Realizing what a great benefit the Erie Canal had been to New York, by
1834, Pennsylvania had connected Philadelphia and Pittsburgh by canals,
the greater part of which had been completed by 1832;[109] but with the
revision of the tariff of 1833, so injurious to her, as has been shown,
she bent every effort to supplement her waterways with railroads, and,
by 1835, there were some 200 miles of railroads in the State.[110] The
bulk of these it is true were coal roads, but by 1839, a railroad had
been completed from Philadelphia to Columbia (Pa.) 82 miles in length,
and there was in process of construction 41¾ miles additional in a
southwestwardly direction to Gettysburg.[111] Philadelphia also had a
railroad connection with New York to the North and Baltimore to the
South.
In New York by 1836, railroad communication between Albany and Utica
was open for traffic,[112] and work was being pushed on the Erie
railroad, starting from lower down on the Hudson towards Lake Erie.
In Maryland, the Baltimore and Ohio, begun about the same time as
the Charleston and Hamburg, but, not as soon used for steam power
operation, had by 1834 reached Harper’s Ferry, 82 miles.[113] There
it connected by a viaduct over the Potomac River, with the Winchester
Railroad, which by 1839, ran down the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia
for 30 miles. A branch to Washington, some 33 miles in length,
connected with the Richmond and Potomac Railroad[114] 70 miles in
length, opened for traffic in 1836.[115] From Richmond, south, ran
the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad, in process of construction, and
from Petersburg to Blakely, in North Carolina, complete, by 1839, to
Wilmington by 1840.[116]
By 1842 the New York Central reached Buffalo, while, at the same time,
Boston linked up with Albany.
The above vindicates the warning which Hayne issued to the people of
South Carolina in 1835, upon the call from Ohio for Southern railroad
connection, viz., that “New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore
were moving for what was offered Charleston.”[117] In 1838 he declared
to the people of Charleston:
“If after all we have said and done, we should falter in our course,
our sister cities will very soon establish these connections, by which
our doom will be sealed, and we shall deserve our fate.”[118]
To the people of South Carolina he said:
“It is impossible to shut our eyes to the fact that South Carolina
is destined to sink down from her high and palmy state of prosperity
... unless her sons shall avail themselves of the present favorable
opportunity.”[119]
Six months later, when striving to induce Calhoun to reconsider his
announced resignation from the Directorship of the L. C. & C. Co., he
admitted:
“Should your influence be thrown against us, our whole project in all
its parts may fail.”—
But he also warned him, with true prophetic power, that cooperation
with those he was deserting was: “the only plan, be assured, by which
ever your views can be affected.”[120] Set and hardened in his views,
Calhoun refused to be influenced by any argument, threw his influence
against the plan, and considered the stopping of Hayne’s road at
Columbia, one year after Hayne’s death, a personal triumph.[121] He
thus destroyed the plan of a connection with Cincinnati, to which from
the outset he had been opposed, although in veiled phrases,[122] on
account of his determination to secure the combination of political
and commercial benefits, which he was convinced must flow from a
railroad across Tennessee to Arkansas. It is true that at the time of
his resignation from the Carolina enterprise, 2000 men were at work
on the line from Atlanta to Chattanooga, and expectation keen that by
the fall of 1839, one hundred of the 138 miles would be finished; but
without a precise statement of account to indicate how the expenditure
of $2,602,457.26 had been incurred,[123] this work was suspended in
1841, without even the laying of the iron; which suspension stopped
as well the Georgia and the Georgia Central with 88 and 95 miles
respectively from Augusta and Savannah, with some sixty miles still
intervening between their most extended work and the southern point
in this link of their chain to the West. It also stopped work from
Nashville down towards the Northern point at Chattanooga. The
suspension occurred just two years after the death of Hayne, and but
one after the persistent resolve to stop work on the South Carolina
Road at Columbia and dissolve the relations between it and Tennessee
and North Carolina had been affected. To those who had effected this
disastrous result it, therefore, became absolutely essential to push
the Georgia road on to completion; which was effected by 1845.
[Illustration: U.S. 1840
WHITES
WHITES & BLACKS
NEGROES
RAILWAYS COMPLETED
PROJECTED]
“New subscriptions from Charleston and Augusta to the stock of the
company, it seems, were largely responsible for the hastening of the
road to completion”;[124] but what portion of the cost, $3,328,594, was
borne by the contributors from South Carolina does not clearly appear.
