Attacking slavery from within: the making of The Impending Crisis of the South.

IT IS DIFFICULT TO THINK OF A FIGURE IN SOUTHERN HISTORY MORE NOTORIOUS in reputation, but the subject of so little rigorous scholarly investigation, as Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909). While many essays and biographical sketches have been written over the years, few have been based upon archival research, and basic details concerning Helper's life and career, particularly his family background, remain shrouded in mystery. (1) The controversy that this North Carolinian abolitionist provoked during his lifetime has been repeated in historians' debates about why he wrote his most famous book, The Impending Crisis of the South. Most students of antebellum southern and political history know that this work caused a major furor in the late 1850s, so much so that historian George M. Fredrickson believes that "it would not be difficult to make a case for The Impending Crisis as the most important single book, in terms of its political impact, that has ever been published in the United States." In December 1859 Democrats returning to Congress reacted with astonishment and indignation when it was discovered that sixty-eight Republicans had endorsed a shortened compendium version to be used as campaign literature in the presidential election of 1860. The revelation of Republican support for the incendiary The Impending Crisis, which called for nonslaveholders to unite with slaves in abolishing slavery, could not have come at a worse time because the first session of the thirty-sixth Congress opened just three days after the militant abolitionist John Brown was hanged. What followed was an ill-tempered and acrimonious election for Speaker of the House, the second-longest in congressional history, as southern politicians refused to accept as Speaker anyone who had supported Helper. Southern states tried to prevent circulation of The Impending Crisis and suspected abolitionists of covertly infiltrating the South, while politicians and newspapers in the region attacked both the book and its author in a frenzied atmosphere. On the eve of the Civil War, probably only John Brown's name was more reviled by white southerners than Hinton Rowan Helper's, and few would have shed tears if he had suffered the same fate as Brown. (2)

The similarities between the two abolitionists end there, however. In contrast to Brown, Helper remains an enigmatic figure. The content of The Impending Crisis is well known: it argued for slavery's harmful economic, political, and social impact upon nonslaveholding whites, a group largely overlooked by other writers of the time. Few scholars would challenge Hugh T. Lefler's verdict that the book "was probably the most caustic, scathing, and vituperative criticism of slavery and slaveholders ever written." (3) It is surprising, therefore, that there has not been a satisfactory explanation of Helper's decision to write The Impending Crisis. Helper was a proud North Carolinian who wrote much of his book while resident in his native state. When ranks were being closed in both the North and the South, he dramatically broke sectional loyalty. What prompted him to seemingly reject his culture and heritage in such a spectacular fashion? Two tentative explanations have been suggested, but both tend to obfuscate, rather than resolve, this question. One falters in the confusion surrounding Helper's upbringing and socioeconomic status. The second relies too heavily upon interpreting his later books, written between 1867 and 1871, as if they reflected Helper's thinking in the mid-1850s. Both approaches are reductionist in that they ignore complex and varied motivations, pointing instead toward Helper's dysfunctional personality and particular individual circumstances. This article draws upon new evidence to challenge those interpretations and suggest that a variety of factors influenced Helper. Most importantly, specific events between 1855, when Helper published his first book, The Land of Gold, and the spring of 1857, when he completed the manuscript of The Impending Crisis, persuaded him of slavery's harmful effect upon the South and of the need for a book that spoke on behalf of nonslaveholding whites. Helper had been converted to an abolitionist brand of Republicanism and, with the zeal of a recent convert, wanted to share this new insight with his peers. However, it would be misleading to suggest that only external events influenced Helper as he wrote The Impending Crisis. His arguments were also indelibly shaped by the time and place in which they were written. Slavery was never as economically important in the central piedmont of North Carolina as it was in many other parts of the South, and by the 1850s the region had a growing number of landless whites.

Born in Rowan County on December 27, 1829 (in an area that became Davie County seven years later), Helper was the youngest son of a family of five boys and two girls. When he was just ten months old, his father, Daniel Helper, died. For some historians, this represents the first of a number of misfortunes that shaped the younger Helper into a frustrated and bitter individual. Hugh C. Bailey writes that Helper was "born in poverty," and George Fredrickson claims that the family was left "in poverty" after Daniel's death. Edmund Wilson describes him as "The son of an illiterate farmer, whose parents had died early and left him nothing" and who was therefore "from all but the lowest stratum," suggesting incorrectly that Helper's mother, Sarah Brown, had also died when he was still a child. These accounts have sustained the popular perception that Helper was the "spawn of 'poor white trash,'" as Earl Schenck Miers puts it. (4) Perhaps the roots of Helper's hostility to slavery, then, lay in the poverty he experienced as a child? Fredrickson further speculates that Helper's low standing was cruelly exposed at the local school, which he "somehow managed to attend." Mocksville Academy, a fee-paying institution, "was patronized largely by children of the planter class," and Helper probably "encountered social snobbery and would have glimpsed enough of a tantalizing world he could never enter to embitter him for life." (5)

Things supposedly did not get much better for Helper upon leaving the North Carolina piedmont as a young man. Along with thousands of others he traveled to California in 1851 in search of gold. After three unsuccessful years he returned home none the richer and, according to Laurence Shore, continued to feel the "frustrated expectations" of his youth, while "still seeking to gain his fortune and to avoid physical labor." In 1855 Helper published his first book, The Land of Gold, both to make money and to expose California's faults. The book was not successful, however, and with few other opportunities for economic advancement, Helper allegedly decided to vent his anger at the society that he blamed for his plight by writing another book. He "considered himself a 'victim,'" writes Shore. "But he resolved not to submit to victimization" and thus exposed "the economy that created victims" in order to "achieve revenge." Fredrickson similarly notes that writing The Land of Gold and "Becoming a professional debunker was Helper's way of relieving his frustrations and of charting a new career for himself as a popular writer." Fredrickson tentatively agrees with Shore that The Impending Crisis was motivated by its author's bitterness toward the South. "To some extent," he suggests, "Helper was a man who excused personal failure and compensated for it by showing that economic failure was characteristic of an entire region that denied him access to its wealth." Edmund Wilson expands upon this victim motif. "When we examine Helper's whole career," Wilson argues, "we discover that he has always had a grievance, that he was never to succeed anywhere and that he was always to blame society for his failure." In this depiction writing became a kind of catharsis for Helper. (6)

However, the victim thesis is not borne out by archival records. Hinton Rowan Helper had a large extended family on both sides, with ample resources and a close kin network. The Browns and Helpers owned prosperous farms, situated close to one another in Bear Creek, a tributary of the Yadkin River. In 1795, Helper's paternal grandfather bought a plot of 200 acres, formerly "part of a tract of land granted to Esquire Boone." Records indicate that Helper's maternal grandfather also bought and sold land in and around the Bear Creek area in the early nineteenth century. In 1798 he purchased 112 acres and fourteen years later 205 acres for the price of $700, a considerable sum. (7) Sons and daughters tended to remain in the vicinity as they married and bought their own properties. Daniel Helper first purchased land in 1819, for the price of $80, and was also left 100 acres in his father's will. In 1827, after the unfortunate death of his younger brother, Daniel bought the other half of their father's estate at auction for $200. (8) Sometime in the 1820s Daniel, who had married Sarah Brown in 1817, moved onto the estate of his father-in-law, in all likelihood to concentrate upon his main business interest--carpentry. The Special Schedule of Manufactures in North Carolina recorded in 1820 that both Daniel and his elder brother Jacob were skilled artisans. (9) Daniel was a cabinetmaker, owning a full set of cabinet tools, and Jacob was a wheelwright with a full set of wagon tools. Daniel had been successful enough to employ two males and spend $500 on raw materials, according to the digest, and at that level of investment he had probably increased the volume of his business throughout the 1820s. He sold cupboards, clock cases, sideboards, bureaus, and desks and by 1830 owned four slaves, probably using profits from his business to buy them at some point in the 1820s, although no record of such a purchase exists. (10) As well as securing the economic stability of the family, such work must have raised their profile within the local community. Business could still be conducted on a personalized basis (in contrast to more formal market relations) by barter as well as by cash, and artisans in a small community like that of Bear Creek would generally have enjoyed a respectable status. At the same time, Daniel Helper was part of a growing, commercially oriented economy by the 1820s. The goods listed in the digest were hardly everyday items and were more generally associated with the wealthy. Cabinetmaking was an elite and specialized profession, although no doubt at times Daniel took more mundane carpentry work such as house construction. Notably, the market value of Daniel's products in the digest was generally higher than that of his competitors. As will be shown, the Helpers had strong connections to elites in Davie and Rowan Counties--perhaps those links were established as leading local families purchased furniture from Daniel in the 1820s. (11)

Daniel Helper's death in 1830 thus did not prove disastrous to the family's economic position and future prospects. Helper's mother remarried in 1836 and had three more children with her new husband. It is not absolutely certain whether Hinton Rowan lived with his mother or with an uncle or even his grandmother, but it seems improbable that he was not adequately provided for. Thomas McNeely and Thomas Brown eventually became legal guardians of Helper and his surviving brothers. (12) McNeely was one of the wealthiest and most influential men in Davie County. He founded a cotton factory in the town of Mocksville that was reportedly worth $30,000 in capital, owned thirteen slaves in 1840, and was appointed in 1839 as one of the first town commissioners. (13) Thomas Brown, Helper's uncle, owned 219 acres of land valued at $639 in an 1847 tax list, as well as an "office" in town worth $400. A family genealogy suggests that Brown, an elder at the First Presbyterian Church of Mocksville, financed the education of his nephews, although Helper's stepfather, John Mullican, would also have been in a position to contribute. (14) The agricultural schedule of the 1850 census records that Mullican owned 200 acres of improved land, 850 acres of unimproved land, and a farm with a cash value of $2,700. Mullican ranked, at the very least, solidly within the yeoman class, judging by criteria developed by historians Charles C. Bolton, Lacy K. Ford Jr., and Stephanie McCurry. Across North Carolina in 1860, approximately 42 percent of farms had less than 50 acres, and over 69 percent had fewer than 100 acres. Mullican's farm, at over 1,000 acres, was well above average in comparison and placed him among the top tier of landowners within Davie County. (15)

This level of support refutes the assertion that Helper lived in poverty. It also explains how his family afforded school fees that would surely have been beyond the means of someone from a poor background. Indeed, further evidence shows that Helper had attended a common school before entering Mocksville Academy; together they provided him with intellectual and literacy skills associated with the better off, important attributes for any prospective writer. (16) Helper likely would not have been treated as socially inferior in his youth. His family did not own slaves when he attended the academy in the mid-1840s, but in general Davie County had few large slaveholders. In 1850 just nineteen Davie slave owners had twenty or more slaves, and only two of those owners held fifty or more slaves. (17) Upon leaving Mocksville Academy, moreover, Helper entered into a prestigious three-year clerkship in the store of Michael Brown in February 1847, relocating to Salisbury, the county seat of Rowan and the center of commercial activity in the region. Brown, who was no relation, was one of Salisbury's leading citizens and wealthiest businessmen; therefore, Helper worked alongside a pillar of the slaveholding establishment. Brown owned a plantation (with fifty-three slaves in 1850), ran a very successful general store, opened a book shop in partnership with his son in 1848, and had diverse interests that included selling railroad stock, co-owning a cotton factory, and, by the late 1850s, banking. Helper appears to have developed a close relationship with his employers, and he joined the Presbyterian Church in Salisbury, where they were members. (18) The Presbyterians were known as the denomination of large slaveholders, and their exclusivity was emphasized by the fact that just 7 percent of southern church members were Presbyterian in 1860. (19) Indeed, Brown endorsed bank loans for Helper in 1855 and 1856 while his former apprentice wrote The Impending Crisis. Needless to say, Brown was not aware of the book's contents. Rather than being a victim of slaveholder snobbery, then, Helper was actually the beneficiary of planter patrimony. He thrived in a stable and supportive family environment and associated with leading citizens of both Davie and Rowan Counties. (20)

