Professor Paxson’s view of the situation for the same time seems somewhat in accord with the above:
“Had the secession movement of 1850 grown into war, none of these factors (i. e. railroads) would have been effective, and success for separation could hardly have been questioned. But in 1860 secession came too late. The Northwest was crossed and recrossed by an intricate entanglement of tracks.”[148]
Such a coincidence of view in such widely separated quarters is entitled to the highest respect; but it is not the view entertained by the writer of this work, to whom 1850 seems to have been too late to affect the situation favorably for secession, even if Calhoun had survived; for, judged by his career, it is exceedingly doubtful if he would have forced matters to a head. It would not have been in accord with his past. He was a great parliamentarian and an even greater debater; but all through his career his hand had been forced. He was never quite ready for the situation as it developed. It may have been greatly to his credit and consistent with his views; but he always consulted and pondered. His political methods so disclose him. McDuffie forced his hand with regard to Nullification. Clay forced his hand with regard to the tariff of 1833. For Rhett’s resolution of 1838, he was not ready, although that was the logical time and the logical course.
Those who feel, that for this great Republic a world task was and is reserved, may rejoice that no effort to secede was moved in 1838, but that does not effect the question of its possible success had it been attempted. Conditions in South Carolina were very much confused by Calhoun’s death. To supply his place in the United States Senate, Governor Seabrook first appointed F. H. Elmore and, upon his death in a month or two, Robert W. Barnwell, but upon the meeting of the General Assembly of South Carolina, six months later, that body elected R. Barnwell Rhett, who, for about a year and a quarter, strove for the accomplishment of the policy of secession and failing, resigned and gave way to W. F. DeSaussure, apparently in accord with the Georgia policy of pushing slavery to the Pacific, within the Union, and in the wake of Georgia, South Carolina moved until 1860, when her representatives again took the initiative with the full approval of the leaders of the Empire State of the South.[149]
For the carrying into effect, in 1850, of the Georgia scheme of pushing slavery to the Pacific there were in Missouri 592,004 whites, in Arkansas 163,189, and in Kentucky and Tennessee 1,518,247, to which the entire South remaining could add 3,422,923, and even if Arkansas had doubled her white population since 1840, the 450,000 whites with which Ohio’s population had been increased in the same time, put in that State one-tenth of the total white population of the Union, which, with that with which Indiana and Illinois disposed of in about the same space as Kentucky and Tennessee below, furnished fully two and a half times as many to draw upon. It should have been apparent, therefore, that it would take all that the South could do to hold Missouri, much less invade the further Northwest, even if Iowa, at that, time did not have very many more white inhabitants than Arkansas. There was a chance to have affected Ohio in 1840; but by 1855 the movement from the East and the railroads had made it the powerful advanced outpost of the Abolitionists. The ten years between 1838 and 1848 practically determined the course of events, making more and more for war between the slowly separating sections, and for the steadily increasing black population of slaves in the South.
If it is true that:
“Transportation, after all, has determined both the course and the period of Western development.”[150]
—the colonizing stream with which the great and populous State of Ohio, from 1840 fecundated the prairies of the West might have poured to a considerable extent into the valleys of the Blue Ridge, the Alleghany and the Cumberland mountains along the lines of the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad to meet and mingle with the stream which had been moving westward from South Carolina, since 1820.[151] In such a case the country might and in all probability would have developed at a slower pace; but it would have been as a more homogeneous people. It is idle to declare that there was an irrepressible conflict. That has always been the claim of those who are determined to precipitate such and are absolutely dead to—
“the influence of a free, social and commercial intercourse, in softening asperities, removing prejudices, extending knowledge and promoting human happiness.”