“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.