In 1850 Helper departed for New York en route to California. Around the same time, his eldest surviving brother, Hardie Hogan, also left North Carolina to work for the Navy Department in Washington, D.C. The Helper family's respectable standing helped make such a job possible. Joseph P. Caldwell, Whig representative from North Carolina's second district, sent a letter of recommendation on Hardie Hogan's behalf to William A. Graham, Secretary of the Navy and fellow North Carolinian. It was not unusual for a congressman to support one of his constituents, by any means, but the endorsement did indicate a measure of confidence in Hardie. Caldwell's letter gives a valuable contemporary assessment of the family's status. "Mr. Helper is a poor young man," he wrote, which was an exaggeration but did show that at this juncture Hardie, like his surviving brothers, did not have excess money or land. Despite inheriting their father's estate upon the death of their grandmother in 1842, the brothers did not seemingly live, work, or take any profit from that property at this time. (21) More telling was Caldwell's further comment that "He is connected with some of the most respectable families of this place." Written from Salisbury, not Mocksville, this observation underscores that the Helpers had developed networks and contacts across both Davie and Rowan Counties. Caldwell's remark that "I am satisfied that he is fully competent to discharge the duties of the office" confirmed the standards of literacy and the generally good impression that the Helpers made. (22) The example of Hinton Rowan Helper's other brother also puts Caldwell's comment in context. Hanson Pinkney Helper was running a general store in the town of Davidson, not far from the border with South Carolina, from at least as early as 1852. In addition to this significant undertaking, he became postmaster of the town in 1854, a position that surely reflected the middle-class status of the Helper family. At the time Helper wrote The Impending Crisis, be must have had numerous opportunities available to him. (23)

A second thesis explains Helper's obsession with slavery as a result of his desire to be rid of African Americans. Louis Filler has no doubt that this was the crucial factor: "The Negro he despised; his feelings were all for his own people, the poor whites, male and female, who suffered from the competition, as Helper saw it, of the unfruitful slavery system." Harvey Wish explains that Helper "shared the common anti-Negro prejudices of so many of the small farmers and workers who regarded Negroes as competitors and beings of a low order." Hugh C. Bailey also makes this assumption about Helper. "Like many of the poorer whites of his native region," Bailey writes, Helper "loathed the Negro" and "wished to see slavery destroyed, not only to improve the economic lot of the small farmer but also to remove the Negro from American life." Stewart Holbrook sums up a widely held view that "The moral aspects of slavery interested him not at all" and that Helper "looked on the Negro at best as a sub-species of humanity, incapable of being civilized." (24) By contrast, Carl N. Degler observes that a "close examination" does not support the argument that Helper's "views derived principally from his hatred of Negroes." In fact, "there are almost no references to blacks in the whole length of the book, and certainly slavery is emphasized as the evil, not blacks." Joaquin J. Cardoso and Fred Hobson go even further than Degler. Hobson suggests that "One finds, indeed, far more humanitarian concern for Negroes in The Impending Crisis than has heretofore been acknowledged." George M. Fredrickson wonders whether Helper had "deliberately kept his antiblack sentiments somewhat under wraps," afraid that they would not appeal to the northern market. "This would seem to be another case of Helper's principled dishonesty or opportunistic militancy," Fredrickson adds. (25)

The Impending Crisis was written on the behalf of nonslaveholding whites, not for slaves. Indeed, this was so important to Helper that he stated clearly in his preface that "it has been no part of my purpose ... to display any special friendliness or sympathy for the blacks," but rather to consider "my subject more particularly with reference to its economic aspects as regards the whites--not with reference, except in a very slight degree, to its humanitarian or religious aspects." While Helper's statement is broadly correct, a careful reading of the text suggests a greater moral undertone of sympathy for slaves and a stronger sense of the injustice they suffered than his own disclaimer indicates. This theme runs throughout the whole of the book, and it is wildly inaccurate to state that he "loathed" and "despised" blacks. Some historians have been guilty of pushing Helper's extreme racism of the post-Civil War period, apparent in books written between 1867 and 1871, back into the 1850s. However, it is an easy mistake to make. Helper could not contemplate abolition without the subsequent removal of the slave population, and select passages indicate an element of antipathy toward blacks in general. Other passages suggest a far more positive view. In any case, the key question is whether racism was Helper's primary motivation, and in order to answer that, his perspective needs careful evaluation, not prior assumption. (26)

The Impending Crisis blamed slavery for southern deficiencies in a host of areas, but the book also displayed a strong moral objection to slavery as an institution. Crucially, the justification of slavery on racial grounds was vehemently contested. James Madison " 'thought it wrong to admit the idea that there could be property in man,' " Helper wrote, "and we indorse [sic], to the fullest extent, this opinion of the profound editor of the Federalist." In fact, "no man of genuine decency and refinement would hold them as property on any terms; in the eyes of all enlightened nations and individuals, they are men, not merchandize." Passages taken from Thomas Jefferson illustrated how Jefferson "spoke of the blacks as citizens" and "as brethren," contradicting the proslavery assertion that they were inherently predisposed to be slaves. It was slavery that turned human beings into property and encouraged the buying and selling of them. "It is not our business to think of man as a merchantable commodity; and we will not, even by implication, admit ... that the condition of chattelhood may rightfully attach to sentient and immortal beings." Race clearly did not justify slavery, and Helper outlined a surprisingly inclusive conception of humanity in these passages. (27)

Religion further shaped Helper's perspective. His assessment of "several eminent Christian writers of different denominations" concluded that "The divine principle in man prompts him to speak and strike for Freedom; the diabolical principle within him prompts him to speak and strike for slavery." Helper responded to proslavery theorists who used extracts from the Old Testament to justify southern slavery. Some kind of bondage might have been tolerated "In a crude state of society," he admitted, but "the Deity never approved it, and, for the very reason that it is impossible for him to do wrong, he never will." Those who used the Bible to defend slavery might as well argue "that the sun loves darkness," and "to say that one man was created to domineer over another is to call in question the justice, mercy, and goodness of God." Indeed, the Bible actually constituted the "original and complete anti-slavery text-book." Rather than accept a hierarchical view of society based upon reciprocal obligations, Helper's religious ethos posited equality before God. (28)

Helper's assessment of slavery's impact upon blacks was as critical as any written in the antebellum era. Slaves "toiled unceasingly from the gray of dawn till the dusk of eve, for their cruel task-masters, who have rewarded them with scanty allowances of the most inferior qualities of victuals and clothes, with heartless separations of the tenderest ties of kindred, with epithets, with scoldings, with execrations, and with the lash--and, not unfrequently, with the fatal bludgeon or the more deadly weapon." Slaveholders had grown rich and arrogant via their exploitation of others. "From the labor of their hands, and from the fruit of their loins, the human-mongers of the South have become wealthy, insolent, corrupt, and tyrannical." Slaves were therefore fully deserving of compensation. "If they were to demand an equal share of all the property, real and personal, which has been accumulated or produced through their efforts, Heaven, we believe, would recognize them as honest claimants." With its strong moral indignity at the treatment of slaves and the separation of families and its republican critique of their exploitation, this line of argument was reminiscent of the writings of many British and American abolitionists. Such rhetoric places Helper closer to the mainstream of the movement than hitherto appreciated. (29)

In places it was even suggested that slaves and nonslaveholders join together in bringing abolition. "For ourselves, as white people, and for the negroes and other persons of whatever color or condition," he wrote, "we demand all the rights, interests and prerogatives, that are guarantied to corresponding classes of mankind in the North, in England, in France, in Germany, or in any other civilized and enlightened country." Indeed, there were significant similarities in the way that all southerners, regardless of race, suffered at the hands of slaveholders. "[P]oor whites and the negroes are alike bowed down in heathenish ignorance and barbarism," he stressed. If Helper had no concern at all for blacks, then he surely would not have penned these passages. What was there to gain by such an approach when the vast majority of nonslaveholding whites viewed them with suspicion, if not hostility? Helper consistently emphasized slavery's pernicious impact upon all aspects of southern life, insisting that "Every victim of the vile institution, whether white or black, must be reinvested with the sacred rights and privileges of which he has been deprived by an inhuman oligarchy." (30)

However, there were definite limits to Helper's concern, and his position was firmly predicated upon the removal of freed slaves after abolition. He held significant reservations about a continued African American presence within the United States because he considered blacks to be an unnatural element of the population. "Confined to the original states in which it existed, the institution would soon have been disposed of by legislative enactments," he rather naively suggested, thereby "rid[ding] ourselves not only of African slavery, which is an abomination and a curse, but also of the negroes themselves, who, in our judgment, whether viewed in relation to their actual characteristics and condition, or through the strong antipathies of the whites, are, to say the least, an undesirable population." (31) The intriguing distinction between "actual characteristics" of blacks and "strong antipathies" of whites suggests that Helper recognized the construction of negative stereotypes rather than accepting them as absolute. Despite this, his assessment was of an "undesirable population" that had no place in the future development of the country. Blacks were not suited to life in the South, constituting an unnatural presence: "The truth is, instead of its being too hot in the South for white men, it is too cold for negroes; and we long to see the day arrive when the latter shall have entirely receded from their uncongenial homes in America, and given full and undivided place to the former." Neither the inhuman treatment of African Americans, nor their essential humanity, was enough to legitimate their continued residence. (32)

Moreover, Helper implicitly accepted the racial inferiority of blacks, even though he was fully aware of the self-serving nature of arguments put forward to justify the institution of slavery. His brief discussion of the science of ethnology, which became an increasingly important element of the proslavery argument in the 1850s, was revealing. "Some few years ago, when certain ethnographical oligarchs proved to their own satisfaction that the negro was an inferior 'type of mankind,'" he wrote, "they chuckled wonderfully, and avowed, in substance, that it was right for the stronger race to kidnap and enslave the weaker--that because Nature had been pleased to do a trifle more for the Caucasian race than for the African, the former, by virtue of its superiority, was perfectly justifiable in holding the latter in absolute and perpetual bondage!" The explicit contrast of Caucasian with African races would become more prominent in books written by Helper between 1867 and 1871, although this was the only mention of "Caucasian" in The Impending Crisis. He considered whites to be stronger than blacks, although he did not specify to what extent nor whether this was in a physical or mental sense. Nonetheless, whatever the attributes of the respective "races," their differences did not justify slavery in Helper's estimation. (33)

Claims of immutable racial differences contravened Helper's deep-rooted faith in the egalitarianism of republican democracy. "No system of logic could be more antagonistic to the spirit of true democracy," he wrote. "It is probable that the world does not contain two persons who are exactly alike in all respects; yet 'all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'" A concept of natural rights--established by reference to the Declaration of Independence--applied to everyone, irrespective of supposed racial background. Taken on its own, this passage indicates that Helper rejected racial schema. The next line suggests differently, however. "All mankind may or may not be the descendants of Adam and Eve. In our own humble way of thinking, we are frank to confess, we do not believe in the unity of the races." The statements are contradictory. Helper had doubts about the theory of monogenesis, indicating greater faith in polygenesis and the separate development of the races. Yet the recognition that no one was exactly similar and his outright rejection of arbitrary distinctions between peoples compromised a worldview that organized people into homogeneous "races." Helper's republican philosophy was suspicious of any attempt by a minority to usurp the rights of individuals. By no means did he call for equal rights for all, but he recognized that the exclusion of any group threatened the "spirit of true democracy." In view of his later conversion to ethnography and fundamental belief in the overriding importance of race, the tentative nature of his comments in The Impending Crisis was particularly significant. (34)

