Even if the census data is presumed correct for the purposes at hand, historians must take care not to use it in erroneous or misleading ways. Consider, for example, the case of North Carolinian Hinton Helper. In his study The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), Helper used aggregated data from the 1850 census to show that the North surpassed the South in agricultural production, wealth, commerce, literacy, and virtually every other measure available. Helper used these figures to persuade Southerners that slavery was the ruin of the South. Only by voluntarily emancipating their slaves and instituting a free labor system, he contended, could Southerners reverse their declining status vis-a`-vis the North. Helper's publication generated a vitriolic debate which deepened sectional animosity. His most prescient critics, however, pointed out that the amateur statistician had not adjusted his figures to account for differences in the total population of the two regions. When Helper's figures were recomputed on a per capita basis, the South actually surpassed the North in many of these same categories!