Along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe published in 1852, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It by Hinton Rowan Helper was one of the most important abolitionists works before the outbreak of the Civil War. Using statistics from the census of 1850, Helper argued that the South had fallen behind the Northern states economically, culturally, and intellectually. The reason for this decline was the South’s dependence on slavery. Slavery had allowed the formation of an elite, slave-owning planter class that dominated all aspects of Southern society. The wealth of the planter class was bound directly to the enslaved people they owned.