Hinton Rowan Helper

Hinton Rowan Helper (December 27, 1829 – March 9, 1909) was an American writer and abolitionist, even though racism was "the ruling passion of his life". In 1857, he published a book that he dedicated to the "non-slaveholding whites" of the South. Titled The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It and written partly in North Carolina but published when the author was in the Northern United States, it argued that slavery hurt the economic prospects of non-slaveholders and was an impediment to the economic growth of the entire South. Anger over his book due to the belief he was acting as an agent of the North attempting to split Southerners along class lines led to Southern denunciations of "Helperism."

Life and career

Helper "(originally Helfer: his grandfather had come from Heidelberg)" was born near Mocksville, North Carolina. He was the son of a small slave-owning farmer in Western North Carolina. His father died before Helper was a year old, but he was cared for by a wealthy extended family and obtained a good education with the financial help of his uncle. He graduated from Mocksville Academy in 1848 and went to California in 1851 hoping to get rich, but he came back in 1854, disillusioned.

In 1855 Helper published The Land of Gold; Reality versus Fiction, in which, Edmund Wilson writes, he "attempted to tell, incidentally, of his discovery in the course of his travels that slave labor was less profitable than free labor and in Baltimore, where the book was to be published, he had run into a Maryland statute, dating from 1831, which made it a felony with a penalty of not less than ten years in jail knowingly to write or print anything 'having a tendency to excite discontent... amongst the people of color'.... Compelled to excise these comments, Hinton Helper — an irascible man — resolved to speak out his whole mind in a book devoted entirely to this subject." The book was The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. Expressing Helper's deep opposition to slavery as the cause of the benighted condition of Southern culture and the South's lack of economic progress, it was one of the most effective criticisms ever written of the South.