When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Hinton Rowan Helper was an unreserved bigot from North Carolina who wrote hateful, racist tracts during Reconstruction. He was also, in the years leading up to the Civil War, a determined abolitionist. His 1857 book, âThe Impending Crisis of the South,â argued that chattel slavery had deformed the Southern economy and impoverished the region. Members of the plantation class refused to invest in education, in enterprise, in the community at large, because they didnât have to. Helperâs concern wasnât the enslaved Black people brutalized by what he called the âlords of the lashâ; he was worried about the white laborers in the South, relegated by the slave economy and its ruling oligarchs to a âcesspool of ignorance and degradation.â