Hinton Rowan Helper: The South's Most Dangerous Book

Hinton Rowan Helper was born in Davie County, North Carolina, in eighteen twenty-nine, and in eighteen fifty-seven he published what the slaveholding South considered the most dangerous book in America. Not Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, though that was close, but Helper's own work, The Impending Crisis of the South.

Helper did not argue against slavery on moral grounds. He argued that slavery was an economic catastrophe for non-slaveholding white Southerners, who far outnumbered slaveholders and were being held back by a system that benefited only the planter class. The book was banned across the South and people were punished for possessing a copy. Republican leaders endorsed a shortened edition as a campaign document for the eighteen sixty election. Helper's home county in North Carolina is a modest corner of the Piedmont. The man who came from it helped light the fuse of the Civil War.