The book investigates the economic and social incompatibility of the institution of slavery with the long-term prosperity and stability of the Southern United States. Hinton Rowan Helper, a Southern-born critic of the slave system, utilizes extensive statistical data and comparative economic analysis to argue that slavery hindered industrial development and impoverished the non-slaveholding white population. He presents a framework that prioritizes free labor and capitalist modernization as the necessary path forward for the region's survival.

Historians identify this text as a significant primary source that fueled intense political polarization leading up to the American Civil War. Readers frequently note the polemical intensity of the prose and its historical importance in understanding the internal dissent within the antebellum South.