"It is a fact well known to every intelligent Southerner that we are compelled to go to the North for almost every article of utility and adornment, from shoepegs and paintings to cotton-mills, steamships and statuary...owing to the absence of a proper system of business amongst us, the North becomes, in one way or another, the proprietor and dispenser of all our floating wealth, and that we are dependent on Northern capitalists...and that, instead of building up...our own States, cities, and towns, we have been spending our substance at the North, and are daily augmenting and strengthening the very power which now has us so completely under its thumb....It is not so much in its moral and religious aspects that we propose to discuss the question of slavery, as in its social and political character and influences."Hinton R. Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South, 1857Hinton R. Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857).The excerpt above was most likely a reaction to which of the following historical trends?

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