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Hinton Rowan Helper
1829–1909
Best known for a fiercely controversial 1857 book, this North Carolina writer attacked slavery as a system that hurt the South’s economy and limited opportunities for non-slaveholding whites. His work became influential in the years before the Civil War, even as his own racial views were deeply troubling.
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 near Mocksville, North Carolina, in 1829, Hinton Rowan Helper became one of the rare white Southern writers to publicly attack slavery before the Civil War. He is best remembered for The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), a book that argued slavery held back the South economically and especially harmed whites who did not own slaves.
Helper’s writing drew wide attention in the North and fierce hostility in the South, where his book was banned in some places. He later served as U.S. consul to Argentina and continued to write and lecture.
Today, Helper is remembered as a complicated and unsettling figure: his antislavery arguments were influential, but they were not rooted in equality, and reliable sources also describe him as a white supremacist. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1909.