Terminus

ATLANTA: “whatever they were calling it now.”
This quote by John C. Calhoun, describes the place he would settle— “If only he were young!” “If he were young, he told a group in the summer of 1845, he would settle over there— in the North Georgia country. He swept a long finger down the map from Greenville and Seneca to the tiny speck marking the southern end of the rail line running northwestward from the old Cherokee country on into Tennessee. This was the place, he announced— Terminus, or Marthasville, or whatever they were calling it now. Give it a few years and you’d see a railroad running from that spot to the Ohio country and on to the Pacific coast beyond. Just wait, he said in substance, and you’d see Terminus the great railroad center of the Southeastern United States. Yes, that’s where he would go, if he were young again!” “His friends listened, with deference but skepticism. That was like old Calhoun for you! What gentleman could ever imagine living in that brawling mudhole, with its one railroad office, one sawmill, and two stores? They were changing its name again now- Marthasville it had been for the last year or two, and now it was rechristened again— what was the name, anyway? Oh, yes, Atlanta— Atlanta, Georgia, that was it.” (page 413.) XXIV America in Mid-Century Quotes from: JOHN C. CALHOUN American Portrait by Margaret L. COIT, Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston, 1950. (page 398.) “IT WAS IN THE FALL OF 1845 that John C. Calhoun set out to take a look at America. The trip was long overdue.” “Scattered over the South and New West by the half-century mark were 2,400,000 farmers, planters, and dairymen. But their number was topped by the 2,500,000 bankers, businessmen, and industrial workers, including financiers, iron mongers, whalebone-makers, flax-dressers, and ‘makers of philosophical instruments.’ [J. D. B. DeBow, Statistical View of the United States, 126 - 128.] Already the industrialists outvoted the farm, and the destiny of America was fixed for the next hundred years.” (page 399.) “Foreign visitors still came to look and wonder at democracy in action. As an ideal, they found it even more vehemently asserted than in Jackson’s time, but far less of a living reality. Those who had won its profits had been the first to betray its principles. ‘Love of liberty and country I found infinitely stronger among the laboring classes,’ declared a German visitor, amazed at the ‘contempt and hatred of American institutions’ he found among the self-appointed ‘upper classes.’ ” [ Francis Grund, Aristocracy in America, II, 70.] (page 416.) “In November, Calhoun arrived at his destination— the Memphis Convention. There, as president, he sounded the keynote with a plea for harmony, for unity above party feelings. A single purpose dominated his mind: the union of South and West as a counterbalance to Northern majority rule.” (page 417.) “For it was the regional and the economic interests of the country that Calhoun recognized as dominant now. In theory the Union was built on states; in practice it was now operating in terms of sections. No state could stand alone. Every right the individual state might possess, plus the united strength of the South itself, was not enough under the system of majority rule. To survive within the Union, the South must find allies with whom she could rule the Union.” “He was fighting to win. But the mental intricacies of the man who has been called the most ‘subtle’ of all American statesmen were beyond his own times and his own admirers. The nationalism of this new program horrified them. The prophet had gone astray. As Jefferson Davis viewed it, his reversal had something of the effect which would have been produced by Moses altering the Ten Commandments.” ⁵⁵ ⁵⁵ J. Hamilton Eckenrode, The Randolphs, 249, 251; Varina Howell Davis, Jefferson Davis, I, 207. (page 408.) “Calhoun’s interest in the West went back to 1835 when he had written a Georgia Congressman that ‘a judicious system of railroads would make Georgia and Carolina the Commercial centre of the Union.’ By ‘proper exertions,’ he had pointed out in a subsequent letter, ‘the two States could turn half of the commerce of the Union through their limits.’ With ‘one great road of uniform construction,’ an ‘immense intercourse’ would take place between the West ‘and Southern Atlantick ports.’ And at the outlet would stand not New York, but Charleston. ‘The advantages of New York are not to be compared with it.’ ” ³² “Thus, in a few enthusiastic sentences had Calhoun given birth to the program to which he would devote the energies of his middle years. Fundamentally his aim was unchanged— to preserve the integrity of the South within the Union. But his means were changing. Already he saw that if the Southern life was to be preserved, some surrender to the spirit of the age must be made. If money was the means of power, then the South must share in the ‘mighty flood of prosperity’ that the age of railroads would bring. Linked together in distance and commerce, the West and the South could withstand the encroachments of industrial power.” “How could this great aim be accomplished? Already a route was clear in Calhoun’s mind: the little railroad at Athens, Georgia, extended to the Tennessee River, where the paddleboats lashed the tawny water into foam; then on to NashviIIe and the steamboats down the Cumberland; across the Ohio and to St. Louis where the Mississippi and the Missouri met. From this main line must run several branches: one south to the Chattahoochee near Columbus, Georgia, ‘to meet the projected railroads from Montgomery and Pensacola’; another down the Tennessee to join the Decatur Railroad, around the Muscle Shoals and thence by the ‘projected’ railroad to Memphis; ‘another between the Tennessee and Nashville to Cincinnati,’ and finally one ‘from. . . the Ohio to Lake Michigan.’ ‘Projected,’ imaginary, but still ‘the most important and magnificent work in the world.’ ” ³³ “Georgia thought otherwise. Georgia financiers had evinced no interest in extending their railroads for the benefit of Charleston. Hence, the question was, Where should the route start— along the valley of the French Broad River, through North Carolina, as suggested by Robert Young Hayne, or by the little-known ‘Carolina Gap,’ along the old Cherokee Path in a beeline from Charleston to Nashville and on to St. Louis, as urged by Calhoun? ” “That Hayne’s route— serving, as it did, the entire Carolina up-country— was more advantageous to his own state, a single glance at the map will reveal. But Calhoun, bent on his grand design of ‘uniting . . . two sections,’ was thinking beyond the borders of Carolina. It was to the Far West that the South must look, not to Cincinnati or Lexington, whose natural trade outlets were not South Carolina, but Maryland and Virginia. Basically both Hayne and Calhoun sought the same end— intersectional unity through trade; but where Hayne indulged in roseate dreams that rail lines between Kentucky and Ohio would make for social ties and affection between the sections that might even allay the Northern repugnance to slavery, Calhoun’s plan dealt far more with practical economics. ActuaIIy his railroad scheme was only a part of his long-range program for a balanced and broadening Union, voiced first in his days as a Congressman and as Secretary of War, and to be climaxed with his Memphis Memorial of 1846.” “Politically, of course, Calhoun’s plan was inadvisable, because from a superficial standpoint it slighted his own state. But he was no man to be deterred by such considerations. Back in 1836 he had determined that the Carolina Gap was the direct highway to the West, far superior to Hayne’s alternative French Broad route. Well, he had decided, he would see for himself. Only if he proved to himself that he was right, could he demonstrate the truth to others. Maps were not enough. He would walk the first stage of his route, across the mountains from Fort Hill to the mouth of the North Carolina river, Tuskaseegee.” “To another man the scheme might have seemed fantastic. To the ‘active, energetic’ Calhoun nothing was impossible that he had set his mind upon. And in mid-September, 1836, accompanied by his friends Colonel James Gadsden and William Sloan, he had started for the mountains.” Isonomia.US LandGrab.US Eminent Domain - Condemnation: reduces Private Property to a priviledge, and creates Nomads.

