Hinton helper biography

The success of The Impending Crisis in 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.

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...

Upon the father's death, the family was forced to turn to a maternal uncle who ran the farm and paid for Hinton's education at the Mocksville Academy. Helper worked as an apprentice to a storekeeper in Salisbury until 1850, when he left for California with $300 in embezzled funds, which he agreed to pay back.

Considered in two letters, with copious extracts from the recent work of Hilton R. Helper," John Harmer Gilmer calls Helper "a profane miscreant," one of many insults directed at Helper in that essay. There are very few references to blacks in the book, and certainly slavery as an economic institution is denounced, not black people.