The Impending Crisis of the South: How to meet it.
HELPER, Hinton Rowan
London and New York: Sampson Low, Son, & Co., and A.B. Burdick.. 1860.
8vo. (195x120mm) pp. xvi, 17-438, 16 [publisher's advertisements]. Original publisher's green cloth, decorated in blind and lettered in gilt to spine. Corners bumped and slight creasing to head and foot of spine. Internally very good. The London issue is scarce and is noted as such in an auction record of 1914 which was when it last appeared. Tipped in on the front free endpaper is a label with the inscription "In Remembrance of Richard Cobden. This Book, out of his Library is presented to Mr Malleson with Mrs Cobden's kind regards". Loosely inserted is a letter from Richard Cobden dated 29 March (no year) and sent from 103 Westbourne Terrace which dates it to between 1848 and 1856. The name of the addressee has been crossed out. The letter is on four pages (each page measuring 179x112mm). It begins with an apology for not being able to join the recipient the following day as Cobden is suffering from a "very shocking cold in my head". Shortly before this letter, Cobden had become a father again as he gives news about "my wife & the little girl" although he indicates that she would have "preferred a boy, but since in even this age of "progress" & scientific discovery, we can have no voice in such matters, we must be content to take things as they come". A postscript addresses one of Cobden's principal political concerns, Anglo-French relations: "I am glad to see you have made the amends for your belligerent anti-Gallicanism by signing the City address of fraternization with the French people". The 29th March date and reference to the "little girl" makes it almost certain that the letter was written in 1853 and that the baby was Julia, born on 26th March. She is the most celebrated of Cobden's children, becoming a suffragette and, perhaps more importantly for the bibliophile, the wife of the unemployed barrister T.J.Sanderson who added her surname to his and followed her brilliant suggestion that he give up the law for book-binding.
Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909) was almost the only Southern voice to attack slavery before the Civil War. First published in 1857, The Impending Crisis of the South was a major influence in the Northern States and has been described as "next to Uncle Tom's Cabin…the most important anti-slavery book of the 1850s". Possession of the book was a criminal offence in the South (three men in Alabama were hanged for it) and Helper had to move to New York for his own protection. In 1861, Lincoln appointed him to be US Consul in Buenos Aries. However, Helper is problematic. His opposition to slavery was born, not of a desire to free black slaves, but of a belief that non-slave owning white people were economically disadvantaged and so would benefit from abolition. Indeed, after the Civil War, Helper emerged as an avowed white supremacist arguing for the deportation of all black people from America. In 1860, though, Helper would have been seen, not least by Cobden when reading this copy, as a firm abolitionist. When Civil War broke out in America, the views of the Cobdenite Free Traders were initially complicated by their opposition to the North's economic protectionism. But Cobden had always been an opponent of slavery and the slave trade, and was merciless in his skewering of the hypocrisies that accompanied (and still do accompany) most discussions of the subject. Once it became clear that slavery was the principal issue on which the War was to be fought, Cobden made his views clear in a letter to his abolitionist friend Charles Sumner: "our old anti-slavery feeling began to arouse itself, and it has been gathering strength ever since".
8vo. (195x120mm) pp. xvi, 17-438, 16 [publisher's advertisements]. Original publisher's green cloth, decorated in blind and lettered in gilt to spine. Corners bumped and slight creasing to head and foot of spine. Internally very good. The London issue is scarce and is noted as such in an auction record of 1914 which was when it last appeared. Tipped in on the front free endpaper is a label with the inscription "In Remembrance of Richard Cobden. This Book, out of his Library is presented to Mr Malleson with Mrs Cobden's kind regards". Loosely inserted is a letter from Richard Cobden dated 29 March (no year) and sent from 103 Westbourne Terrace which dates it to between 1848 and 1856. The name of the addressee has been crossed out. The letter is on four pages (each page measuring 179x112mm). It begins with an apology for not being able to join the recipient the following day as Cobden is suffering from a "very shocking cold in my head". Shortly before this letter, Cobden had become a father again as he gives news about "my wife & the little girl" although he indicates that she would have "preferred a boy, but since in even this age of "progress" & scientific discovery, we can have no voice in such matters, we must be content to take things as they come". A postscript addresses one of Cobden's principal political concerns, Anglo-French relations: "I am glad to see you have made the amends for your belligerent anti-Gallicanism by signing the City address of fraternization with the French people". The 29th March date and reference to the "little girl" makes it almost certain that the letter was written in 1853 and that the baby was Julia, born on 26th March. She is the most celebrated of Cobden's children, becoming a suffragette and, perhaps more importantly for the bibliophile, the wife of the unemployed barrister T.J.Sanderson who added her surname to his and followed her brilliant suggestion that he give up the law for book-binding.
Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909) was almost the only Southern voice to attack slavery before the Civil War. First published in 1857, The Impending Crisis of the South was a major influence in the Northern States and has been described as "next to Uncle Tom's Cabin…the most important anti-slavery book of the 1850s". Possession of the book was a criminal offence in the South (three men in Alabama were hanged for it) and Helper had to move to New York for his own protection. In 1861, Lincoln appointed him to be US Consul in Buenos Aries. However, Helper is problematic. His opposition to slavery was born, not of a desire to free black slaves, but of a belief that non-slave owning white people were economically disadvantaged and so would benefit from abolition. Indeed, after the Civil War, Helper emerged as an avowed white supremacist arguing for the deportation of all black people from America. In 1860, though, Helper would have been seen, not least by Cobden when reading this copy, as a firm abolitionist. When Civil War broke out in America, the views of the Cobdenite Free Traders were initially complicated by their opposition to the North's economic protectionism. But Cobden had always been an opponent of slavery and the slave trade, and was merciless in his skewering of the hypocrisies that accompanied (and still do accompany) most discussions of the subject. Once it became clear that slavery was the principal issue on which the War was to be fought, Cobden made his views clear in a letter to his abolitionist friend Charles Sumner: "our old anti-slavery feeling began to arouse itself, and it has been gathering strength ever since".