Hinton Rowan Helper

Hinton Rowan Helper (December 27, 1829 – March 9, 1909) was an American Southern critic of slavery during the 1850s. In 1857, he published a book which he dedicated to the "nonslaveholding whites" of the South. The Impending Crisis of the South, written partly in North Carolina but published when the author was in the North, argued that slavery hurt the economic prospects of non-slaveholders, and was an impediment to the growth of the entire region of the 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'.

Helper 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 in hopes of finding wealth, but came back in 1854 disillusioned.

In 1855 Helper wrote the book The Land of Gold. Reality versus fiction, which widely ridiculed the state. Deeply opposed to slavery and the condition of Southern culture and lack of economic progress, Helper later wrote one of the most effective criticisms of the South titled The Impending Crisis of the South. In it he argued the South's growth, prosperity, and cultural development were being held back by slavery. He deployed statistics from the census to show that land values, literacy levels, and manufacturing rates were considerably lower in the South than in the North. He warned of the devastation caused by slavery through deforestation. He proposed that slaveholders be taxed to colonize all free blacks in Africa or Latin America.

The success of The Impending Crisis of 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.

...
Wikipedia