In the value of their real estate, which could not be as well concealed as their personal property, the Northern States stood out richer, so that in her revenue, Georgia stood not higher than seventh, among the States of the Union; but, when revenue, expenditure and debt were considered together, no State in the Union was apparently in such an eminently sound and healthy condition; for, with her surplus, she could have extinguished her debt in five years.
Of course that which made the personal property returned for taxation by the residents of the Southern States, stand out so greatly in excess of that of the richer States of the North was the fact that the bulk of it was in slaves. But that fact reveals why the institution of slavery had such a hold upon the South, when not more than ten per cent of its inhabitants were slave holders. If the statesmen and politicians who supported and defended it demanded “a guarantee for property fairly acquired,” that property bore the bulk of the tax. That was not the condition of the North, and the vice of the more advanced civilization of that section was that, by every device which could be conceived, more and more the burden of taxation was thrown upon the poor.[144]
While not to the swollen condition that is apparent today, the North was, for thirty years and more prior to the War between the States, the land of the capitalist, the abode of American capital.
How far the determination of Northern capital to keep the South financially tributary to it was responsible for the rapid railroad development of the North and West, it will require much investigation to disclose. Whether, with a higher and nobler personnel among its leaders and greater regard for the toiling masses of its white population, it could have prepared the way so thoroughly for the conquest of the South is doubtful; but having been stricken a blow, even if a weak one, by the tariff of 1833, with a home valuation it had parried the blow and sustained itself on the increased import trade until it could enact the tariff of 1842; and when that was replaced by Calhoun’s tariff of 1846, marshalling its industrial dependents, it reached out with splendid energy, with one hand grasping the South and the other the West and bound them both to its girdle with bands of steel.
We have seen what was attempted in the South in the political commercial effort to stretch from the Atlantic to Arkansas, after the abandonment of the movement to Cincinnati in 1840. Now reverting to the West, we find that in Ohio, part of the Cincinnati, Sandusky and Cleveland Railroad was built in 1837; but it was not until 1848 that it was completed.[145]
In Kentucky, of the 97 miles projected, by 1839, there were in operation from Lexington to Frankfort, on one end, 28 miles; from Louisville to Portland on the other end, 3 miles.[146] But within nine years from the time at which the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad was stopped at Columbia, a railroad extended from Detroit across lower Michigan, and by 1851, Cleveland and Pittsburgh were connected by rail; while a second line from Toledo below Detroit, paralleled the road from Detroit to the lower end of Lake Michigan. By 1853, down from Lake Michigan to the junction of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, a line continued these two from Toledo and Detroit; while from Cleveland a network of roads reached Indianapolis, sending out from that city a line West to Terre Haute and one North to Lake Michigan. By 1857 this had become a perfect mesh of railroads, crossing and recrossing Ohio, Indiana and Illinois and reaching up into Wisconsin, while three constituent roads stretched across from the North Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River opposite Missouri.
The situation with regard to population was about as follows at this period: The three States mentioned above contained about 4,500,000 white inhabitants, which the population of Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa raised to about 6,000,000. Behind them were banked some 11,000,000 whites in New York, Pennsylvania and New England.
Meanwhile, to the Nashville Convention of 1850, South Carolina had sent a representative, who might have been considered a leaf from her great past, Langdon Cheves and against the independent secession of South Carolina, he strove successfully.
Mr. G. M. Pinckney, the most sympathetic of all Calhoun’s biographers, thus sums up the situation in 1850:
“If Mr. Calhoun had lived a little longer, it seems highly probable that history would have been different. He certainly would have forced matters to head at this session, and at this time, had the South taken definite action it seems probable that there was left genuine love enough for the Union on all sides to save it. To delay ten years was necessarily fatal. Every moment lost but added fuel to the kindling flame of sectional hatred. Mr. Calhoun’s death was a stunning blow. The South fell into confusion. Delay resulted and natural causes taking their course produced natural results.”[147]