In the very year in which Calhoun was advising the people:—
“if all other effectual resistance should fail, it would be their duty to take measures to concentrate the voice of the South, which should plainly announce to their Northern brethren that either the Bill (Force) or the political connection must yield:—”[94]
in his report on the completion of the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad in 1833, Elias Horry alludes to the “Western and Atlantic Railroad Convention” held in Asheville, North Carolina, September 3rd, 1832, for a “Railroad up the French Broad River,” at which were pointed out the many and great advantages that would be produced ... not less in a political than in a commercial point of view, so indissolubly connecting the Southern and Western interests, strengthening the bonds of union and thereby perpetuating all the blessings of our valuable institutions.[95]
But with the death of Horry in 1834, the project seems to have slumbered until, in October, 1835, a well thought out statement, emanating from a group of citizens of Ohio, one of whom was General Harrison, brought the matter up again,[96] and on July 4th, 1836, delegates from Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, at Knoxville, launched the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad to connect the West and South. Hayne became President of the company and Calhoun a Director. From the outset, however, Calhoun was a continually disturbing element. He was never able to shake off the view that railroads, if not adjuncts to water courses, would be failures. It was a natural view in his day, if it was an ignorant one, and one honestly held; but it was injurious to the enterprise.
His known distrust of the route through North Carolina chilled the enthusiasm of the people of North Carolina.[97] He deserted the South Carolina Company at the most critical time, when the prospects of the rival enterprise through Georgia seemed fairest. His powerful obstructive force arrested the Carolina road at Columbia, by a declaration pertinaciously sought to be made in advance that it should not go further[98] and by so doing diverted to the “rival system” in Georgia, funds in South Carolina which most materially aided in preserving the Georgia venture from utter failure, when it had collapsed, with unaccounted funds, to the extent of $2,602,457,26;[99] while his sadly triumphant designation of Hayne’s road as an ended “humbug,” one year after Hayne’s death, when it was at last determined that it should not go beyond Columbia, has been accepted at its face value by those more inclined to believe it, than to take the trouble to examine the facts.
Yet Calhoun, himself, although he survived Hayne eleven years, died before the “rival system” was assured; and nine years after his own death, when, as yet, no great benefits to South Carolina trade had accrued from the construction of the Georgia road, a vigorous attempt was made to resurrect the French Broad route, with a declaration that only the gap from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to Paint Rock, on the Tennessee-North Carolina line, remained to be closed, C. G. Memminger, in opposing the resurrection of the L. C. & C. R. R., made the statement concerning it, that “it had been the mother of all our interior railroads, and had not cost the State a dollar of her money.”[100]
If such a statement could be made in 1858 by one who, while he had materially assisted it up to 1839, had then opposed it, it may be well to consider how the scheme was regarded in Europe, at the date at which Mr. Memminger led the movement for the stopping it at Columbia, evidently so as to concentrate all effort on the route through Georgia.
In the work of Alexander Trotter, of London, England, published in 1839, appears three allusions to Hayne’s Western road. One in the general discussion of conditions in the United States at large; one in the chapter treating of the State of South Carolina; and one in that discussing Ohio. The first is as follows:
“Besides the outlet for their produce which the Ohio and Mississippi afford to cultivators, the State of Pennsylvania has established a communication on the former river by a series of canals and railroads, and has opened to them the market of the Atlantic cities. The State of New York, by means of the Erie Canal, has procured for them a similar advantage at a port more to the North, while a still more gigantic undertaking than either of these works is now in progress to connect the city of Cincinnati with Charleston, which will bring the products of these distant lands to the markets of the Southern Atlantic States.”[101]
In that portion of his work which treats of South Carolina, Mr. Trotter enters more particularly into the plan of the connection: