Hinton Rowan Helper

Compelled to excise these comments, Hinton Helper — an irascible man — resolved to speak out his whole mind in a book devoted entirely to this subject.

He deployed statistics from the census to show that land values, literacy levels, and manufacturing rates were considerably lower in the South than in the North.

[5] The fear of class divisions within the white community was enough to lead many Southerners who had previously been opponents of secession to embrace it after the election of Abraham Lincoln.

Another man who knew Helper before the war recalled that 'he has always been inflexibly opposed to all the relations and conditions which have kept the two races close together; and this ... was one of the principal grounds of his opposition to slavery.

"[6] Nevertheless, Southern enemies of Reconstruction were unwilling to forgive his previous opposition to slavery, and he remained a marginal and increasingly unstable character in postwar America.

He spent most of the postwar years promoting a scheme to build an intercontinental railroad connecting North and South America, which would help replace black and brown peoples with whites.

[8][9] The book, which was a combination of statistical charts and provocative prose, attracted little attention until 1859, when it was widely reprinted in a condensed volume called the Compendium by Northern opponents of slavery.

Helper spoke on behalf of the majority of Southern whites of moderate means—the Plain Folk of the Old South—who he said were oppressed by a small but politically dominant aristocracy of wealthy slave owners.

"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".