the House of Representatives, to fund a Transcontinental Railway, but which could not be reconciled with its Senate version due to opposition from the southern states, such as by Senator James Murray Mason, that would insist on a more southerly route, one closer to the 42d parallel. (The Iowa representative would try again in 1861, and again fail due to Southern intransigence; however, once the southern politicians had abandoned their seats in the federal government, the House of Representatives would approve the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 on May 6th, 1862, the federal HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Senate would approve it on June 20th, 1862, and President Abraham Lincoln would sign it into law on July 1st, 1862.)

At about this time John Brown, Jr., James Redpath, Thaddeus Hyatt, and Lewis Hayden were being summoned before Senator James Murray Mason’s special investigatory committee of the US Senate to be interrogated about the details of the Harpers Ferry conspiracy, and Brown, Jr., in hiding in Ohio, was refusing to respond. When the committee was made aware that they had summoned a person of color to incriminate himself before them, they backtracked and rescinded their warrant on Hayden,43 and warrants were made out only in the names of Brown, Jr., Redpath, and Hyatt. Of these, only Hyatt would actually come before the committee in chains, and he, upon refusing to testify, would be remanded to the District of Columbia’s prison.

John C. Rutherfoord, a legislator from Virginia, ventured to mention the explicit linkage which was being made between the Secret “Six” supporters of Northern white abolitionists such as John Brown and the supporters of Southern white abolitionist racists such as Hinton Rowan Helper, by referring to them in a pot category “admirers of Brown and endorsers of Helper.” The author of the incendiary THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT, which offered a commonality of interest between the poor white man of the North and the poor white man of the South against the interests of the rich white man of the South with his substantial investment in his African chattels, was perhaps the most dangerous man, from their point of view, in our nation — more dangerous by far than any mere deluded idealist such as Brown could ever hope to become.

Helper had, of course, fled his native South to avoid assassination by indignant rich white men, seeking the shelter afforded by New-York.

43. This would count as another of the many evidences that the business of the committee was the suppression of information as to the nature of the conspiracy, rather than any public disclosure of its real extent or purpose. Had they been intent on finding out anything, when they discovered that Hayden was a black man they would have had him tortured to death! HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Henry Thoreau’s “A Plea for Captain John Brown” and “The Martyrdom of John Brown” were published in James Redpath, ed., ECHOES OF HARPER’S FERRY. Clearly, Henry was attempting to find some way to spin the treason situation by reconstructing Captain Brown as a sort of hero of civil disobedience along the lines of Sir Thomas More or Friend Mary Dyer: HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

As a person who reprocesses Thoreau materials, and as a Quaker adherent of the Peace Testimony, I am frequently asked how it is that I am able to pardon Henry for his defense of Brown. I've needed to give that issue long and hard thought, because I really do think of people such as Captain Brown, and Lord Protector Cromwell, as having been Al-Queda types, which is to say, pure and simple, that they had been terrorists. And nevertheless I really do look up to Henry David Thoreau, and admire his attitudes as well as his work product.

The answer I have found that satisfies me, lies in a careful consideration of the situation in which the white abolitionists found themselves after the raid on the federal arsenal. Proslavery Americans were of course in a fury, and were in the process of taking their vengeance upon the survivors of the action. It was a moment in which the entire American antislavery movement was at risk of being generally considered to be in disgrace – is this, this, what “being antislavery” amounts to? –Are these people willing to risk servile insurrection, and butchery? –Is an abolitionist the same as a fool? –Is an abolitionist the same as a terrorist? That 1859 situation cried out for spin control, which was, I suggest, what Thoreau, in his “A Plea for Captain Brown,” attempted to provide. His was a salvage operation, but it was not an attempt to salvage terrorism but an attempt to salvage an upright cause: it was a continuation of the righteous attempt to bring the peculiar institution of race slavery in the United States of America to its quietus.

After Captain John Brown had gone off on this raid of his, it hadn’t been a perfect situation — and, in an imperfect situation, none of the alternative attitudes which a concerned individual can embrace are going to be perfect ones. However, the most imperfect attitude of all would have been an attitude of surrender to the righteousness of proslavery — surrender to the righteousness of proslavery was the one thing that the abolitionists simply could not and would not and should not commit — and that was the condition under which our Henry stepped to the fore.

ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)

February 1, Wednesday: The Niagara Falls Gazette expressed skepticism about the promised exploits of the touring tight-rope performer “Charles Blondin” (M. Jean-François Gravelot, 1824-1897): “The English mind has been surely excited on the subject of Blondin and his performances at the Falls. The ‘stilt’ hoax, the ‘Georgia Railroad’ yarn, the Silver Lake ‘snaik’ story, and other American ‘sells’ by which their most solemn journals have been victimized together with the wiggish letter to the New York Times last summer, which declared Blondin to be a myth, have combined their cautioning influence to render our British brethren confirmed skeptics as regards the rope walking achievements of the little Frenchman.”44 The performer appears to have been touring, having performed the night before at the Theatre Royal in Liverpool. Midway on his path above the Niagara Falls he would stop on the highwire to cook and eat an omelet. Nowadays he is in the Kensal Green Cemetery of London and may for all we know still be cooking his omelets.45

The Democratic candidate having withdrawn, the American candidate for the Speakership of the House of Representatives finally achieved the necessary 119 votes. The longest speakership struggle in our nation’s Hinton Rowan Helper “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

44. Once upon a time a yarn had been pulled over the eyes of a New-York Times reporter, that Georgian white men fought duels aboard their state railroad trains. 45. High-Density Lipoproteins have no medical significance subsequent to death. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER history had been completed. During this struggle the representatives had been coming into the chambers armed for their own protection, and had friends sitting in the galleries who were likewise armed and alert to defend them by firing down onto the floor if and when the occasion arose. In the course of the debating over the Speakership, Representative L.O.B. Branch of North Carolina had challenged Representative Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania to a duel and the two Representatives had had to be arrested and placed under heavy bond. Representative John A. Logan had become so enraged in the midst of a violent argument with Representative William Kellogg over an alleged insult to Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois that he had drawn and brandished his pistol, proclaiming “By God, if I can’t talk, I can do something else.”

While Representative John B. Hasking of New York had been in the process of making derogatory remarks about a Democratic colleague, he had accidentally dropped his pistol onto the floor, although it appears not to have discharged. Senator William Bigler of Pennsylvania commented in regard to all this that “Nothing has made so much bad blood as the endorsement of the Hinton Rowan Helper book and attempt now making to promote a man who did this to the responsible station of speaker of the House. The next most offensive thing is the sympathy manifested for old Brown.” JOHN BROWN

A person evidently named R. Redington was writing Henry Thoreau to inquire if he had written more than two books, to request that, if so, he be informed where these books might be purchased, and to request in addition that two copies of each of his existing books be sent to Little, Brown, & Company:

Cle[ve]land Ohio Feby 1 1860 H.D. Thoreau Dr Sir I would inquire if you have publish- ed any other of you writings HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER than[?] “A week on the C & M” and “Walden” if so will you inform me [where] they can be had [ ] or if you can furnish them and will send me two copies of each to the care of Little Brown & Co Boston—if they are in pamphlet form by mail. I will remit you the bill soon on them on recd– Truly Yours R. Redington Where can the two works named above be had?—

Thoreau commented, to the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the Secret “Six” conspiracy, that Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s “quiet, steadfast earnestness and ethical fortitude are of the type that calmly, so calmly, ignites and then throws bomb after bomb.” Meanwhile, John E. Cook, who had escaped from Harpers Ferry, and Albert Hazlett, who had not participated in the fighting but with whom he had been arrested in Pennsylvania, who had not a friend in this world but one another, were going on trial for their lives in part in result of the quiet, steadfast earnestness and ethical fortitude of this Sanborn who had obtained the benefit of unqualified support from certain of the residents of his hometown, Concord.46

Feb. 1. 2 P.M.—5°. A cold day. Two or three inches of dry snow last night. Grows colder apace toward night. Frost forms on windows.

46. They would be promptly convicted, and sentenced to hang on March 16th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1861

Professor Elias Peissner attempted to refute Helperism by destroying the statistical “evidence” upon which it supposedly rested. (Get a clue!) The professor’s careful analysis of the misuse of statistical information was issued as THE AMERICAN QUESTION IN ITS NATIONAL ASPECT. BEING ALSO AN INCIDENTAL REPLY TO MR. H.R. Helper’S “COMPENDIUM OF THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH.” This would of course prove quite futile as racism is not the sort of attitude problem which can be reduced by sharpening one’s pencil. HINTON ROWAN HELPER

January 14, Monday: Louisiana forces occupied Fort Pike near New Orleans.It was reported, in the Observer, that the US CIVIL WAR

“infamous author of the “Impending Crisis,” Hinton Rowan Helper, had in Fayetteville, North Carolina encountered a somewhat hostile audience.

