CHAPTER VI
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.
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.