What is known, however, is that General Gadsden, who owed his elevation
to the presidency of the South Carolina Railroad to the powerful
assistance of Calhoun, contemporaneously with the completion of the
Georgia Railroad in 1845, wrote to Calhoun urging him to attend the
railroad convention to be held at Memphis the same year, declaring in
his letter:
“We are on the eve of realizing all our fond hopes and expectations of
1836 ... Now is the time to meet our Western friends at Memphis—to set
the ball in motion which will bring the valley to the South.”[125]
From 1836 to 1838, Calhoun was a director in the South Carolina
enterprise, Gadsden its most inveterate foe.[126]
F. H. Elmore was more definite in his endorsement of the road to
Memphis. He wrote Calhoun:
“A railroad communication based at Memphis, in a slave region and
extended direct to Charleston, passing through the most martial
portion of our people, and who have, as at present situated, the least
interest of all the South in slavery, would render their relations
with us at Charleston and Memphis so intimate and advantageous that
their interests and ours would be indissolubly united. They would be
to us a source of strength, power and safety, and render the South
invulnerable.”[127]
Of course it was not only possible, but not at all improbable, that
in pressing the original route along the line from Charleston to
Cincinnati, free labor might have injured the institution of slavery
in South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee, even more than
familiarity with it might have softened the feelings of the inhabitants
of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois towards slavery. But whichever way it
worked, it must have knit more firmly together the sections, by the
identity of thought, which would have made itself felt with closer
commercial intercourse. What Elmore hoped to sustain in 1845, Conner
saw beginning to crumble in 1849, for he writes Calhoun at that date:
“The cities all of them are becoming daily more and more unsound, and
all for the same reason. The infusion of Northerners and foreigners
amongst them. And their interest is being felt in the interior. The
draymen and laborers of New Orleans are all white and foreigners,
and they will not let a Negro drive a dray. He would be mobbed or
killed. The steamboats all employ white servants, and their captains
are mostly Northerners, and the issue of Free Labor against Slave
Labor will soon be made at the South. Our own people many of them are
desponding. They begin to think that the institution of Slavery is
doomed.”[128]
In the light of this letter in 1849, we may well ponder what might not
have been accomplished for peace had not what might have become a great
artery of trade between Cincinnati and Charleston been so recklessly
cut in 1840. It is hardly possible to doubt, that in the cutting,
commercial conditions were made absolutely subservient to political in
the cultivated growth concerning the Institution in which the disciples
were continually forging ahead of the masters and teachers.
In 1846 Calhoun had suggested, to J. H. Hammond, the propriety of
eulogizing Rev. Henry Bascomb for his vindication of the South on the
occasion of the division of the Methodists, and Hammond had replied at
some length with a declination. Calhoun’s rejoinder is of some interest:
“I concur in the opinion that we ought to take the highest ground on
the subject of African Slavery, as it exists among us, and have from
the first acted accordingly; but we must not break with or throw off
those who are not prepared to come up to our standard, especially on
the exterior limits of the slave holding States. I look back with
pleasure to the progress which sound principles have made within the
past ten years in respect to the relations between the two races. All,
with a very few exceptions, defended it a short time since on the
ground of a necessary evil to be got rid of as soon as possible. South
Carolina was not much sounder 20 years ago than Kentucky now is and I
cannot but think the course the Western Baptist and Methodists took in
reference to the division of their churches has done much to expel C.
Clay and correct public opinion in that quarter.”[129]
Now if we go back twenty years from this expression of Calhoun’s, we
will be within one year of the date of Hayne’s great speech in the
United States Senate of 1827. In the twenty years, as well as can be
arrived at, the whites had increased to the extent of about fifty per
cent, the Negroes to the extent of about sixty per cent. Apparently he
had expected too much. The increase rate of the whites had not been
as great as that of the Negroes, no matter what were the causes, and
with the increase, the estimate of the Institution increased. In the
light of these facts it is scarcely surprising that in 1848, although
railroads from Columbia to two points on the North Carolina line,
were again under way, and an application for a charter for a third,
along Hayne’s route to Spartanburg, pending, the City of Charleston
was induced to give $500,000 to complete the railroad from Nashville
to Chattanooga, in spite of the protest[130] of some of the citizens
of Charleston, that it was not right to use corporate funds for work
outside of the State, and even if it was, it was not expedient to do
so, as long as Augusta refused, as she was then refusing, to permit a
bridge to be built across the Savannah River at the terminus of the
Hamburg road, by which alone the South Carolina Railroad could connect
with the Georgia system.
Upon Calhoun’s return from the trip to the West which had been urged
upon him by the president of the South Carolina Railroad, Gadsden,
he expressed himself to his son-in-law, Clemson, as satisfied with
his reception in Memphis and elsewhere; but he could hardly have been
pleased at the tone taken by Gadsden very shortly after with regard to
the tariff.
Mention has previously been made with regard to what is herein
considered Calhoun’s failure in 1833 to cope successfully with Clay;
but the very slight gains then secured were wiped out in a new tariff
in 1842. In 1846, being free from the terrific responsibilities and
overshadowing dangers of Nullification, Calhoun secured legislation,
which seems in its workings to have balanced very satisfactorily the
imports and exports of the country, being apparently passed upon the
sound principles of Lowndes’s legislation. But the effort drew from
Gadsden’s swollen greatness, this insolent characterization of the main
creator of it:
“The passage of the tariff has pleased, but not satisfied us. Perhaps
it was the best terms which at this crisis could be got, and doing
away with the minimums and the _ad valorem_ duty is a point gained.
The valuation is ambiguous. Whether on the foreign or the home
we cannot understand. The bill may be construed either way. The
Pennsylvanians really seem to control you.”[131]
The conclusion must have been galling, and it was followed in 1847 with
another letter in which, with professions of devotion, it was intimated
that General Taylor’s candidacy for the Presidency would be a serious
impediment to the only kind of candidacy Calhoun could undertake.
Whether Mr. Gadsden received the early answer he requested on the
ground “that the concert of action may be certain to secure the triumph
of one, who will not court our influence to deceive,”[132] does not
appear; but the next year there was a strong movement, led by George
A. Trenholm of Charleston, to oust Gadsden from the presidency of the
railroad, and in the last two years of his life, Calhoun’s intimacy
with Gadsden is not evidenced by any correspondence. Rather it was upon
Hammond that he leant more and more and it was to him that he addressed
the last letter written to any one beyond the immediate circle of his
own hearthstone.
To Hammond the dying statesman turned with a confidence calculated to
inspire the latter’s belief in himself:
“Without flattery I know of no one better informed than you are on the
subject that now agitates the country, or more capable of deciding
what should be done, with the knowledge you would acquire of the state
of things here or of preparing whatever papers the Convention may
think proper to put out.... Never before has the South been placed in
so trying a situation, nor can it ever be placed in one more so. Her
all is at stake.”[133]
The convention was the Nashville Convention of 1850, which met a
few months after Calhoun’s death. Hammond and many others hoped to
have had Calhoun’s advice at it, and possibly the suggestion for a
new Constitution framed by Calhoun. They believed emancipation was
impending, and that with it the South would be reduced to the condition
of Hayti. Hammond had declared to Calhoun:
“We must act now and decisively.... If we do not act now, we
deliberately consign, not our posterity, but our children to the
flames. What a holocaust for us to place upon the alter of that union
for which the South and West have had such a bigoted and superstitious
veneration.”[134]
The brilliant follower had passed quite beyond his leader. The orator
who eight years later defiantly declared in the United States Senate,
“Cotton is King,” tersely states in this letter his political creed,
viz., that:
“The fundamental object of government is to secure the fruits of labor
and skill—that is to say property, and that its forms must be moulded
upon the social organizations. Life and liberty will then be secured,
for these are naturally under the guardianship of society and that
civilization which is the fruit of its progress. ‘Free government’ and
all that sort of thing has been, I think, a fatal delusion and humbug
from the time of Moses. Freedom does not spring from government, but
from the same soil which produces government itself, and all that we
want from that is a guarantee for property fairly acquired.”[135]
His conclusion was: “If leaders will only lead, neither they nor we
have anything to fear.”
