About: 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 that he dedicated to the "nonslaveholding whites" of the South. The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, written partly in North Carolina but published when the author was in the North, argued that slavery hurt the economic prospects of non-slaveholders and was an impediment to the growth of the entire region of the 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."