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). "A. B. Burdick, the publisher of The Impending Crisis, testified that Helper ... avoided all contacts with Negroes, refusing even to patronize hotels or restaurants which employed Negroes in menial capacities. Another 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."Frederickson, George M., "Introduction" to The Impending Crisis of the South (1968), p. liv. 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.Fredrickson (1988), p. 52.