Property is said to be proverbially timid, and the powers of finance
to dread war and its confusion; but Hammond’s conclusion was identical
with that if the greatest banker of Charleston, of that day, who in the
previous year had informed Calhoun after an extended journey, that the
South was “ready to act.”[136]
With Calhoun’s death, however, the party of action was without any
recognized head. There was no South Carolinian, who could in 1850 take
his place without question, and accordingly by 1852, the leadership of
the South passed to Georgia from South Carolina, and to some extent
it did so pass from and through the blind efforts of the Titan of
South Carolina to mould all things to his will; for it was through
Calhoun to a considerable extent, that Georgia had secured and waxed
fat upon the great railroad up into Tennessee and to the West. As
soon as the Western and Atlantic, from Atlanta, reached Chattanooga,
meeting there in 1851, the road from Nashville, which ran some 35
miles from Chattanooga towards the West, another subscription was
secured from Charleston,[137] for a road thence to that point on the
Mississippi river opposite Arkansas, although, in this instance,
with some glimmer of sense, it was conditioned upon the removal of
the obstruction caused by the city of Augusta’s refusal to permit a
bridge from the South Carolina shore across the Savannah river, by
which alone connection with the railroad beyond could be made from
South Carolina. But it was only, when, in despair of accomplishing
this bridging of the Savannah river in 1852,[138] $500,000 was given
to aid in pushing the South Carolina road on from Anderson, S. C., to
Knoxville, Tennessee, that then, by purchase from Augusta, the right
to bridge the Savannah river and connect with the Georgia Railroad was
obtained; so that, in the end, some hundred or more miles of railroad
had to be built beyond Columbia in South Carolina, merely to secure
the connection with the Georgia road in 1853, for which Hayne’s great
road had been stopped at Columbia in 1840. But by 1853, the futility
of any hope of great benefit to South Carolina trade from the Georgia
connection having possessed the minds of those directing affairs in
South Carolina, $500,000 from Charleston and $1,000,000[139] from the
State was granted to promote the second of the two routes with which
Calhoun had obstructed the French Broad Railway from its inception. For
five years, with repeated disasters, the construction of this second
string to the bow of Calhoun, was energetically pushed, with the vain
hope of securing for South Carolina, at that late day, what had been
thrown away eighteen years earlier in blind obedience to a great man’s
imperious dictation. And it was in asking for an additional $1,000,000
from the State and resisting the arguments concerning the resurrection
of the French Broad route that Mr. Memminger, later Secretary of the
Treasury of Confederate States, declared of Hayne’s railroad:
“Although that great work was abandoned from causes beyond our
control, yet it has been the mother of all our interior railroads and
has not cost the State a single dollar of her money.”[140]
If there was anything which could have been said to have further
accentuated the fatal folly of the abandonment of this great enterprise
in favor of the attempted junction with the Georgia roads in 1840 and a
route to Arkansas instead of Ohio, it was epitomized unconsciously by
the same speaker, Mr. Memminger, at the same time in 1858, in the same
speech, from which the above extract was taken:
“The two roads to the West, which have been assisted by Charleston
are the Memphis and the Nashville Railroads.... We hoped that they
would bring trade to the city, but it finds a cheaper outlet by the
Mississippi river.”[141]
One word more with regard to the cost of this road, which if it had
not been stopped at Columbia, might possibly have prevented the war
between the States. In the three years from 1836 to 1839 the old
Hamburg Railroad, run down and out of condition, had been purchased and
put into such order as to raise the receipts from it fifty per cent,
by 1839. Seventeen miles had been built on the fork to Columbia from
Branchville, with preparations so well forward that to the $1,858,772
spent on the 153 miles, $584,304 additional, it was estimated, would
enable the remaining 48 to be completed in a year to Columbia, with
about $1,300,000 additional to be spent to reach the North Carolina
line by 1846, when the total expenditure of the road from Charleston
to Augusta and from Branchville through Columbia to the North Carolina
line via Spartanburg, would have reached $3,743,076. At that point
$1,102,600 pledged by North Carolina and Tennessee would have been
obtained, which with the work done and prepared for was all lost by the
stoppage at Columbia. Yet nine years after Hayne’s death, 1848, the
report of the president of the South Carolina Railroad, James Gadsden,
shows $5,546,735.48[142] spent in securing only an additional 51 miles
of roadway.
FOOTNOTES:
[109] Trotter, Finances of the North American States p. 163.
[110] Hadley, Railroad Transportation, p. 33, _et seq._
[111] Trotter, Finances North American States, p. 165.
[112] Hadley, Railroad Transportation, p. 33, _et seq._
[113] Trotter, Finances North American States, p. 165.
[114] Ibid. p. 211.
[115] Ibid. p. 212.
[116] Ibid.
[117] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 388.
[118] Ibid. p. 459.
[119] Courier, March 13th, 1838.
[120] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 477.
[121] Jameson, Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 464.
[122] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 470.
[123] Phillips, Transportation in Eastern Cotton Belt, p. 316.
[124] Ibid. p. 242.
[125] Jameson, Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 1062.
[126] Courier, Dec. 18th, 1839.
[127] Jameson, Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 1060.
[128] Ibid. p. 1188.
[129] Ibid. p. 672.
[130] Pamphlet, C. L. S. Vol. VIII. Art. 7, p. 6.
[131] Jameson, Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 1085.
[132] Ibid. p. 1148.
[133] Ibid. p. 782.
[134] Ibid. p. 1210.
[135] Ibid. p. 1210.
[136] Ibid. p. 1188.
[137] Pamphlet, C. L. S. Vol. VII. Art. 7. p. 16.
[138] Ibid. p. 19.
[139] Pamphlet, Vol. II, C. L. S. Miller, p. 6.
[140] Pamphlet, Vol. XXI. Memminger, C. L. S. p. 9.
[141] Ibid. p. 23.
[142] Pamphlet, Vol. V. C. L. S. Art. 18, p. 18.