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The Impending Crisis of the South: How To Meet It - Paperback
$25.88
by Hinton Rowan Helper (Author)
The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It is an 1857 treatise by Hinton Rowan Helper (1829–1909), a North Carolina-born writer, businessman, and later U.S. consul in Buenos Aires. A Southerner who declared himself proud of his region, Helper wrote the book largely in Baltimore, where its publication would have been illegal. It was widely circulated in the North by antislavery leaders and became one of the most politically explosive books of the decade.
The work attacks slavery on economic rather than primarily humanitarian grounds. Using census data, Helper argues that the institution had impoverished the South, retarded its industry, commerce, education, and population growth, and benefited only a small class of planters while harming the non-slaveholding white majority. He compares the relative wealth and productivity of free and slave states and contends that slavery was the principal cause of Southern backwardness. The book proposes a program for the non-slaveholding whites of the South to abolish the system themselves, including political organization, taxation of slaveholders, and a timetable for emancipation.
Sovereign Archive Publishing is proud to offer this influential antebellum text. The Impending Crisis of the South remains essential reading for those curious in the sectional crisis, Southern economic thought, and the political literature that intensified the conflict over slavery before the Civil War.
Number of Pages: 216
Dimensions: 0.46 x 9 x 6 IN
Publication Date: March 14, 2015