{"id":3171,"date":"2010-08-16T10:50:06","date_gmt":"2010-08-16T15:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/?p=3171"},"modified":"2010-08-17T08:21:33","modified_gmt":"2010-08-17T13:21:33","slug":"election-of-1860-hinton-rowan-helper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/2010\/08\/16\/election-of-1860-hinton-rowan-helper\/","title":{"rendered":"Election of 1860 &#8211; Hinton Rowan Helper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu\/node\/5870\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-3172\" title=\"Hinton Rowan Helper\" src=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/files\/2010\/08\/HD_helperHc.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"175\" height=\"210\" \/><\/a> Even though <a href=\"http:\/\/hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu\/node\/5870\" target=\"_blank\">Hinton Rowan Helper<\/a> published <em><a href=\"http:\/\/deila.dickinson.edu\/slaveryandabolition\/title\/0147.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It<\/a><\/em> in 1857, the book was still a factor in the <a href=\"http:\/\/hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu\/node\/9604\" target=\"_blank\">election of 1860<\/a>. \u00a0While Helper was born in North Carolina to a family that owned more than 200 slaves, he used the <em> Impending Crisis<\/em> to call for the South to end slavery. That institution, as Helper argued, limited the economic potential of white labor and prevented the South\u2019s economy from developing. In 1859 Helper published the <em><a href=\"http:\/\/digital.library.cornell.edu\/cgi\/t\/text\/text-idx?c=mayantislavery;idno=18866107\" target=\"_blank\">Compendium of the Impending Crisis of the South<\/a><\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/digital.library.cornell.edu\/cgi\/t\/text\/text-idx?c=mayantislavery;idno=18866107\" target=\"_blank\"> <\/a>&#8211; a cheaper edition of that reached thousands of readers. By the election of 1860 northern Democratic editors like <a href=\"http:\/\/hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu\/node\/17383\" target=\"_blank\">James Gordon Bennett<\/a>, who owned the <em>New York Herald<\/em>, used Helper\u2019s book as evidence that the Republican party was dangerous to the United States. On election day in November 1860 the <em>Herald<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu\/node\/33849\" target=\"_blank\">warned <\/a>voters that Republicans had \u201ccirculated hundreds of thousands of Helper\u2019s handbook of treason.\u201d Prominent Republicans had endorsed the book, which as the\u00a0<em>Herald<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu\/node\/33852\" target=\"_blank\">explained<\/a>, were \u201c[distributed] to abolitionize the Northern mind.\u201d If <a href=\"http:\/\/hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu\/node\/6095\" target=\"_blank\">Abraham Lincoln<\/a> became President, the <em>Herald<\/em> argued that  \u201cone phase of [his] administration [would be] to  engender or to  inaugurate, if possible, a civil war at the South between the non-slaveholding whites of that section (excited by abolition emissaries) and those who own slaves.\u201d One of the best secondary sources on Helper is David Brown\u2019s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=M6eu66g38RIC&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;dq=David%20Brown%20Southern%20Outcast%3A%20Hinton%20Rowan%20Helper%20and%20The%20Impending%20Crisis%20of%20the%20South&amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=true\" target=\"_blank\">Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper and The Impending Crisis of the South<\/a><\/em> (2006).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Even though Hinton Rowan Helper published The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It in 1857, the book was still a factor in the election of 1860. \u00a0While Helper was born in North Carolina to a family that owned more than 200 slaves, he used the Impending Crisis to call for the South [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,171,173],"tags":[4756],"class_list":["post-3171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antebellum-1840-1861","category-historic-periodicals","category-rare-books","tag-contests-elections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3171"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3180,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3171\/revisions\/3180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}