Helper was ambivalent toward scientific racism before the Civil War because he was focused on more immediately pressing and less abstract questions. Ethnography and concomitant questions of race were of minor importance in understanding and resolving the problems that the South faced. Racial theory was "a matter ... which has little or nothing to do with the great question at issue." Race was not important because it was slavery that really mattered. "Aside from any theory concerning the original parentage of the different races of men, facts, material and immaterial, palpable and impalpable--facts of the eyes and facts of the conscience--crowd around us on every hand, heaping proof upon proof, that slavery is a shame, a crime, and a curse--a great moral, social, civil, and political evil--an oppressive burden to the blacks, and an incalculable injury to the whites--a stumbling-block to the nation, an impediment to progress, a damper on all the nobler instincts, principles, aspirations and enterprises of man, and a dire enemy to every true interest." (35) One of the themes in Helper's first book, The Land of Gold, was an association of blacks with slavery, a position reiterated in The Impending Crisis. The few African Americans he encountered in California were unfailingly connected to a servile status, as Helper conceptualized the relationship between blacks and whites by reference to slave and free, rather than to African and Caucasian. Race was a minor side issue to the main priority--the "great question" of slavery. Seemingly, only when slavery was removed--and not before--would he become fully receptive to racial ideology. (36)

Despite seeming contradictory, then, Helper's comment that "a reasonable degree of fellow feeling for the negro, makes us a colonizationist" was entirely consistent. He advocated financial compensation for slaves and their transportation to Africa, South America, or, most intriguingly, "within the Boundaries of the United States." (37) Most, if not all, northern abolitionists had abandoned such ideas by the 1850s, but colonization was still popular among fledgling Republican activists in the upper South. (38) In a manner similar to Thomas Jefferson, Helper's primary concern was slavery's impact upon whites, and notably he later claimed that Jefferson was an important influence upon his thinking. (39) Helper appreciated that "To turn the slaves away from their present homes--away from all the property and means of support which their labor has mainly produced, would be unpardonably cruel--exceedingly unjust." But "still more cruel and unjust would it be, however, to the non-slaveholding whites no less than the negroes, to grant further toleration to the existence of slavery." (40) He could not foresee abolition without the removal of blacks. Nonetheless, in the context of the 1850s South, Helper's racial perspective was considerably less hostile than widely assumed. Claims that he was "a rabid racist" or that "a virulent racism informs The Impending Crisis," allegations that continue to be made in the present, make little sense other than with a highly skewed reading of the text, for which antiblack prejudice was not a prime, or even a minor, motivation. (41)

The immediate impulse behind The Impending Crisis was not race or economic frustration but lay instead in the unhappy experience that Helper encountered in publishing his first book, The Land of Gold, in 1855. The trip to California had provided him with an important opportunity to leave his native soil and experience different ways of life, first in New York City and then in California itself. Short passages in The Land of Gold mention the possible introduction of slavery to California and to parts of Central and South America. (42) They are very brief and do not provide much insight other than to confirm that Helper could not think of emancipation in the United States without envisioning the subsequent colonization of freed slaves elsewhere. His unthinking acceptance Of slavery as an institution did not really change in the early 1850s. As he emphasized later in his career, "I learned, as, by force of habit, (in the absence of any counteracting agent,) almost every Southerner learned, to look upon negroes and negro slavery as absolutely essential constituents of the general plan, harmony and perfection of nature,--quite as essential, indeed, as fire, air, earth and water." For the first time, though, his attention was focused upon the merits and drawbacks of the peculiar institution, and he developed reservations about its utility in urban areas. As a whole, these three years constituted a sustained period of reflection that broadened his horizons in a way that would not have been possible had he remained in North Carolina. Analytical skills, put to such devastating use in The Impending Crisis, were honed and sharpened in California, as they were by the process of writing The Land of Gold. When Helper subsequently turned his attention toward southern society, he had both a critical perspective and a critical method by which to make his assessment. (43)

Sections of the manuscript that were not published acted as Helper's primary motivation for further work. The Land of Gold was contracted "through the office of the Southern Quarterly Review" in Baltimore. The book gave a frank account of his three years in California, but with the exceptions already noted, it had little to say about slavery and the South. Some passages, though, "took strong ground against the continuance of negroes and slavery in Southern cities," and these sections were rejected for publication. Helper's publisher, Charles Mortimer, was "a strong pro-slavery Virginian,--but in other respects a good man," who "gruffly characterizing and condemning those views as manifestations of the idiosyncrasies of a deluded Abolitionist ... positively refused to be, in any manner, instrumental in giving them publicity." The dilemma Helper faced was made more acute because he had given $400 to the publisher in advance, money that he stood to lose if he did not accept revisions. Moreover, he had already received the proofs of the first chapter from the printers, who were about to complete the rest of the manuscript. He could either accept the changes or withdraw his manuscript and lose his investment. This was a momentous decision and a critical turning point in Helper's life. "Finding that, under all the circumstances, there was no way of escape from the will of the slaveholder, which was the slaveholder's law, I at once, under the smartings of defeat and disgust, relinquished all control of the manuscript, and told my publisher to do with it as he pleased." (44)

The passages deleted by Mortimer both inspired and formed the basis for The Impending Crisis. (45) This act of censorship, Helper wrote, confirmed his suspicion that only proslavery literature was tolerated in the South, an opinion based upon "numerous other similar proceedings of which I was cognizant, and in some of which I had been involved." Thus, "Deeply impressed with this conviction, I solemnly vowed that I would, if possible, have a hearing on the subject upon which I had been thus unjustly silenced." Helper gathered together "the suppressed portions of my manuscript, [f]orming these rejected fragments into a basis for future action," and he "at once assumed toward slavery an attitude of more direct and determined hostility. I had ceased to be the submissive victim of an unmitigated despotism." The final sentence illustrates the resolve that was to be so apparent in pursuing the research, writing, publication, and circulation of what would become The Impending Crisis. In the summer of 1855 Helper moved from an unthinking acceptance of slavery as part of the southern landscape to an "earnest and open opposition." The lack of free speech pushed him to act. Otherwise, The Impending Crisis would almost certainly not have been written. Critics of the book would later dismiss it as derivative of northern writers, and some even questioned if Helper were the real author. But it was written in the South by someone as proud of his region and its heritage as any other native. (46)

That fall Helper returned to Salisbury and, as he put it, "applied myself assiduously to such publications as were within my reach, for facts, arguments and theories bearing upon the two rival and distinct systems of life and labor." His reading heavily influenced his point of view. Helper's economic critique of slavery touched upon many of the issues raised in the southern commercial conventions of the 1850s, and as several historians have pointed out, one of his passages basically paraphrased a speech by Albert Pike from the New Orleans convention in 1855. (47) Helper drew upon this discussion, but his greatest debt was to northern intellectuals and politicians. In particular, The Impending Crisis was couched in the language of republicanism and was reflective of Republican political discourse of the 1850s. One historian describes Helper as "the foremost Republican political and economic philosopher of the time." That would push things too far, but his exposure to the urban, industrial environment of the North seemingly left a deep impression upon him. He noted how "The merchant, the mechanic, the artizan, the professional man, and even the common laborer ... are busy with their morning or evening paper, or engaged in an intelligent discussion of some topic of public interest," whereas in the South "newspapers and books seem generally ignored." Now, as he considered slavery's future, he gravitated toward the argument not only that it was an inferior labor system that stifled entrepreneurship and education but also that it kept the whole South, with the exception of slaveholders, in a permanent state of backwardness. Naturally, then, he pledged "unswerving allegiance" to the emerging Republican Party, switching support from the Whigs. (48)

The Republican connection was solidified in Baltimore in the summer of 1856. On May 8 he sold his interest in the family farm to his brother Hanson and headed north via Richmond to Baltimore, both symbolically and literally severing his ties to the agrarian South. (49) In August at a rally for the presidential nominee John C. Fremont, Helper met William Gunnison. Gunnison was a noted opponent of slavery and longtime Whig who became instrumental in the formation of a local branch of the Republican Party, established on February 8, 1856, with a Quaker, F. S. Corkran, as president. Helper joined the Baltimore Republicans, becoming the fiftieth member shortly after meeting Gunnison. (50) This was a critical period in Helper's intellectual development as he continued to research material for his book, no doubt taking advantage of bigger and better libraries in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. (51) He must also have shared conversations and developed ideas with other party members, some of whom remained friends for years, and most importantly, he would have experienced what it was like to be associated with an antislavery cause in a slave city. A sensationalist newspaper article entitled "Black Republicanism on the Increase" called attention to the group, warning that "the enemies of the Union and your rights are among you." (52) Gunnison recorded how the group of Republicans met as frequently as possible but were subject to harassment that made "some of our number 'weak in the knees'" and eventually caused the suspension of meetings in August 1856. In early September they resumed, and members decided to advertise their meeting in advance. (53)

This was a fateful decision because the result was to attract a proslavery mob that, as Helper later briefly mentioned, "brutally assaulted" the participants. (54) A full description of the meeting, giving some idea of the agenda of the Baltimore Republicans and hence the group's potential impact upon Helper, can be found in a local newspaper. With thirty to forty people in attendance, Gunnison began the meeting in relative calm by outlining a Free Soil policy that called for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise. Significantly, he then suggested that the Republicans were not unconditional abolitionists "as they held the opinion that the emancipation of the slave would tend to render his position worse, and fatal to the black race, unless the government should take steps to colonise the manumitted slaves." It was further suggested that slavery caused "a monopoly of the soil in the slave States, and that it tended to subjugate the rights and interests of the non-slaveholder to the slave-owner." At this point, the proceedings were interrupted from the back, as hecklers proposed three cheers for Fillmore and then Buchanan. The hostile members of the crowd shouted down the speakers, and "cries of 'turn off the lights'" and "'tar and feather them'" were heard. The meeting was severely disrupted, and participants left the room, only to find a crowd estimated at two thousand strong outside the building. Corkran was "roughly hustled" on his way down the street, and he eventually was "tripped up or knocked down and the tails of his coat cut entirely off" and passed around the crowd. (55)

Free speech was already a crucial issue for Helper, and this act of violence must have confirmed his belief that it was stifled by the slave system and, given his character, have redoubled his efforts to be heard upon the slavery question. He recognized the controversial nature of his arguments, but to be violently confronted because of them took his development a stage further. This experience might well have purged him of any lingering doubt about slavery's harmful impact upon the South. He could have abandoned writing after leaving Baltimore in October to head for New York City, but he chose to press ahead. The tone of his argument was surely influenced by this event. (56) Ironically, an editorial in the Baltimore Sun criticized the actions of the mob "as disreputable, and unworthy of a people who profess to honor the freedom of speech" and found "nothing obnoxious to the civil rights of others" in the Republican's position. It suggested that Baltimore Republicans could only show their "own weakness and absurdity," and, therefore, "such an assault upon it as that of last night does vastly more harm than republicanism [sic] in Maryland can ever effect." (57) This was a profound comment, as four years later The Impending Crisis was at the center of a bitter political row that polarized sectional feeling and did much damage to the stability of The Union, greatly increasing the likelihood of civil war. (58)

Just weeks after the incident in Baltimore, a fellow North Carolinian was also attacked for his abolitionist stance. Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, born and raised near Salisbury, was dismissed from his faculty post at the University of North Carolina for publicly supporting Fremont in the 1856 presidential election. (59) In a widely published defense of his actions, parts of which were reprinted in The Impending Crisis, Hedrick argued that slavery was detrimental to the interests of ordinary southerners and lamented the fact that "neighbors, friends, and kindred" had left the piedmont, "knowing, as they did, that free and slave labor could not both exist and prosper in the same community." Moreover, he maintained, "the majority of the people among whom I was born and educated" opposed slavery. This last sentence is of most importance. Shortly before Hedrick was forced to leave North Carolina, Helper sent a letter of support: "Bravo? You are right. Stand firm, and friends will gather around you. I have not the pleasure of your acquaintance, but it would do me good to take you by the hand and tell you how glad I was to find that my dear old native state has at least one fearless patriot within her borders." Helper's next sentence echoed Hedrick's remark: "There are tens of thousands of men in the state, who entertain views similar to those expressed in your letter, but they dare not open their mouths. A remarkably free country?" Hedrick's reply described how he had recently escaped from the clutches of a mob in Salisbury in the aftermath of his dismissal, further emphasizing the violent suppression of dissent. His letter ended somewhat prophetically by urging Helper "As a native North Carolinian ... to give the timorous of the North a correct understanding of the case as regards the South," even though at that stage Hedrick was not aware that Helper was writing The Impending Crisis. (60)

