author
Hinton Rowan Helper
1829–1909
Best known for writing The Impending Crisis of the South, he was a Southern-born polemicist whose attack on slavery stirred fierce debate before the Civil War. His life and work remain striking because they mixed antislavery arguments with deeply racist views, making him a complicated and unsettling figure in American history.
2 Audiobooks
The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It
by Hinton Rowan Helper
The land of gold; reality versus fiction
by Hinton Rowan Helper
About the author
Born in Davie County, North Carolina, in 1829, Hinton Rowan Helper became one of the very few white Southerners to publish a major public attack on slavery before the Civil War. His 1857 book The Impending Crisis of the South argued that slavery damaged the South economically and hurt non-slaveholding white people, and it drew wide attention in the North.
Helper later served as a U.S. consul to Argentina and continued to write and lecture. Although he opposed slavery, modern reference works also describe him as a white supremacist, and that contradiction is central to understanding both his reputation and the limits of his politics.
He died in Washington, D.C., in 1909. Today he is remembered less as a conventional literary figure than as a controversial political writer whose work helped shape arguments over slavery in the years just before the Civil War.