Jan. 14. Coldest morning yet; 20° (?). Pliny says, “In minimis Natura praestat” (Nature excels in the least things). The Wellingtonia gigantea, the PLINY famous California tree, is a great thing; the seed from which it sprang, a little thing; and so are all seeds or origins of things. Richard Porson said: “We all speak in metaphors. Those who appear not to do it, only use those which are worn out, and are overlooked as metaphors. The original fellow is therefore regarded as only witty; and the dull are consulted as the wise.” He might have said that the former spoke a dead language. John Horne Tooke is reported in “Recollections” by Samuel Rogers as having said: “Read few books well. We forget names and dates; and reproach our memory. They are of little consequence. We feel our limbs enlarge and strengthen; yet cannot tell the dinner or dish that caused the alteration. Our minds improve though we cannot name the author, and have forgotten the particulars.” I think that the opposite would be the truer statement, books differ so immensely in their nutritive qualities, and good ones are so rare. Gosse, in his “Letters from Alabama,” says that he thinks he saw a large dragon-fly (Æslona), which was hawking over a brook, catch and devour some minnows about one inch long, and says it is known that “the larvæ of the greater water-beetles (Dyticidœ) devour fish.” It is the discovery of science that stupendous changes in the earth’s surface, such as are referred to the Deluge, for instance, are the result of causes still in operation, which have been at work for an incalculable period. There has not been a sudden re-formation, or, as it were, new creation of the world, but a steady progress according to existing laws. The same is true in detail also. It is a vulgar prejudice that some plants are “spontaneously generated,” but science knows that they come from seeds, i.e. are the result of causes still in operation, however slow and unobserved. It is a common saying that “little strokes fall great oaks,” and it does not imply much wisdom in him who originated it. The sound of the axe invites our attention to such a catastrophe; we can easily count each stroke as it is given, and all the neighborhood is informed by a loud crash when the deed is consummated. But such, too, is the rise of the oak; little strokes of a different kind and often repeated raise great HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER oaks, but scarcely a traveller hears these or turns aside to converse with Nature, who is dealing them the while. Nature is slow but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance; she knows that seeds have many other uses than to reproduce their kind. In raising oaks and pines, she works with a leisureliness and security answering to the age and strength of the trees. If every acorn of this year’s crop is destroyed, never fear! she has more years to come. It is not necessary that a pine or an oak should BOTANY bear fruit every year, as it is that a pea-vine should. So, botanically, the greatest changes in the landscape are produced more gradually than we expected. If Nature has a pine or an oak wood to produce, she manifests no haste about it. Thus we should say that oak forests are produced by a kind of accident, i.e. by the failure of animals to reap the fruit of their labors. Yet who shall say that they have not a fair knowledge of the value of their labors — that the squirrel when it plants an acorn, or the jay when it lets one slip from under its foot, has not a transient thought for its posterity? Possibly here, a thousand years hence, every oak will know the human hand that planted it. How many of the botanist’s arts and inventions are thus but the rediscovery of a lost art, i.e. lost to him here or elsewhere! Horace Mann told me some days ago that he found, near the shore in that muddy bay by the willows in the rear of Mrs. Ripley’s, a great many of the Sternothœrus odoratus, assembled, he supposed, at their breeding-time, or, rather, about to come out to lay their eggs. He waded in [and] collected –I think he said– about a hundred AGASSIZ and fifty of them for Agassiz! I see in the Boston Journal an account of robins in numbers on the savin trees in that neighborhood, feeding on their berries. This suggests that they may plant its berries as well as the crows.