Immediately after receiving Hedrick's letter, Helper took selected extracts and delivered them to the New York Herald, and they were subsequently published on November 1, 1856, under the heading "Southern Politics." Helper hoped this did not breach any confidence between the two, but he believed that publicizing Hedrick's plight "may be the means of stimulating a number of 'timorous' northerners to a proper performance of their duty." He expressed his fear that the Republicans would be defeated at the polls in the upcoming presidential election of 1856 but was optimistic that they would prevail in 1860. "The principles involved in this party will, if properly studied, commend themselves to every honest man in the country," he wrote. This exchange of letters came at a critical point in the writing of The Impending Crisis. (61) Correspondence with Hedrick must have reassured Helper that his arguments were important and that they would find a receptive audience. Hedrick virtually invited his fellow North Carolinian to finish the book, and phrases such as "a correct understanding" and "timorous of the North" encouraged Helper to emphasize his iconoclastic viewpoint. Hedrick's treatment confirmed what Helper had already experienced--that free speech on the slavery issue within the South was not only denied but could potentially result in violence--and it made him even more determined to be heard. These letters also reveal the depth of Helper's identification with and faith in the Republican Party. His desperate attempt to gather further support for the Republicans on the eve of polling in the 1856 presidential election illustrated his commitment to the cause. Moreover, his suggestion that "every honest man in the country" might be converted if they were only presented with the party's principles defined his own understanding of the ultimate purpose of his manuscript.

As Helper completed final revisions in late 1856, he wrote to Gerrit Smith, and possibly to other leading abolitionists, with specific questions. He regarded the New York radical as "the most proper and practical abolitionist in the country" and clearly admired his example. "You are a thorough, uncompromising abolitionist, and that, it occurs to me, is what every true-hearted American ... ought to be." First, Helper asked if slaveholders should receive compensation, "and if so, how much, and in what manner do you propose to raise it?" Second, he wanted to know "what disposition would you make of the negroes after emancipating them? Would you let them remain in America or would you send them to Africa? If you are in favor of colonizing them in Africa, how do you propose to raise the funds necessary for the consummation of the purpose?" This was an important letter, further emphasizing the seriousness with which Helper approached the subject of colonization. It illustrated not only emerging connections with the abolitionist community, but also how he stood outside of that group. Smith, like the vast majority of northern abolitionists, had abandoned the idea of colonization by the 1850s, a fact seemingly unknown to Helper. Indeed, John Stauffer has recently shown that Smith held remarkably enlightened racial views at this time. Helper ended his letter by remarking that he would have liked to have written to Smith from North Carolina but could not do so "reared amidst the vigilant censorship of the Oligarchy." Helper also asked Smith to keep their communications secret, as he did "not wish it to be generally known that I am writing an antislavery work until the manuscript is ready for the press." (62)

Helper's conversion to abolitionism and the Republican cause was a momentous event in his life, and with the zeal of a religious convert, he was propelled to pass on his insight to others. Fred Hobson identifies a strong pattern of southern self-criticism, a "rage to explain" within southern culture. His comparison of Helper with Edmund Ruffin, "both seeing themselves in the late 1850s as Southern prophets, messengers with the truth," accurately characterizes Helper's motivation. Helper was also very much a southern man, well attuned to codes of honor. For example, he dismissed the popular antislavery literature of "Yankee wives," stating that "it is all well enough for women to give the fictions of slavery; men should give the facts," and his text was notably masculine in its orientation. (63) The close links between masculinity and honor have been well established, and Helper's response to a personal attack by Asa Biggs, senator from North Carolina, in April 1858, displays his grasp of this most important southern code. Just ten months after publication of The Impending Crisis, Biggs questioned Helper's character and suggested that his real name was Heifer. Helper sought his critic on the floor of the House of Representatives. He could not find Biggs but recognized his colleague Burton Craige, representative from Salisbury, North Carolina, whom Helper suspected of having furnished the offending information to Biggs. Helper approached Craige, insults were traded, and the two men came to blows, eventually having to be separated by astonished onlookers in an incident somewhat reminiscent of the famous Preston Brooks-Charles Sumner caning of 1856. (64) Helper's earlier decision to write The Impending Crisis was not so dramatic but illustrated a similar concern for personal honor by publicly giving his opinion in defiance of those who would suppress free speech. It avenged the censorship of The Land of Gold and the treatment of fellow southerners like Benjamin Hedrick who had been denied their right to a free hearing. As Helper wrote in The Impending Crisis, "For daring to have political opinions of his own, and because he did not deem it his duty to conceal the fact that he loved liberty better than slavery," Hedrick "was peremptorily dismissed." He was "ignominiously subjected to the indignities of a mob, and then savagely driven beyond the borders of his native State." Helper described those responsible as "villainous persecutors," and his book began to hold them to account. The ferocity with which Helper attacked slaveholders in parts of The Impending Crisis reflects his strong sense of honor and an overall feeling of violation, qualities that were displayed more openly in his physical confrontation with Craige. (65)

It is easy to imagine that Helper believed he was writing on behalf of fellow southerners like Hedrick and the Republicans in Baltimore as he applied the finishing touches to The Impending Crisis in late 1856 and early 1857. Whether the vast majority of southerners agreed with him or not, he was convinced that he spoke for their best interests and had "simply given utterance to the honest convictions of our heart--being impelled to it by a long-harbored and unmistakable sense of duty which grew stronger and deeper as the days passed away." This might seem a melodramatic statement at first glance, but, placed in context, it accurately sums up his purpose. As I have argued elsewhere, Helper wrote primarily for the southern yeoman, but he hoped his work would speak to as wide a constituency as possible, even slaveholders, and was prepared to work with anyone who would help in his quest for reform. (66) He maintained his commitment to his peers despite the over-whelmingly hostile southern reaction when his book appeared. As late as 1859 he told William Anthon that "I have labored long, and labored hard to reach the South and now that some of them at least are eager to learn, and willing to pay for the information, I hope that the truth will not be withheld from them." (67) Even years later, Helper retained a powerful sense of duty and responsibility. When John Spencer Bassett inquired about the publication of the book, Helper stated that "With these cautious and thrifty publishers, every one of them, it was merely a matter of business, an outlook for money; with me, it was a matter of principle, a principle of national consistency and vitality and permanence and probity and prosperity and honor; and how much, how severely, how sorely, I suffered for my unswerving fidelity to that principle, is known only to myself." This quotation indicates the sense of persecution that increasingly affected Helper in his later career, but it was true that he did not earn a penny from the book's publication. Indeed, Helper spent many fruitless months in New York "trying to find a publisher possessed of sufficient manliness to bring out the book" because, he was told, any publishing house bringing out The Impending Crisis risked losing its "Southern patronage." This could only have added to his sense of frustration and injustice. In the end, he signed with a book agent, A. B. Burdick, and actually secured Burdick against financial loss. Burdick "made a fortune" but eventually "became bankrupt." Even when a compendium edition was commissioned by the Republican Party in 1859, Helper preferred to print at cost in order to circulate as widely as possible. (68)

Thus, a sense of duty and of speaking for the silenced folks at home motivated Helper's actions. Whether or not Helper's and Hedrick's claims of widespread popular sympathy with their cause were accurate, both men believed that they were. There is no doubt that the North Carolina piedmont remained receptive to antislavery ideas long after the southern wing of the abolitionist movement had supposedly withered in the proslavery onslaught after 1832. The survival of opposition to slavery was partly due to the peculiar religious makeup of the region, which included Quakers, Moravians, Lutherans, Dunkers, and other sects, as well as an intellectual strain of antislavery thought exemplified by Hedrick and another North Carolinian, Daniel Reaves Goodloe, who wrote a series of articles and books attacking slavery. (69) Helper both drew upon and became part of this tradition after his conversion to abolitionism in 1855. This is not to argue for environmental determinism. As Hedrick's reception at Salisbury illustrates, many in the region vehemently defended slavery. Though a committed few demonstrated overt opposition to slavery, ambivalence was the more widespread and common sentiment among certain groups. Crucially, that ambivalence was strong enough to sustain an antislavery oppositional discourse seemingly absent elsewhere, as the success of the American Missionary Society, which openly preached an abolitionist message in the piedmont during the 1850s, shows. In July 1859 the Reverend Daniel Worth triumphantly declared "that your missionaries on this Southern field are still combating for light and truth, and that victory seems evidently inclining to the side of fight. Never was the prospect of ultimate success in the Old North State so gratifying as now." His comment probably envisions unrealistic levels of support, but an older generation of historians, including John Spencer Bassett and Kenneth M. Stampp, also recognized a significant level of antislavery support in the region. (70) Moreover, the persistence of Unionism and high rates of desertion during the Civil War provides further evidence that many piedmont natives were not committed to slavery. One disgruntled Confederate complained in 1863 that "there are whole communities dotted here & there that are thoroughly abolitionized" and included "as rabid abolitionists as can be found in Massachusetts or Ohio." Whether relying upon moral or economic objections, slavery's opponents found an audience for their views within the piedmont to an extent not apparent in most other regions of the South. (71)

Further important links can be made between the North Carolina piedmont and the views expressed in The Impending Crisis. The pertinent issue is not only why Helper decided to write this book, for he was an intelligent and educated man who had already written about his experiences in California, but why was he so critical of slavery and slaveholders? Clearly, Helper was concerned that free speech was denied in the Old South and felt that his honor had been compromised. But a full answer to this question must also consider the precise circumstances of piedmont North Carolina in the 1850s, specific characteristics that shaped Helper's perception of the South. Could it be that his analysis unconsciously reflected the particular socioeconomic situation found there, rather than the South as a whole? It is well established that an enduring antagonism existed between counties in eastern North Carolina, containing the state's largest slaveholders and concentrations of wealth, and those in the piedmont. Historian Daniel W. Crofts describes "chronic tensions over issues such as legislative apportionment, taxation, internal improvements, popular election of public officials, and property qualifications for voting and officeholding" between upcountry and plantation districts in the upper South, including the North Carolina piedmont. Frederick Law Olmsted famously pointed to the acute polarity between regions as "population and wealth are more divided [in North Carolina] than in the other Atlantic States." (72) North Carolina was also a state in which political power undoubtedly resided with slaveholders. In 1860 slaveholders accounted for 85.8 percent of the state legislature, with 36.6 percent of the legislators being planters, the highest percentages in the upper South. Moreover, slaveholders protected their interests and managed to avoid many of the democratic changes apparent in other southern states; for example, property qualifications remained for voting and for officeholding. (73) Throughout the antebellum period, the piedmont fought a constant battle for more resources and better internal communications and sought to counter the privileges that slaveholders enjoyed within the state system of government. (74)

Thus, it should not be surprising that one of Helper's chief complaints was the manner in which slaveholders controlled political appointments and public offices. "The magistrates in the villages, the constables in the districts, the commissioners of the towns, the mayors of the cities, the sheriffs of the counties, the judges of the various courts, the members of the legislatures, the governors of the States, the representatives and senators in Congress--are all slaveholders," he wrote. (75) What might seem like paranoia at first glance was not so exaggerated when considering local government in antebellum North Carolina. Paul D. Escott describes a "squirarchy" system, in which wealthy families monopolized local positions of prominence, in some cases for decades, with little or no check on their power. Most if not all were slaveholders or had strong connections to the slaveholding establishment. Slaveholders were prominent in all southern states, of course, but divisions between them and the non-slave-holding majority were put into unusually sharp relief within the Old North State. (76) Moreover, an "intensifying series of class conflicts" highlighted divergent interests during the 1850s. "Free suffrage"--a movement to abolish the fifty-acre qualification in state senatorial elections--became an important issue in the 1848 gubernatorial election and resurfaced periodically thereafter. The dispute over an ad valorem tax had been a cause of antagonism since the revised constitution failed to tax all slaves in 1835, instead taxing only slaves over twelve and under fifty years of age. (77) Helper's conclusions about the harmful impact of slavery were shaped by these considerations. When he assessed slavery's impact, he inevitably, and probably without realizing it, took North Carolina as his model.

