Hinton Rowan Helper - The Impending Crisis of The South

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 condensed form 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—whom he said were oppressed by a small (but politically dominant) aristocracy of wealthy slave-owners.

The reaction in the South was very negative. According to John Spencer Bassett, who studied the issue and wrote in 1898, circulating Helper's book could be the basis of criminal charges and politicians often accused each other of having read it,but, many of the most successful politicians read it and used it to change the problems stated. In his 1867 essay, "War of races. By whom it is sought to be brought about. Considered in two letters, with copious extracts from the recent work of Hilton R. Helper", John Harmer Gilmer calls Helper a profane miscreant, one of many insults directed at Helper in that essay.

There are very few references to blacks in the book, and certainly slavery as an economic institution is denounced, not black people. It generated a furor in the South, where authorities banned its possession and distribution and burned copies that could be seized. Between 1857 and 1861 nearly 150,000 copies of the book were circulated, and in 1860 the Republican party distributed it as a campaign document. In December 1859 Democrats returning to Congress reacted with indignation because 68 Republicans had endorsed the book and planned to use it as campaign literature in the presidential election of 1860. Opponents blocked the election of Republican John Sherman as speaker because he had endorsed the book.