November 13, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau wrote to L.L. & C.H. Smith in New-York. Concord Nov. 13-61 Messrs[W] & CH Smith I received on the 8 [inst]— your draft in payment for Plumbago sent to you Oct 23d I forgot to deduct the interest, [why] I remembered it [but] supposed that you would make [the] ^ the mistake correct it before I could— for I the had agreed to do so—make deduct ^ deduction—. But the [case] is unaltered for However if I have to pay all for the draft—(which my other custom ^ I [think] that ers are able to send without cost—) you should ^ can not expect me to make any further deduction for interest— Yrs truly Henr D. Thoreau

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HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER Hinton Rowan Helper had discovered that the US consul at Buenos Aires, William H. Hudson, who had been appointed by President Franklin Pierce, was “unfriendly to Mr. Lincoln’s administration.” He had taken this information to his friend, Treasury Secretary Salmon Portland Chase, and shortly, on this day, received his reward in being informed that by order of President Abraham Lincoln he was himself to supercede this consul in Buenos Aires. His appointment (of course?) would be at a substantially lower annual salary. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1862

August 22, Friday:At 4:30AM Achille-Claude Debussy was born in St. Germain-en-Laye, 1st of 5 children born to Manuel-Achille Debussy, proprietor of a china shop and Victorine Joséphine Sophie Manoury, daughter of a wheelwright.

A 2d day of attacks by braves upon “the soldiers’ house,” Fort Ridgely. WHITE ON RED, RED ON WHITE

The refugee population at the Ridgely settlement in Minnesota swelled to 300. General Sibley arrived at St. Peter from Fort Snelling but ignored New Ulm’s need for aid. The Riggs party arrived at Fort Ridgely and continued downriver. RACE WAR IN MINNESOTA

Killing would be going on at Rappahannock Station / Waterloo Bridge, not letting up until the 25th. US CIVIL WAR

President Abraham Lincoln wrote his former political opponent, the newspaper editor Horace Greeley, whose perpetual public carping was getting on his nerves, and laid it on the line. Look here, it’s not about those negroes, he said, who care about them? — it’s about us white people and the strength of our united government. It might as well have been the white-man’s-white-man Hinton Rowan Helper himself who was delivering these lines! If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. (It’s often supposed nowadays that this Honest Abe from Illinois was the friend of the black man, but what I say is, if this is what it is to be a friend then Americans of color really don’t need any enemies.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1863

March 13, Friday: The US consul to Buenos Aires, Hinton Rowan Helper, married a lovely Argentinian lady named Marie Louisa Rodriguez. To forestall any suspicion of miscegenation, he immediately wrote the US Department of State in Washington DC to assure them that his bride was “of pure Spanish descent.” And, while he was on the subject of having gotten married, Helper wondered whether they might feel their way clear to grant him an immediate 50% salary increase. Were they to grant such a salary increase, he suggested, it might be possible for him to forward to the US treasury certain local fees and emoluments received in the course of official duties as consul — which up to this point had been being channeled directly into his own pocket. (!)

Bedrich Smetana was elected president of the Czech Society of Arts.

Johnson, J.R.; Chelsea MA.To Charles Wesley Slack. Arrangements for a lecture at the Boston Music Hall.

Johnson, Oliver, 1809-1889; New-York. To Charles Wesley Slack. Plans for future lectures. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1866

October: Rather than grant Hinton Rowan Helper the 50% raise in salary for which he had been pleading, he was allowed to resign his responsibilities as US consul.

When it became mandatory for Julian Hawthorne to discontinue his attendance at Harvard College, the Hawthornes relocated to Germany so their son would be able to continue in an education.

A letter arrived at the Oneida Community in Oneida, New York inquiring after Colonel Richard Realf. The letter was signed “S.E. Realf” and had been posted in Furnissville, Indiana.

In collaboration with the composer Charles Edward Horsley, then living in Melbourne, Australia, Richard Henry Horne staged THE SOUTH SEA SISTERS, A LYRIC MASQUE. This was produced as one of the highlights to the opening of the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. The performance was well received by audiences and critics, and a few nights later was repeated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1867

2d edition, posthumous, of James Robert Ballantyne’s THE LAGHU KAUMUDI, A SANSKRIT GRAMMAR, BY VARADARÁJA.