For example, when Helper undertook fieldwork between 1855 and 1856, he naturally looked at his home state: "much reading and research and reflection" was "coupled with local tests in North Carolina." (78) He used Salisbury as a test case on rates of slave hiring in the South, compared the Rowan County Agricultural Fair to a similar event in New York, and contrasted wage rates for slaves and free laborers working for the North Carolina Railroad Company. (79) A clear example of this parochial approach was apparent in a discussion of the state of schooling provided for nonslaveholders. Slaves were excluded "from the fountains of knowledge" by law, Helper wrote, but "the poor non-slaveholding classes are almost as effectually excluded from the institutions of learning by their poverty--the sparse population of slaveholding districts being unfavorable to the maintenance of free schools, and the exigencies of their condition" making it impossible to afford "more costly educational privileges" such as private academies. North Carolina was actually the only southern state, with the exception of Kentucky, to implement a comprehensive public school system, which relied in part upon funding at the county level. The school tax law was not compulsory for counties, however, and some ignored it, causing educational provisions to vary greatly within the state. Contrary to Helper's assertion, the richer North Carolina counties, almost always those with a majority of slaveholders, had higher levels of funding. He was correct, though, in stating that most nonslaveholders could not afford to send their children to private schools and academies. (80)

If some observations were based upon fieldwork in the piedmont, then it is essential to look carefully at slavery's importance to the local economy, on Helper's home turf. Larry E. Tise writes that while families in the piedmont "eventually owned small coteries of slaves," they "never became fully convinced that their lives and livelihoods depended upon the institution," nor did the region as a whole become dependent upon slavery. (81) Tise overgeneralizes, but he makes a valid point if his statement is qualified. Counties in the extreme north and south, on the Virginia and South Carolina borders respectively, actually developed slave-based economies during the antebellum era based on selling cotton and tobacco. (82) However, in the fourteen counties that form the central Piedmont, of which Davie County is part, wheat was the major cash crop, and plantations were rare. It would have been these counties with which Helper was most familiar. Slaves were present but did not make up more than one-third of the population, and in 1860 just 15-20 percent of whites owned slaves. Thus, for more than three-quarters of the white population, slavery was not central to their immediate interests. (83)

Moreover, economic trends within the central piedmont gradually worsened the position of nonslaveholders during the 1850s. Charles C. Bolton calculates that landless poor whites, who were mainly tenant farmers and laborers, composed somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of all free white households in the central piedmont in 1860, and he suggests that slavery restricted their economic opportunities. Most significantly, the chance of owning land and joining the ranks of the yeoman farmer diminished in the 1850s as the presence of slaves both lessened the need for and drove down the price of casual wage labor. Such work, routinely required by the agricultural economy, was one way that poor whites might eventually accumulate enough savings to become upwardly mobile. Other potential avenues of employment, such as working in the mining or turpentine industries, were also subject to competition from slave labor. The move toward more commercial farming, as railroads made the piedmont accessible to distant markets, also harmed the position of poor whites because the net effect was to raise land prices. Bolton concludes that there was a permanent and growing class of landless whites in the central piedmont whose only option was to leave the area, as they did in increasing numbers during the 1850s. Notably, Helper included in The Impending Crisis Benjamin Hedrick's lament about the plight of families forced to leave the region. (84) This was the economic situation of the piedmont in the mid-1850s, with which Helper would have been personally familiar. We know that he placed great faith in the importance of statistics and quoted extensively from the 1850 census. However, he was also surely influenced by his own observations of greater numbers of landless whites, more frequent departures of friends and family, and a general sense of restricted economic opportunity in the piedmont. This situation stood in stark contrast to his impressions of the bustling urban North. Helper would have encountered a different economic scenario had he been resident elsewhere in the South and, accordingly, would have written a different book. (85)

Hinton Rowan Helper was not motivated by racial hatred or by personal envy and most importantly was not an outsider, but instead he genuinely believed that he held the best interests of the South at heart. He attacked slavery from within. Given a history of intrastate antagonism, a retention of elements of antislavery thought, and an economy that with the exception of specific counties was only loosely tied to slavery, it should not be surprising that someone from the North Carolina piedmont could write a book like The Impending Crisis. Helper's case was notable for the vitriol with which he attacked slaveholders, which can be explained by the events of 1855 and 1856 that offended his honor and curtailed his right to free speech. His conversion to abolitionism was cemented by joining the Republican Party in Baltimore and corresponding with Benjamin Hedrick in 1856. However, Helper derived his outlook in equal measure from his heritage and culture, and the arguments that he employed were not as anomalous or as exaggerated for a piedmont native as some would believe. In fact, they unconsciously reflected North Carolina's entrenched monopoly of political power and economic wealth that Helper took to be characteristic of a slave system and hence of the South as a whole.

(1) Among the most useful studies that in part rely upon archival or other primary research are John Spencer Bassett, Anti-Slavery Leaders of North Carolina (Baltimore. 1898), 11-29; Joaquin Jose Cardoso, "Hinton Rowan Helper: A Nineteenth Century Pilgrimage" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1967); George M. Fredrickson, "Antislavery Racist: Hinton Rowan Helper," in Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn., 1988), 28-53; and Fred Hobson, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge, 1983), 44-63. Bassett corresponded with Helper in 1896 when writing his study and interviewed him personally, thus his account is of particular importance. Some passages have clearly been taken from their exchange of letters, but frustratingly Bassett's published essay does not contain extensive footnotes. Helper generally approved of Bassett's short biographies in Antislavery Leaders, stating that they were "in the main, impartial and graphic and gracious." Hinton Rowan Helper to John Spencer Bassett, July 11, 1898, Papers of John Spencer Bassett (Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). See also Jeffrey Brooke Allen, "The Racial Thought of White North Carolina Opponents of Slavery, 1789-1876," North Carolina Historical Review, 59 (January 1982), 49-66; Hugh C. Bailey, "Hinton Rowan Helper and The Impending Crisis," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, 40 (April 1957), 133-45; Bailey, Hinton Rowan Helper: Abolitionist-Racist (University, Ala., 1965); David Rankin Barbee, "Hinton Rowan Helper," Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 15 (January 1934), 145-72; Barbee, "Hinton Rowan Helper's Mendacity," Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 15 (April 1934), 228-32; Jack J. Cardoso, "Southern Reaction to The Impending Crisis," Civil War History, 16 (March 1970), 5-17; J. J. Cardoso, "Hinton Rowan Helper as a Racist in the Abolitionist Camp," Journal of Negro History, 55 (October 1970), 323-30; Michael Kent Curtis, "The 1859 Crisis over Hinton Helper's Book, The Impending Crisis: Free Speech, Slavery, and Some Light on the Meaning of the First Section of the Fourteenth Amendment," Chicago-Kent Law Review, 68 (Summer 1993), 1113-77; William Pratt Dale II, "Hinton Helper and Hispanic America," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, 40 (April 1957), 146-60; Carl N. Degler, The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1974), 67-75; Benjamin Franklin Gilbert, "The Life and Writings of Hinton Rowan Helper," Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 53 (January 1955), 58-75; Gilbert, "Hinton Rowan Helper on the Land of Gold," Journal of the West, 12 (October 1973), 521-62; Stewart H. Holbrook, "Hinton Helper and His Crisis," American Mercury, 60 (January 1945), 108-13; Holbrook, Lost Men of American History (New York, 1946), 169-77; Hugh Talmage Lefler, Hinton Rowan Helper: Advocate of a "White America" (Charlottesville, 1935); William S. Pelletreau, "Hinton Rowan Helper and his Book," Americana (August 1911), 801-8; William Polk, "The Hated Helper," South Atlantic Quarterly, 30 (April 1931), 177-89; Laurence Shore, Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832-1885 (Chapel Hill, 1986), 60-66; Theodore V. Theobald, "Hinton Rowan Helper and The Impending Crisis" (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1949); James W. Wall, "Hinton Rowan Helper and The Impending Crisis" (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1949); and Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York and Oxford, 1962), 364-79. Authors tend to follow one another in their assumptions, and they have not carried out serious archival research on Helper in census records and manuscript collections. It is possible that historians have relied upon one particular article by David Barbee, in which he claimed to have searched the archival evidence and dismissed previous accounts as based upon myth rather than research. Barbee made selected use of newspapers and other contemporary accounts, as well as census data and documentary evidence that included two wills and what he believed to be "one of the few existent letters of Helper." Ostensibly he had done substantial research. Barbee, "Hinton Rowan Helper," 162. In fact, he was a thoroughly unreliable source. As one historian put it, Barbee's articles were "monuments to historical inaccuracy and undocumented opinion." Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley, 1968), 132. It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the financial support provided by two Archie K. Davis Fellowships from the North Caroliniana Society, one when I first began graduate work on Helper and a second that enabled me to complete research for this article in 2003. Earlier versions of this paper were given at North Carolina State University, at Warwick University, and at the annual meeting of BrANCH (British American Nineteenth Century Historians) at Gregynog, Wales, and I am grateful for all comments received, as well as for the reports of the anonymous referees for the JSH. I must also thank Michele Gillespie and Nicholas Graham for carrying out research and checking citations on my behalf. Above all, I was very lucky to receive detailed critiques from James E. Crisp and John David Smith that improved the article immeasurably.

(2) Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York, 1857); Fredrickson, "Antislavery Racist," 28. The fullest account of the Speakership contest remains Ollinger Crenshaw, "The Speakership Contest of 1859-1860: John Sherman's Election a Cause of Disruption?" Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 29 (December 1942), 323-38, and see also David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York, 1976), 385-404.

(3) Lefler, Hinton Rowan Helper, 5.

(4) Bailey, Hinton Rowan Helper, ix (quotation), 4; Fredrickson, "Antislavery Racist," 34; Wilson, Patriotic Gore, 365, 371; Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, edited by Earl Schenck Miers (1857; rpt., New York, 1963). 7. Fred Hobson disputes this view, accurately suggesting that "Helper came from the upper stratum of the rural middle class." Hobson, Tell About the South, 47. Like many descendants of immigrants in the United States, Daniel changed his surname to a more Anglo-friendly pronunciation. He was born Daniel Helfer but changed the surname to Helper. Documentary records use both spellings as some family members kept the original. All subsequent citations to The Impending Crisis are to the edition published in 1857.

(5) Fredrickson. "Antislavery Racist," 34 (first quotation), 50 (second and third quotations).

(6) Shore, Southern Capitalists, 60; Fredrickson, "Antislavery Racist," 34-35; Wilson, Patriotic Gore, 375-76.

(7) Rowan County Deed Book, Vol. 14, p. 523 (September 3, 1795); Vol. 16, p. 609 (August 22, 1798); Vol. 20, p. 316 (October 2, 1812); Rowan County, Division of Estates, Book A, p. 76 (August 1812), North Carolina State Archives (North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh); hereinafter cited as NCSA. Squire Boone was father of the famous Daniel Boone, the archetypal frontiersman who arrived in Rowan County around 1752. James W. Wall, Flossie Martin, and Howell Boone, comps., The Squire, Daniel, and John Boone Families in Davie County, North Carolina (Mocksville, N.C., 1982).

