The Tarnished Tarheel

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1851 phantasmagorical image of slave life in the South has long been regarded as one of the sparks that ignited the War Between the States.  However, a now almost forgotten anti-slavery polemic by the North Carolina abolitionist Hinton Rowan Helper did far more to inflame the nation at that time than did “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  In fact, Helper even poked fun at Stowe’s work in the preface of his book “The Impending Crisis of the South : How to Meet It” when he quipped that while “Yankee wives have written the most popular fictions of slavery, men should give the facts.”  In its day, Helper’s book was also effectively employed by the Free-Soil Republicans as a propaganda piece in Lincoln’s 1860  presidential campaign.

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