2,000 Chinese railroad workers staged a week-long strike protesting inhumane and racist conditions.47 CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

On the dedication page to his NOJOQUE, A QUESTION FOR A CONTINENT, Hinton Rowan Helper supposed that the American nation could be rendered all-white by 1876, our centennial year: “No Slave nor Would-be Slave, No Negro nor Mulatto, No Chinaman nor unnative Indian, No Black nor Bi-colored Individual of whatever Name or Nationality [should ever again be allowed to] find Domicile anywhere within the Boundaries of the United States.” HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Reading between the lines of this, we may infer that Helper’s phrase “unnative Indian” was intended to allow that since native Americans had not been brought from anywhere else, it made precious little sense to ask them to go back where they came from. SLAVERY

47. Please understand that the nonviolent civil disobedience in this incident was entirely on the side of the Chinese. There was no nonviolence on the part of white Americans. They burned a number of the Chinese laborers alive, and scalped, mutilated, branded, decapitated, dismembered, and hanged others from gutterspouts. One Chinese man’s penis and testicles were severed and toasts were drunk to them at a nearby saloon, as a “trophy of the hunt.” The event would come to be known as the “Rock Springs Massacre.” (It goes to show you, that civil disobedience is not the sort of tactic that will function well, when the opposing group is incapable of shame.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1868

In a work entitled THE NEGROES IN NEGROLAND; THE NEGROES IN AMERICA; AND NEGROES GENERALLY. ALSO THE SEVERAL RACES OF WHITE MEN, CONSIDERED AS THE INVOLUNTARY AND PREDESTINED SUPPLANTERS OF THE BLACK RACE, Hinton Rowan Helper attempted to present race observations made by white men in various parts of the world. These observations tally closely with the sort of thing I have heard from my father’s family in Olney, Illinois during my childhood. For instance, Helper has Dr. Livingston saying that “Among the negroes, no science has been developed, and few questions are ever discussed, except those which have an intimate connection with the wants of the stomach.”

For our benefit Helper described the failures of the black race: • His low and compressed Forehead; • His hard, thick Skull; • His small, backward-thrown Brain; • His short, crisp Hair; • His flat Nose; • His thick Lips; • His projecting, snout-like Mouth; • His strange, Eunuch-toned Voice; • His scantiness of Beard on his Face; • The Toughness and Unsensitiveness of his Skin; • The Thinness and Shrunkenness of his Thighs; • His Curved Knees; • His calfless Legs; • His low, short Ankles; • His long, flat Heels; • His glut-shaped Feet; • The general angularity and Oddity of his Frame; • The Malodorous Exhalations from his Person; • His Puerility of Mind; • His Inertia and Sleepy-headedness; • His proverbial Dishonesty; • His predisposition to fabricate Falsehoods; and • His Apathetic Indifference to all Propositions and Enterprises of Solid Merit. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1909

March 8, Monday: Reduced to poverty after many years of wheeling and dealing as a lobbyist and political hanger-on in Washington DC, unable to raise funding for his grand scheme to place himself in charge of the building of a railroad from Hudson Bay to the Straits of Magellan, Hinton Rowan Helper finally chose to do the next best thing to getting to be rich and famous and a benefactor of humankind without doing any work or being of any benefit to anyone and, placing letters to a friend and to the Treasurer of the United States urging the construction of a north/south railway connecting Canada with Patagonia on the table of his room, barricaded the door, stopped up the keyhole, placed a towel around his neck and turned on the gas. (Well, better late than never they say.) He would be buried in an unmarked grave and now he is forgotten by an America determined to forget that its abolitionism had been as much oriented toward destroying the slaves among us as toward destroying slaves among us. SUICIDE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

1946

Stewart Hall Holbrook’s LOST MEN OF AMERICAN HISTORY (The Macmillan Company) was a book that turned out to be not merely about the great lost ancestor Josiah Holbrook of Derby, Connecticut (page 131), a founder of the lyceum movement, but about other great lost Americans as well: By all odds the most completely forgotten figure of all the great figures of the anti-slavery days is that of Hinton Rowan Helper, a true Southern gentleman of the old school, complete with frock coat, boiled white shirt, string tie, and goatee. Tall, spare, soft-voiced, he was of distinguished appearance, an embodiment of all the graces of the Old South. That is, except for his ideas about slavery. Helper has seldom got a line in the history books. He deserves more recognition. No one, so far as the record shows, was ever hanged for owning a copy of Mrs. Stowe’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, or even arrested. Such was not the case with THE IMPENDING CRISIS, the 413 pages of carefully prepared and concentrated dynamite that Helper wrote and published in 1857. Men were hanged for possessing this book. Many more men were mobbed; and the legislatures of the South, characteristically, passed laws specifically forbidding its sale, purchase, and possession. It was also the book that blew the Congress of the United States to pieces. - page 169.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2018. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Prepared: May 21, 2018 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HINTON ROWAN HELPER the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.