through deforestation. He proposed that slaveholders be taxed to colonize all free blacks in Africa or Latin America. The success of The Impending Crisis in the South made Helper famous overnight. It also heightened the political crisis by raising fears among Southerners that poor landless Southern whites might turn against slavery if they saw that it did not benefit them. The fear of class divisions within the white community was enough to lead many Southerners who had previously been opponents of secession to embrace it after the election of Abraham Lincoln. After the war, Helper appeared as a post-war Fire Eater, urging the wholesale expulsion of former slaves. He believed the United States should be exclusively white (also excluding Chinese, Native Americans, and other non-white groups.) His hatred of blacks eventually became a phobia, to the point that he would not patronize hotels or restaurants that employed blacks. A man who knew Helper before the war recalled that "he has always been inflexibly opposed to all the relations and conditions which have kept the two races close together; and this ... was one of the principal grounds of his opposition to slavery." Nevertheless, Southern enemies of Reconstruction were unwilling to forgive his previous opposition to slavery, and he remained a marginal and increasingly unstable character in postwar America. Lincoln appointed Helper as United States consul in Buenos Aires from 1861 to 1866. He spent most of the postwar years promoting a scheme to build an intercontinental railroad connecting North and South America, which would help replace black and brown peoples with whites. The "Three Americas Railway" was supposed to extend from the Bering Sea to the Strait of Magellan. His schemes never came to anything, and he committed suicide by turning on the gas in his Washington, D.C. apartment. The Impending Crisis of the South The book, which was a combination of statistical charts and provocative prose, attracted little attention until 1859 when it was widely reprinted in a condensed volume called the Compendium by Northern opponents of slavery. Helper concluded that slavery hurt the Southern economy overall by preventing economic development and industrialization and was the main reason why the South had progressed so much less than the North (according to the results of the 1850 census). Helper spoke on behalf of the majority of Southern whites of moderate means—the Plain Folk of the Old South—who he said were