![]() As his career progressed after the war, Helper's racial attitudes grew increasingly intolerant. The author argues that Helper never wavered in his commitment to the South, though his book's devastating critique made him an outcast there, playing a crucial role in the election of Lincoln and influencing the outbreak of war. ![]() It sold 140,000 copies, perhaps rivaled only by Uncle Tom's Cabin in its impact. Helper's book paints a picture of a region dragged down by the institution of slavery and displays surprising concern for the fate of American slaves. Brown places Helper in a perspective that shows how the society in which he lived influenced his thinking, beginning with Helper's upbringing in North Carolina, his move to California at the height of the Californian gold rush, his developing hostility toward nonwhites within the United States, and his publication of The Impending Crisis of the South. In his intellectual and cultural biography of Helper - the first to appear in more than forty years - David Brown provides a fresh and nuanced portrait of this self-styled reformer, exploring anew Helper's motivation for writing his inflammatory book. Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909) gained notoriety in nineteenth-century America as the author of The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), an antislavery polemic that provoked national public controversy and increased sectional tensions. ![]() Download Southern Outcast Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle
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