The Americans: The Democratic Experience

"From the raw material of this census of 1850, Hinton R. Helper, a North Carolinian shaped his Impending Crisis of the South (1857), probably the most influential antislavery work of nonfiction. Helper aimed to prove with statistics that the South as a whole, and especially the free white laborer, was being impoverished by slavery. He therefore attacked slaveholders as the enemies of Southern prosperity. Because Helper was a Southerner his book created a stir even greater than that of Uncle Tom's Cabin five years before. And the Republican Party ordered one hundred thousand copies to support Lincoln in the campaign of 1860." The Americans: The Democratic Experience by Daniel Boorstin

Knew about the effect Uncle Tom's Cabin had on the war but this history was new to me.