Hinton Rowan Helper

Hinton Rowan Helper (1829–1909) was an American Southern writer and abolitionist best known for his 1857 book *The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It*, which argued that slavery economically harmed non-slaveholding whites and the South, influencing Northern antislavery sentiment and aiding Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election. After the Civil War, he promoted a visionary intercontinental railroad scheme in *The Three Americas Railway* (1881) while holding racist views favoring white supremacy. Poverty-stricken in Washington, D.C., he died by suicide in 1909.