Very rare first edition, fourth thousand of Hinton R. Helper’s classic and highly influential text from the run-up to the Civil War.

Hinton R. Helper, himself a southerner, believed the truest friends of the southern states were the anti-slavery abolitionists in the population, that slavery was both a moral and economic curse to the land. His meticulously argued text was found so threatening, its distribution was banned in the south immediately after its publication. It vied for popularity with Uncle Tom’s Cabin [Howes], the two forming a potent dual-pronged narrative and didactic pair. The Dictionary of American Biography indicates that its contemporary influence was actually greater than Uncle Tom’s Cabin and that it contributed significantly toward the outbreak of the Civil War.

The second edition [1859] and third edition [1860] appear more often at auction with the 1857 being rather rare, especially in this condition.

Chapters cover the comparison between free and slave states, immediate abolition, plain words to slaveholders, the author’s plan for the abolition of slavery, despotism of the slave oligarchy, mal-treatment of non-slaveholding whites, slave-driving democrats, slavery to be abolished without direct compensation to slaveholders, the American Colonization Society and emigration to Liberia, what the fathers of the Republic said about slavery [Washington, Jefferson, Madison, etc.,],the church’s testimony against slavery [Albert Barnes, Thomas Scott, Assembly of 1818, Kentucky Synod, John Jay, Francis Wayland, Abraham Booth, Baptists of Virginia in 1789, etc.,

Helper, Hinton Rowan [of North Carolina]. The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. New York. Burdick Brothers. 1857. 420pp.

Good + to very good, blind stamped cloth, spine dulled with minor nicks to head and tail of spine, textually very fine with only the slightest smudge to margins at a few points. Else bright, crisp, solid, and clean. An exceptional copy.