Further, Calhoun's influence explains the attitude of the non-slaveholding South towards secession. Of the six million white people in the South, two millions of them did not own slaves, and most of these were opposed to the slave traffic. Thousands of Southerners freed their slaves before the war, and moved into Ohio and Pennsylvania. Other thousands declined to participate in the traffic. A North Carolinian named Hinton Rowan Helper published in 1857 a very striking volume called "The Impending Crisis in the South, and How to Meet It." Dedicated to the non-slaveholding whites, and not on behalf of the blacks, its theme was slavery as a blight upon Southern white people and their institutions, and a political peril. Not Garrison himself ever made so vigorous and powerful an arraignment of slavery as did this Southerner. Helper pronounced slavery the enemy of invention, the foe of manufacturing plants, an obstacle to the development of the land, a barrier to the progress of the sons of white men. He held that slavery starves to death masters in the long run, while for the moment it seemingly enriches them. Slavery was like sin, it wore the garb of an angel of light; while secretly it sharpened a dagger, with which to stab to the heart the angel of civilization. Within two years this book sold over 150,000 copies, and set the whole South in a fever of unrest. Nevertheless, when the storm broke, the large non-slaveholding element in the South took up arms for the doctrine of State sovereignty. If they resented interference with slavery, it was because slavery was a Southern domestic institution. But this was only an incident; the one thing they wished was the vindication of the sovereignty of each State of the Union, and the right of its people to govern themselves without regard to other States who had the same right of self-government.