Southern Reaction To The Impending Crisis

Southern Reaction To The Impending Crisis Jack J. Cardoso Hinton Rowan Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South: How To Meet It was an almost instant success with a circulation of some 14,000 copies. This was especially significant in that 1857 was a year of depression and the one dollar cost of the volume was above average. Another factor of interest was the limited distribution of the book in the South, the section which reacted most violently to its publication. Critical comment on the Crisis was mixed though northerners generally approved its contents. A representative northern view was that of the New Englander magazine, which called the work "the most effective presentation" of the economic aspects of slavery "within our knowledge ." It further expressed the view that solely for this reason the South had chosen to "let the book alone" and instead attack Helper personally .1 Immediate evidence of such attacks appeared first in Helper's home newspaper, Salisbury's The Carolina Watchman, which took a special interest in Helper and quickly set the tone for the assaults that were to follow. The Watchman had been approached by Helper prior to the book's publication in an attempt to secure advance notice of the book. In his request Helper had claimed that his manuscript would have a "salutary influence" on the economic interests of North Carolina and the South.2 The paper saw a different intent, however, and charged that he had engaged in both deception and treasonous conduct. In declining to provide the preliminary publicity, the editors raged at the apparent duplicity of this fellow southerner who had been held in high regard as an "exemplary young man" by the townspeople. They discounted Helper's claim that his writing was designed to have a good influence on his section, though his statement was certainly made in good faith. Helper sincerely believed that his writing on the slavery question was in the best interests of western North Carolina, a section inhabited largely by middling yeomen. But the editors vilified Helper, calling him a liar, thief, and apostate son who had abused his friends' confidence. They maliciously referred to Helper's early delinquency when he had embezzled $300 from his employer-uncle and declared that he would never be short of funds as long as he could steal.3 1 Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, (New York, 1950), I, 214; New Englander , XV (Nov. 1857), 647; F. L. Mott, Golden Multitudes (New York, 1947), p. 320. - Salisbury Carolina Watchman, June 23, 30, 1857, Aug. 25, 1857. 3 Ibid., Aug. 11, 18, 25, 1857. b CIVIL war history This same line of attack was used by the Raleigh Standard, which advised Helper to "throw yourself into the arms of Fred Douglass . . . and mingling, mix up with that dark, infidel and traitorous crew upon whose purses all your highest hopes depend."4 This comment was gratuitous to say the least and a reckless distortion of Helper's purpose. Helper, a dedicated Negrophobe to his dying day, was hardly prone to pamphleteer in defense of the Negro. The confusion of his objectives was perhaps typical of the southern mind in its unique defense of an equally unique system of labor. However, another reason for the distortions was that few southerners, including newspaper editors, had actually read Helper's book. Many obviously had taken their cue from reading abolitionist comments and from articles in the New York World, a Democratic paper widely read in the South. Southerners did not make distinctions among antislavery arguments; they misunderstood or ignored Helper's thesis that slavery and the white southern aristocracy which had created it were indeed responsible for the social and economic condition of the non-slaveholders. Southern newspapers felt keenly their responsibility as watchdogs of the public conscience. The Salisbury Watchman felt peculiarly responsible for Helper since he had begun the book while living in that city. Its editors called Helper a "contemptible shoat" who had allied with the enemies of his section and was fit only for fellowship with free Negroes.5 The Salisbury area was particularly sensitive to free Negroes, and the American Colonization Society was one of the more respected...