Lanterna Rally

Author: Hinton Rowan Helper

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2016-08-17

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9781537144375

From the 1898 edition of Modern Culture, Vol. 6: On nearly all of the old bookstands of the country can be found a copy of "The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It," by Hinton Rowan Helper, of North Carolina. That the book can be [easily] purchased indicates that it must have had a large circulation, but there are few persons under forty who have any other than a vague idea of what the work is about, and fewer still know that it was at one time the most talked-of book in America and was hated by the slaveholders even worse than "Uncle Tom's Cabin." THE BOOK MAKES A SENSATION From California, Mr. Helper turned East and then came into prominence by his book, which is the subject of this article. When "The Impending Crisis" was first published, in 1857, it attracted immediate attention for several reasons. In the first place it was an attack upon slavery by a Southern man. This, it is true, was not unprecedented, but his argument was a novel one. Heretofore the attacks on slavery had largely been based on the immorality of the institution. While Helper believed the institution immoral he attacked it on economic grounds. He took as the basis of his attack the Census returns for 1850 which had been collected with a completeness never before attempted. The Superintendent of this Census was Prof. DeBow, of Charleston, South Carolina, editor of the Review that bore his name. The Review was an ardent defender of slavery and the only publication in the South of any considerable literary merit. Thus it was impossible for the slaveholders to claim that the census figures had been juggled to meet anti-slavery ideas. SLAVERY, THE RUIN OF THE SOUTH Using these figure as well as other official statistics, Helper made an attack on slavery as a wasteful institution which had impoverished the South, injured the non-slaveholding classes, and was slowly but surely working its ruin. If he had confined himself to his deductions, with brief and impartial comments, the effect of the book on Southerners would have been much better. On the contrary he was as virulent and unsparing in his denunciation of slave owners as the warmest slavery propagandist was in advocacy of that institution; and in denunciation of those who held contrary views on the subject. Helper was no mean writer and he used his invective in a way that wrung the Southern heart; hence his book was denounced and condemned more bitterly than Mrs. Stowe's great work which showed the brighter as well as the darker side of slavery.