The land of gold; reality versus fiction

Hinton Rowan Helper

Hinton Rowan Helper was an American writer, abolitionist, and white supremacist. 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."