(8) Rowan County Deed Book, Vol. 28, p. 198 (November 11, 1819); Rowan County Will Book G, pp. 325-26 (July 20, 1808); Rowan County Deed Book, Vol. 29, pp. 509-10 (June 2, 1827); Rowan County Estates Papers, Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions (May 7, 1825), NCSA.

(9) Special Schedule of Manufactures in North Carolina, Fourth Census of the United States, 1820, Rowan County, North Carolina, microfilm, NCSA.

(10) Manuscript Census Returns, Fifth Census of the United States, 1830. Rowan County, North Carolina, National Archives Microfilm Series (hereinafter NAMS) M-19, reel 124. They consisted of two males under 10, one female under 10, and a female aged 36-55. It seems astonishing that no one has consulted the census given that the issue of slave ownership by Helper's family has been so contentious, both in the 1850s and in subsequent historiography. Possibly David Rankin Barbee's statement that there was no primary evidence to support Helper's claim that his father owned slaves has been taken as reliable. Barbee, "Hinton Rowan Helper," 148. It is indicative of the animosity that Helper generated, though, that Hugh T. Lefler suggests without any corroborating evidence that Helper "lied about owning slaves as he did about other things" in a communication to Cardoso. Cardoso, "Hinton Rowan Helper," 23.

(11) Daniel's goods were priced as follows: cupboards $40; clock cases $30; sideboards $75; bureaus $16; and desks $45. Special Schedule of Manufactures in North Carolina, 1820, microfilm, NCSA. On artisans and community development in the backcountry, see Johanna Miller Lewis, Artisans in the North Carolina Backcountry (Lexington, Ky., 1995), 8, 17-18, 31, 33, 50-51. There is, of course, a growing literature on the market revolution, although it is still far more extensive on the North than it is on the South. Michele Gillespie identifies furnituremaking as an elite craft in the most comprehensive analysis of southern artisans to date, Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789-1860 (Athens, Ga., 2000), 8.

(12) Daniel Helper, 1844, Davie County Estates Records, 1809-1936, NCSA; Hinton Rowan Helper, 1841, Davie County Guardians Records, 1834-1918, NCSA.

(13) James W. Wall, History of Davie County in the Forks of the Yadkin (Mocksville, N.C., 1969), 131-33, 257; Manuscript Census Returns, Sixth Census of the United States, 1840, Davie County, North Carolina, NAMS M-704, reel 359.

(14) Tax List (1847), Davie County, North Carolina, NCSA; Hinton Alexander Helper, "The Genealogy of the Thomas Canon Brown Family in North Carolina," December 28. 1909, typescript copy, Davie County Public Library, Mocksville, North Carolina. Written by Helper's nephew, this short document was intended to form part of a larger project, "The Life and Work of Hinton Rowan Helper," that was never completed. The author's account of early family history in the eighteenth century is sketchy at best, but he would seem to be on surer ground in recounting events of the antebellum period.

(15) Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Davie County, North Carolina, Schedule 4, Agriculture; Charles C. Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (Durham, N.C., 1994), 11; Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 180-1860 (New York and Oxford, 1988), 55, 70; Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York and Oxford, 1995), 54. However, one must be cautious in interpreting these statistics because the quality of Mullican's land is not known. In 1860 he had only sixty acres of improved land and sixty acres of unimproved land, which suggests the figure in 1850 was somewhat anomalous. The cash value of his farm ($2000) had fallen much less dramatically than the acreage. Perhaps he speculated in land to some degree. Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Davie County, North Carolina, Schedule 4, Agriculture. The statistics on North Carolina in the text are from Paul D. Escott, Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850-1900 (Chapel Hill, 1985), 7.

(16) Winter Session 1842-1843, School Records, Davie County, North Carolina (1839-1908), NCSA.

(17) Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Davie County, North Carolina, Schedule 2, Slave Population, NAMS M-432, reel 652.

(18) James Shober Brawley, "Influence of the Browns on Rowan County's History," in Roscoe Brown Fisher, comp. and ed., Michael Braun (Brown) of the Old Stone House: His Influence and Descendants (Charlotte, 1975), 63-81 (esp. pp. 69-73); Manuscript Census Returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Rowan County, North Carolina, Schedule 2, Slave Population, NAMS M-432, reel 655. Brown brought his son, Calvin S. Brown, into the business as partner about a year after Helper entered his employment, and in the fall of 1848 the Browns opened the book shop in Salisbury. It sold a variety of literary and historical titles, and the local newspaper reported that Helper was an avid reader. Salisbury Carolina Watchman, February 17, November 16, 1848, February 7, 1860. The advertisement of November 16, 1848, contains a list of book titles available for purchase.

(19) Bruce Collins, White Society in the Antebellum South (London and New York, 1985), 154.

(20) Financial support was revealed in a letter by Helper to the New York Evening Post, January 7, 1860, also reproduced in the New York Herald, January 13, 1860. The Salisbury Carolina Watchman, February 7, 1860, claimed that Brown had "enabled him to raise the necessary funds to have it [The Impending Crisis] published." Brown and Helper became embroiled in a bitter public row after the book was published, making it difficult to gauge the accuracy of this information. A series of articles in the Salisbury Carolina Watchman brought to light that Helper had stolen some money while working for Brown. Helper confessed his wrongdoing in 1850, paid the money back, and was fully forgiven by Brown, who promised to keep the matter a secret. Only after publication of The Impending Crisis was the information made public, and southern papers then used it to attack Helper. Salisbury Carolina Watchman, August 11, 18, 25, September 1, 22, 1857.

(21) Joseph Caldwell to William A. Graham, May 6, 1851, in J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, ed., The Papers of William Alexander Graham. Vol IV: 1851-1856 (Raleigh. 1961), 88-89. The "heirs of" Daniel Helper paid tax on two hundred acres, valued at $700, in 1848. Tax List (1848), Davie County, North Carolina, NCSA. Possibly the eldest brother, Horace Haston, worked this plot until his death in August 1849, but what happened to it after that date is not clear. Sarah Helper and her new husband and children likely occupied it. Certainly, Mullican and his son purchased the property in 1863. Davie County Deed Book, Vol. 2A, pp. 468-69 (January 1, 1863), NCSA.

(22) Joseph Caldwell to William A. Graham, May 6, 185 I, in Hamilton, ed., Papers of William Alexander Graham, IV, 88-89. Hinton Rowan Helper is erroneously identified as the subject of the letter, but he was in California at the time it was written. On Hardie Hogan see James W. Wail, "Hardie Hogan Helper," in William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography. Vol. In: H-K (Chapel Hill, 1988), 97; and his obituary in the Baltimore Sun, September 19, 1899, p. 7.

(23) Mary D. Beaty, Davidson: A History of the Town from 1835 until 1937 (Davidson, N.C., 1979), 15-16, 26-28, 48-49, 180. The ledgers from the Helper-Sloan store for 1852-1854 and 1854-1855 are housed in the Helper and Sloan Collection, 1852-1916 (Davidson College Archives, Davidson College, N.C.). Also located there is a brief biographical sketch written by Hanson Pinkney's daughter in 1971, which suggests that he arrived in the town in 1850. Most southern stores relied on credit purchases from wholesalers, and Helper would surely have had to demonstrate financial credibility to his suppliers. See Lewis E. Atherton, The Southern Country Store, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1949), esp. chap. 6.

(24) Louis Filler, The Crusade against Slavery, 1830-1860 (New York, 1960), 255; Harvey Wish, ed., Ante-Bellum Writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on Slavery. (New York, 1960), 23; Bailey, Hinton Rowan Helper, 17; Holbrook, Lost Men, 169-70. Bailey later made his point about the removal of blacks more specific, writing that Helper "wrote The Impending Crisis with the explicit purpose of freeing the Negro in order that he could be removed from the United States." Bailey, Hinton Rowan Helper, 154.

(25) Degler, Other South, 68; Cardoso, "Hinton Rowan Helper," 76; Hobson, Tell About the South, 58; Fredrickson, "'Antislavery Racist," 39. There is no evidence to support Fredrickson's speculative point. As explained below, Helper did not write for profit or for the northern market. Moreover, to withhold his views in such a fashion would have compromised a deeply felt sense of honor, and throughout his career he never restrained his personal opinion, no matter how controversial or unpopular. As revealed in texts and private correspondence of the 1850s, there is no reason to suppose that his attitude toward blacks in The Impending Crisis was not a genuine reflection of his position.

(26) Helper. Impending Crisis, v; Helper, Nojoque; A Question for a Continent (New York, 1867); Helper, The Negroes in Negroland; the Negroes in America; and Negroes Generally ... (New York, 1868); Helper, Noonday Exigencies in America ... (New York, 1871).

(27) Helper, Impending Crisis, 82-83, 198, 86.

(28) Ibid., 258, 274, 275, 276.

(29) Ibid., 180. Helper is inexplicably absent from assessments of the abolitionists in the 1850s, usually on the grounds of his racism. This is incredible, given that he wrote one of the best-selling abolitionist texts of the 1850s. It is difficult to place him within the various factions of the movement, which could also account for his absence. His call for direct action and political involvement might indicate a connection to the radical New York abolitionists led by Gerrit Smith, and the two men corresponded with one another in the 1850s, as will be discussed later. Indeed, the National Era suggested that Helper's "views conform more nearly to those of the Radical Abolitionists, of which Mr. Gerrit Smith is the type, than to the old Liberty Party or Republican schools." Washington, D.C., National Era, July 14, 1859, p. 110. There were significant differences between their positions, however, most obviously that Helper's scheme was based upon abolition taking place over a period of years and upon removal of freed slaves. Support for colonization was once thought to be typical of upper South antislavery advocates like Cassius Clay, but Stanley Harrold's work has recently shown Clay in a much more positive light. The argument presented here puts Helper closer to Clay than Harrold allows for, although Helper was not nearly as concerned for black rights after abolition as Clay. Stanley Harrold, "Cassius M. Clay on Slavery and Race: A Reinterpretation," Slavery and Abolition, 9 (May 1988), 42-56; Harrold, The Abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861 (Lexington, Ky., 1995), esp. 21-23. Ultimately, Helper's moral concern for slaves was subordinate to the political and economic needs of whites. Thus, he has most in common with southern Republican antislavery men of the late 1850s, especially Frank Blair Jr. of Missouri, who also advocated colonization. See Richard H. Abbott, The Republican Party and the South, 1855-1877: The First Southern Strategy (Chapel Hill, 1986), 3-19, 26. A minority of other northern and western Republicans also favored colonization. See Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837-1860 (New York, 1976), 321-36. In the late 1850s many leading figures of the abolitionist movement became involved in distributing a compendium edition of The Impending Crisis within the upper South, including Clay, Blair, John Underwood from Virginia, William McCauley of Wilmington, Delaware, and Lewis Clephane of Washington, D.C. Despite the best efforts of southern authorities to prevent circulation, the book had a southern readership. See David Brown, "Hinton Rowan Helper: The Logical Outcome of the Non-Slaveholders' Philosophy?" Historical Journal, 46 (March 2003), 39-58.

(30) Helper, Impending Crisis, 163, 47, 95.

(31) Ibid., 97.

(32) Ibid., 299.

(33) Ibid., 184.

(34) Ibid., 184. Helper was not the only abolitionist to hold such assumptions. Daniel J. McInerney argues that republicanism was a key influence in the formulation and the language of the abolitionist message. See McInerney, The Fortunate Heirs of Freedom: Abolition and Republican Thought (Lincoln, Neb., 1994). Inexplicably, he does not mention Helper.

(35) Helper, Impending Crisis, 184.

(36) This is what John Spencer Bassett suggested over a century ago, but still the myth of Helper as fanatical racist of the 1850s persists. Bassett, Anti-Slavery Leaders, 27. Comments about African Americans were not abundant in The Land of Gold, but they unfailingly suggested black dependence upon whites in one form or another. For example, Helper stated that free blacks were "slaves to no single individual but to the entire community" and that Californian runaways, "enticed away by meddling abolitionists," became "disgusted with a freedom which was of no value to them" and were eventually "eager to return again to their masters." Helper, The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction (Baltimore, 1855), 275-77. For a more detailed discussion of Helper's fluid racial attitudes in this book, see David Brown, "Hinton Rowan Helper's The Land of Gold and the Evolution of Race Relations in California," American Nineteenth Century History, 1 (Autumn 2000), 28-50. Ira Berlin's subtle analysis of racial attitudes in the upper South, which differentiated sharply from views in the lower South, supports this point. He argues that the degraded position of blacks was commonly explained by reference to slavery and the denial of freedom that bondage enforced, rather than by theories of inherent racial inferiority. "For most Upper South whites, Negroes were rational if culturally inferior beings capable of improvement and desirous of liberty," and there was little need for scientific racism. Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974), 186.

(37) Helper, Impending Crisis, 26, 156. These proposals were part of an eleven-point plan to abolish slavery. Point ten was "A Tax of Sixty Dollars on every Slaveholder for each and every Negro in his Possession at the present time, or at any intermediate time between now and the 4th of July, 1863--said Money to be Applied to the transportation of the Blacks to Liberia, to their Colonization in Central or South America, or to their Comfortable Settlement within the Boundaries of the United States." Point eleven called for "An additional Tax of Forty Dollars per annum to be levied annually, on every Slaveholder for each and every Negro found in his possession after the 4th of July, 1863--said Money to be paid into the hands of the Negroes so held in Slavery, or, in cases of death, to their next of kin, and to be used by them at their own option." Ibid., 156.

(38) The fullest discussion of colonization in the late antebellum period, albeit for just one state, is Harold D. Tallant, Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington, Ky., 2003), esp. chap. 2. The majority of antislavery activists whom Tallant discusses held views very similar to Helper. See also William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion. Vol. I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York and Oxford, 1990), 462-73, 537-44; Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York and Oxford, 2001), 24; and Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 316-20.

(39) Helper claimed that Jefferson was the most important influence in Hinton Rowan Helper to John Sherman, October 19, 1896, Bassett Papers. In The Impending Crisis Helper wrote that "One end of the yoke that bows the African to the dust, presses heavily upon the neck of his Anglo-Saxon master," emphasizing racial differences between white and black (although this was the only reference to "Anglo-Saxon" in the book). Helper, Impending Crisis, 409. His comment was reminiscent of Jefferson's famous statement that "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other." Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, edited by William Peden (1785; rpt., Chapel Hill, 1955), 162. Also like Jefferson, Helper revealed a distaste for blacks, albeit in just two specific passages. He described "seedy and squalid niggervilles in the Old Dominion" and contrasted "industrious tidy white girls" with "negro wenches, slaves, of corresponding ages, so ungraceful, stupid and filthy that no decent man would ever permit one of them to cross the threshold of his dwelling." Helper, Impending Crisis, 108, 380-81. Helper used extensive quotations from Jefferson in ibid., 195-99. It is telling, however, that he did not quote from the famous meditation in Notes on the State of Virginia (pp. 138-39) upon innate differences between whites and blacks, which was reprinted in Helper's later book Nojoque, 26-28. The literature on Jefferson and race is extensive. For a summary and commentary see Alexander O. Boulton, "The American Paradox: Jeffersonian Equality and Racial Science." American Quarterly, 47 (September 1995), 467-92.

(40) Helper, Impending Crisis, 179-80.

(41) James Kirby Martin et al., America and Its People (2nd ed., 2 vols.; New York, 1993), I, 396; William J, Cooper Jr. and Thomas E. Terrill, The American South: A History (2nd ed.; New York, 1996), 261. See also Stanley Harrold, American Abolitionists (Harlow, Eng., 2001), 70.

(42) Helper, Land of Gold, 221-22, 278-79.

(43) Helper, Noonday Exigencies, 156. I have elaborated further upon these points in David Brown, "Travel as Self-Reflection: Hinton Rowan Helper in California, 1851-1854," in Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton, eds., Nation on the Move: Mobility in U.S. History (Amsterdam, 2002), 95-109. See also Hobson, Tell About the South, 50.

(44) Helper, Noonday Exigencies, 159-61. As this information was not disclosed until sixteen years after the event, it should accordingly be treated with some caution. Helper's motive in revisiting the origins of The Impending Crisis was to challenge the southern aspersion, made by both newspapers and politicians, that he had written on behalf of African Americans, and hence he repeatedly stated that his book opposed "slavery and negroes." Stung by fierce criticism in the late 1850s, he took an extreme antiblack position after the Civil War and at every available opportunity protested that his most famous book was consistent with the racist diatribes written between 1867 and 1871. Apart from this goal, Helper likely had no ulterior motive in discussing these events, as The Impending Crisis was of little significance in 1871.

(45) It would be interesting to know what these passages consisted of and what Helper's criticisms of slavery were at that time. Years later, he suggested that he had argued for slavery's greater utility in agriculture, foreseeing "an unconditional lease of life" in rural areas, in contrast to its more limited use in cities. Helper, Noonday Exigencies, 159. The deleted material may have become chapter 9 of The Impending Crisis ("Commercial Cities--Southern Commerce"), although this chapter was more an attack upon southern dependence upon northern manufacturers than a direct critique of slavery.

(46) Helper, Noonday Exigencies, 161, 158. On the censorship of antislavery materials and the violent suppression of antislavery speakers, see Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (1940; rpt., New York, 1964); David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War (New York and Oxford, 1998), chap. 4; and Russel B. Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830-1860 (East Lansing, Mich., 1949).

(47) Helper, Noonday Exigencies, 161 (quotation); Herbert Collins, "The Southern Industrial Gospel before 1860," Journal of Southern History, 12 (August 1946), 391n23; Shore, Southern Capitalists, 61; Vicki Vaughn Johnson, The Men and the Vision of the Southern Commercial Conventions, 1845-1871 (Columbia, Mo., 1992), 112.

(48) James D. Bilotta, Race and the Rise of the Republican Party, 1848-1865 (New York, 1992), 241; Helper, Impending Crisis, 405, 234. The classic exposition of republican ideology remains Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970).

(49) Davie County Deed Book, Vol. 4, pp. 41-42 (May 8, 1856), NCSA. He returned periodically after the Civil War to visit family and lived in Asheville, North Carolina, in the late 1860s, but he never took up permanent residence in the piedmont again.

(50) Hinton Rowan Helper, Letter in Support of Gunnison's Application, March 16, 1861; Baltimore Republican Party membership list, both in William Gunnison file, Collector of Customs, Baltimore, Applications for Appointments as Customs Service Officers, 1833-1910, Records Relating to the Customs Service, Records of the Division of Appointments, General Records of the Department of the Treasury, Record Group 56, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; hereinafter cited as RG 56. This file contains miscellaneous items, including several letters by Helper. For background on Gunnison and the Baltimore Republicans see Roger Bruns and William Fraley, "'Old Gunny': Abolitionist in a Slave City," Maryland Historical Magazine, 68 (Winter 1973), 369-82.

(51) Helper stated that "A considerable portion of this work was written in Baltimore" and that only the "odious clause" of state antislavery laws prevented the book being completed and published there. Helper, Impending Crisis, 360.

(52) Baltimore Daily Republican, August 9, 1856.

(53) William Gunnison to the Editors of the New York Tribune, April 2. 1860, in RG 56.

(54) Helper, Noonday Exigencies, 162.

(55) Baltimore Sun. September 12, 1856.

(56) He wrote that he had "taken into account the pro[b]able consequences of our decision" to write his book. "That we shall encounter opposition we consider as certain; perhaps we may even be subjected to insult and violence," he continued. However, with a strength of mind and purpose that indicated he was not going to be deterred, Helper stated that "we shall shrink from no responsibility, and do nothing unbecoming a man; we know how to repel indignity, and if assaulted, shall not fail to make the blow recoil upon the aggressor's head." Helper, Impending Crisis, 26-27. Ironically, this was exactly the course of action that he took just under a year after the book's publication. See below.

(57) Baltimore Sun, September 12, 1856.

(58) Crenshaw, "Speakership Contest of 1859-1860."

(59) Michael Thomas Smith, "'A Traitor and a Scoundrel': Benjamin S. Hedrick and the Making of a Dissenter in the Old South," North Carolina Historical Review, 76 (July 1999), 316-36; Smith, "Benjamin S. Hedrick and Dissent in Civil War Era North Carolina" (M.A. thesis, North Carolina State University, 1999); Monty Woodall Cox, "Freedom during the Fremont Campaign: The Fate of One North Carolina Republican in 1856," North Carolina Historical Review. 45 (October 1968). 357-83.

(60) Hedrick defended his support for Fremont in a letter to the semiweekly Raleigh North Carolina Standard, October 4, 1856, and it was reproduced along with other documents relating to the case in J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, ed., Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick (Chapel Hill, 1910), 5-42 (quotation on p. 14). It was undoubtedly this letter that prompted Helper to write to Hedrick. Hinton Rowan Helper to Benjamin Hedrick, October 15, 1856, and Benjamin Hedrick to Helper, October 27, 1856, both in Folder 11, Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick Papers #325 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).

(61) Hinton Rowan Helper to Benjamin Hedrick, November 3, 1856, Folder 12, Hedrick Papers. Helper told John Spencer Bassett that "I had never even heard of either Prof. Hedrick or Mr. [Daniel Reaves] Goodloe until a very considerable time after I had finished the manuscript of 'The Impending Crisis of the South.'" Hinton Rowan Helper to Bassett, November 27, 1896, Bassett Papers. He certainly did not know of Hedrick until his dismissal, but given his thorough preparation it would seem unlikely that he had not come across Goodloe's work. Helper printed extracts from Goodloe in The Impending Crisis (pp. 112-13). The manuscript was not finally completed until the spring of 1857--letters written in February, March, April, and as late as May 30, 1857. were included in The Impending Crisis (pp. 336-46. 388). Of course the main points of the book's thesis were developed before then.

(62) Hinton Rowan Helper to Gerrit Smith, October 4, 1856, Gerrit Smith Papers (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, N.Y.); John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 1-7, 11, 14-20, 60-65, 101-2, 139-44, 208-9. It would be interesting to read Smith's reply to Helper's questions, but all we know is that the two men continued to correspond during the 1850s and that Smith contributed to the fund to distribute the compendium.

(63) Helper, Impending Crisis. v-vi; Hobson, Tell About the South, 45. Hobson later qualifies his remark by writing that "One is hesitant to call Helper a Southern prophet" (p. 62), but in the sense of seeking to bring what he perceived to be the truth to the masses, this is an apt description of Helper's purpose. Helper consistently directed his appeal to men, and in a book with dozens of quotations, not one was written by a woman. See Helper, Impending Crisis, 59, 109, 300, 376, 382.

(64) Helper called Craige "a slaveholding coward" and was found with a revolver and bowie knife. Helper's bail was met by Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire, but Craige declined to prosecute. Raleigh North Carolina Standard, April 17, 1858 (semiweekly edition); New York Herald, April 15, 1858. Helper's own account of the incident makes interesting reading, his story bearing the hallmarks of southern honor in the way in which he approached and accosted Craige in a controlled and open manner, eventually striking him in self-defense. Helper clearly took great delight in his own skill and self-control in dealing with Craige, who "though generally regarded as a great bully ... is a very incompetent, awkward, easily-handled pugilist." Hinton Rowan Helper to the Editor, April 17, 1858, published in the New York Daily Tribune, April 20, 1858, p. 5. See also William E. Gienapp, "The Crime against Sumner: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Rise of the Republican Party," Civil War History, 25 (September 1979), 218-45. Helper's action was not as violent, nor did it have such dramatic consequences, as that of Preston Brooks. There are similarities, though, in the way both men acted upon their sense of personal insult and protection of their families' reputations.

