“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: