The Impending Crisis of the South

The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It is an 1857 book by the American abolitionist and white supremacist Hinton Rowan Helper, who declared himself a proud Southerner. It was written mostly in Baltimore, but, as he pointed out, it would have been illegal to publish it there. It was a strong attack on slavery as inefficient and a barrier to the economic advancement of the South in general and the non-slaveholding whites of the South in particular. The book was widely distributed by Horace Greeley, Francis P. Blair, and other antislavery leaders, which infuriated Southerners.

According to historian George M. Fredrickson, "it would not be difficult to make a case for The Impending Crisis as the most important single book, in terms of its political impact, that has ever been published in the United States. Even more perhaps than Uncle Tom's Cabin, it fed the fires of sectional controversy leading up to the Civil War; for it had the distinction of being the only book in American history to become the center of bitter and prolonged Congressional debate."

In the Northern United States, it became "the book against slavery." A book reviewer wrote, "Next to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Hinton Helper's critique of slavery and the Southern class system, The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), was arguably the most important antislavery book of the 1850s."