(65) Helper, Impending Crisis, 305-6.

(66) Ibid., 278; Brown, "Hinton Rowan Helper," 44. Some passages seemingly offered an olive branch, appealing for voluntary abolition, and slaveholders were not excluded from Helper's vision of a new South: "We demand our rights, nothing more, nothing less. It is for you to decide whether we are to have justice peaceably or by violence." Helper also praised slaveholders who manumitted their slaves, describing them as "undeniably actuated by principles of pure patriotism, justice and humanity; and so believing, we delight to do them honor." Helper, Impending Crisis, 128, 96.

(67) Hinton Rowan Helper to William Anthon, September 6, 1859, William Henry Anthon Correspondence (Manuscripts and Archives Division, Humanities and Social Sciences Library, New York Public Library). Anthon was treasurer of the committee formed to distribute The Impending Crisis.

(68) Hinton Rowan Helper to John Spencer Bassett, November 2, 1896, Bassett Papers. Helper stated in this letter that he approached Harpers, Appletons, and Scribners. James Harper gave Helper a personal interview. Harper shared an abolitionist viewpoint: he would have been "glad to publish" but could not do so after consultation with his partners, who estimated that they "would probably sustain a loss of not less than twenty per cent of their current or annual business." Ibid.

(69) [Daniel Reaves Goodloe], Inquiry into the Causes which Have Retarded the Accumulation of Wealth and Increase of Population in the Southern States: In Which the Question of Slaverv Is Considered in a Politico-Economical Point of View (Washington, D.C., 1846); [Goodloe], The South and the North: Being a Reply to a Lecture by Ellwood Fisher... (Washington, D.C. 1849); Hiram H. Hilty, "North Carolina Quakers and Slavery" (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1968); Peter Kent Opper, "North Carolina Quakers: Reluctant Slaveholders," North Carolina Historical Review, 52 (January 1975), 37 58; John Michael Shay, "The Antislavery Movement in North Carolina" (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1970); Jon F. Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Mornvian Worm in Narth Carolina, 1763 1840 (Chapel Hill, 1998). Sensbach provides a wonderfully subtle analysis of how, unlike the Quakers, the Moravians essentially accommodated slavery into their society.

(70) "North Carolina--From Rev. D. Worth," letter dated July 5, 1859, and reprinted in the Washington, D.C., National Era. August 4, 1859, p. 12 I. See also Worth's further communication in the National Era, September 29, 1859. Worth was later arrested for circulating The Impending Crisis. Kenneth M. Stampp writes that "a substantial group of small farmers in the upper South retained its opposition to slavery in the years after 1832," although they were somewhat disorganized. Stampp, "The Fate of the Southern Antislavery Movement," Journal of Negro History, 28 (January 1943), 10-22 (quotation on p. 17). Bassett was even more specific. While also noting continued opposition across many parts of the upper South. in reference to western North Carolina he writes that "Of all the regions of the later Confederacy, that which lay in these counties was very probably the strongest in anti-slavery sentiment" and would probably "have removed the stain of slavery" voluntarily, if given a choice. The specific counties that he mentioned were located in the piedmont. Bassett, Anti-Slavery Leaders, 7-11. On the AMA see Clifton H. Johnson, "Abolitionist Missionary Activities in North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, 40 (July 1963), 295-320; Noble J. Tolbert, "Daniel Worth: Tar Heel Abolitionist," North Carolina Historical Review, 39 (July 1962), 284-304; Mark Andrew Huddle, ed., "North Carolina's Forgotten Abolitionist: The American Missionary Association Correspondence of Daniel Wilson," North Carolina Historical Review, 72 (October 1995), 416-55.

(71) Rev. J. H. Coble to E. J. Hale & Sons, September 10, 1863, cited in William T. Auman, "Neighbor against Neighbor: The Inner Civil War in the Randolph County Area of Confederate North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, 61 (January 1984), 59-92 (both quotations on p. 62). Auman argues that the "Randolph County area," which included all or part of the piedmont counties of Chatham, Randolph, Guilford, and Davidson, as well as parts of other neighboring counties, "was a hotbed of desertion, disloyalty, and persistent Unionism during the war" (p. 59). See also William T. Auman and David D. Scarboro. "The Heroes of America in Civil War North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, 58 (October 1981), 327-63. Also useful are Marc W. Kruman, "Dissent in the Confederacy: The North Carolina Experience," Civil War History, 27 (December 1981), 293-313; Joshua McKaughan, "'Few Were the Hearts... that did not Swell with Devotion': Community and Confederate Service in Rowan County, North Carolina, 1861-1862," North Carolina Historical Review, 73 (April 1996), 156-83: and Phillip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville, 1981).

(72) Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1989), 44; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States ..., edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York, 1953), 148. Historical geographer D. W. Meinig points to the historical roots of this rift, as settlement of North Carolina's interior was made "'by peoples whose origins, social character, economic interests, and political concerns differed sharply from those of the older coastal societies," thereby creating "a profound geopolitical tension." D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Vol. I: Atlantic America, 1492 1800 (New Haven, 1986), 292-93. The fullest discussion of Noah Carolina in this period remains Guion Griffis Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina: A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1937), esp. 3-36 on regional differences. See also Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1992), chap. I; Joseph Carlyle Sitterson, The Secession Movement in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1939), chap. 1; and Allen Tullos, Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont (Chapel Hill, 1989), esp. pp. 40-64.

(73) Ralph A. Wooster, Politicians, Planters and Plain Folk: Courthouse and Statehouse in the

Upper South, 1850-1860 (Knoxville, 1975), 40. Fifty acres of land was the minimum qualification to be able to vote for the upper house. To stand for election as governor, the minimum requirement was a freehold valued at one thousand pounds; for senator at least three hundred acres of land; and for the House of Commons at least one hundred acres. At the county level, justices of the peace were appointed by the governor and appellate judges by the general assembly. They held those positions for life. Justices of the peace composed the county courts that selected all other local officials with the exception of sheriff and clerk of the court, set tax rates, and controlled local public spending. Only in municipal elections were ordinary Carolinians allowed much input. Moreover, seats in the legislature were not apportioned upon a democratic basis, but by a system that favored counties with large property holders who paid the most in taxes. The Constitution of North Carolina, Adopted December 17, 1776; And the Amendments Thereto, Submitted to the People by the Convention Which Assembled at Raleigh, June 4th, 1835 ... (Raleigh, 1835), 8, 10, 13, 16-17; Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 76; Harold J. Counihan, "The North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1835: A Study in Jacksonian Democracy," North Carolina Historical Review, 46 (October 1969). 335-64; Fletcher M. Green, Constitutional Development in the South Atlantic States, 1776-1860: A Study in the Evolution of Democracy (Chapel Hill, 1930), 232-33.

(74) This was not, however, a simple contest between the slaveholders of the east and the nonslaveholders of the piedmont, for it was typically slaveholders from the piedmont who fought the region's battles. Overt sectional and class conflict was contained within North Carolina by the second party system as both parties maintained coalitions of different interests, albeit with much difficulty at times. Thomas E. Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics: North Carolina, 1815-1861 (Athens, Ga., 1989), 3-7, 10, 59-67, 164-65, 186-87, 199, 313-28; Marc W. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina. 1836-1865 (Baton Rouge, 1983), 6-14, 28, 140-58,26869. My point is that the residual effect of regional antagonism was to repeatedly focus attention upon the institution of slavery, despite the fact that both political parties tried to avoid this, in a way that was not apparent in other southern states. It would not have taken much lateral thinking for individuals like Helper and Hedrick to perceive that the peculiar institution, or the slaveholding establishment who benefited most from it, worked against the interests of the majority of piedmont natives.

(75) Helper, Impending Crisis, 159.

(76) Escott, Many Excellent People, 15-22 (quotation on p. 16).

(77) Paul D. Escott and Jeffrey J. Crow, "The Social Order and Violent Disorder: An Analysis of North Carolina in the Revolution and the Civil War," Journal of Southern History, 52 (August 1986), 373-402 (quotations on p. 379); Donald C. Butts, "The 'Irrepressible Conflict': Slave Taxation and North Carolina's Gubernatorial Election of 1860," North Carolina Historical Review, 58 (January 1981), 44-66; Butts, "A Challenge to Planter Rule: The Controversy over the Ad Valorem Taxation of Slaves in North Carolina: 1858-1862" (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1978). See also Thomas E. Jeffrey, "Beyond 'Free Suffrage': North Carolina Politics and the Convention Movement of the 1850s," North Carolina Historical Review, 62 (October 1985), 387-419; Jeffrey, "'Free Suffrage' Revisited: Party Politics and Constitutional Reform in Antebellum North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, 59 (January 1982), 24-48; and Kruman, Parties and Politics.

(78) Hinton Rowan Helper to John Sherman, October 19, 1896, Bassett Papers.

(79) Helper, hnpending Crisis, 148, 323-24, 380-81.

(80) Ibid., 398-99; Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 274, 276; Cooper Jr. and Terrill, American South, 244. Keith Whitescarver concludes that economic wealth was the key to educational achievement in Edgecombe and Buncombe Counties in antebellum North Carolina. Whitescarver, "Political Economy, Schooling, and Literacy in the South: A Comparison of Plantation and Yeomen Communities in North Carolina, 1840-1880" (Ed.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1995), 5-6, 52-103, 162, 166, 183. I thank Michael O'Brien for pointing out to me Helper's parochialism in this particular instance.

(81) Larry E. Tise, "Confronting the Issue of Slavery," in Lindley S. Butler and Alan D. Watson, eds., The North Carolina Experience: An Interpretive and Documentary, History (Chapel Hill, 1984), 193-200 (quotation on p. 194).

(82) Caswell, Granville, and Warren Counties to the north predominately produced tobacco, while Anson, Mecklenburg, and Richmond Counties to the south produced cotton. Rosser Howard Taylor, Slaveholding in North Carolina: An Economic View (Chapel Hill, 1926), 35-36, 48-49.

(83) Bolton, Poor Whites, 11-12, 20. Counties in the central piedmont include Alamance, Chatham, Davidson, Davie, Forsyth, Guilford, Iredell, Montgomery, Moore, Orange, Randolph, Rowan, Stanly, and Yadkin.

(84) Bolton, Poor Whites, 12-41. It is worth looking in more detail at the quotation from Hedrick: "Of my neighbors, friends and kindred, nearly one-half have left the State since I was old enough to remember. Many is the time I have stood by the loaded emigrant wagon, and given the parting hand to those whose faces I was never to look upon again. They were going to seek homes in the free West, knowing, as they did, that free and slave labor could not both exist and prosper in the same community." Hedrick then cited the 1850 census to emphasize the growing problem of out-migration in North Carolina and Virginia, using statistics to support the argument in much the same way Helper did. Helper, Impending Crisis, 305.

(85) The Impending Crisis includes dozens of statistical tables compiled from information recorded in the 1850 census. Indeed, Helper suggested that the 1850 census was the catalyst in his shift toward an antislavery position: "In the process of my conversion from the pro-slavery opinions and prejudgments in which, if I may so speak. I was born and bred, nothing influenced me so much, nothing so whetted my desire for closer scrutiny into the two conflicting systems of society, nothing so hastened my espousal of the cause of white free labor, and certainly nothing so strengthened and confirmed me in my utter detestation of negro slavery, as the thorough perusal of a certain public document ... the Seventh Census." Helper, Noonday Exigencies, 162.

MR. BROWN is senior lecturer in American history at University College Northampton in the United Kingdom.