ATLANTA:
“whatever they were calling it now.”

This quote by John C. Calhoun, describes the place he would settle— “If only he were young!”
“If he were young, he told a group in the summer of 1845, he would settle over there— in the North Georgia country. He swept a long finger down the map from Greenville and Seneca to the tiny speck marking the southern end of the rail line running northwestward from the old Cherokee country on into Tennessee. This was the place, he announced— Terminus, or Marthasville, or whatever they were calling it now. Give it a few years and you’d see a railroad running from that spot to the Ohio country and on to the Pacific coast beyond. Just wait, he said in substance, and you’d see Terminus the great railroad center of the Southeastern United States. Yes, that’s where he would go, if he were young again!”
“His friends listened, with deference but skepticism. That was like old Calhoun for you! What gentleman could ever imagine living in that brawling mudhole, with its one railroad office, one sawmill, and two stores? They were changing its name again now- Marthasville it had been for the last year or two, and now it was rechristened again— what was the name, anyway? Oh, yes, Atlanta—
Atlanta, Georgia, that was it.” (page 413.)

XXIV America in Mid-Century
Quotes from: JOHN C. CALHOUN American Portrait
by Margaret L. COIT, Houghton Mifflin Company.
Boston, 1950. (page 398.) “IT WAS IN THE FALL OF 1845 that John C. Calhoun set out to take a look at America. The trip was long overdue.”
“Scattered over the South and New West by the half-century mark were 2,400,000 farmers, planters, and dairymen. But their number was topped by the 2,500,000 bankers, businessmen, and industrial workers, including financiers, iron mongers, whalebone-makers, flax-dressers, and ‘makers of philosophical instruments.’
[J. D. B. DeBow, Statistical View of the United States, 126 - 128.]
Already the industrialists outvoted the farm, and the destiny of America was fixed for the next hundred years.”
(page 399.) “Foreign visitors still came to look and wonder at democracy in action. As an ideal, they found it even more vehemently asserted than in Jackson’s time, but far less of a living reality. Those who had won its profits had been the first to betray its principles. ‘Love of liberty and country I found infinitely stronger among the laboring classes,’ declared a German visitor, amazed at the ‘contempt and hatred of American institutions’ he found among the self-appointed ‘upper classes.’ ”
[ Francis Grund, Aristocracy in America, II, 70.]
(page 416.) “In November, Calhoun arrived at his destination— the Memphis Convention. There, as president, he sounded the keynote with a plea for harmony, for unity above party feelings. A single purpose dominated his mind: the union of South and West as a counterbalance to Northern majority rule.”
(page 417.) “For it was the regional and the economic interests of the country that Calhoun recognized as dominant now. In theory the Union was built on states; in practice it was now operating in terms of sections. No state could stand alone. Every right the individual state might possess, plus the united strength of the South itself, was not enough under the system of majority rule. To survive within the Union, the South must find allies with whom she could rule the Union.”
“He was fighting to win. But the mental intricacies of the man who has been called the most ‘subtle’ of all American statesmen were beyond his own times and his own admirers. The nationalism of this new program horrified them. The prophet had gone astray. As Jefferson Davis viewed it, his reversal had something of the effect which would have been produced by Moses altering the Ten Commandments.” ⁵⁵

⁵⁵ J. Hamilton Eckenrode, The Randolphs, 249, 251; Varina Howell Davis, Jefferson Davis, I, 207.

(page 408.) “Calhoun’s interest in the West went back to 1835 when he had written a Georgia Congressman that ‘a judicious system of railroads would make Georgia and Carolina the Commercial centre of the Union.’ By ‘proper exertions,’ he had pointed out in a subsequent letter, ‘the two States could turn half of the commerce of the Union through their limits.’ With ‘one great road of uniform construction,’ an ‘immense intercourse’ would take place between the West ‘and Southern Atlantick ports.’ And at the outlet would stand not New York, but Charleston. ‘The advantages of New York are not to be compared with it.’ ” ³²
“Thus, in a few enthusiastic sentences had Calhoun given birth to the program to which he would devote the energies of his middle years. Fundamentally his aim was unchanged— to preserve the integrity of the South within the Union. But his means were changing. Already he saw that if the Southern life was to be preserved, some surrender to the spirit of the age must be made. If money was the means of power, then the South must share in the ‘mighty flood of prosperity’ that the age of railroads would bring. Linked together in distance and commerce, the West and the South could withstand the encroachments of industrial power.”

“How could this great aim be accomplished? Already a route was clear in Calhoun’s mind: the little railroad at Athens, Georgia, extended to the Tennessee River, where the paddleboats lashed the tawny water into foam; then on to NashviIIe and the steamboats down the Cumberland; across the Ohio and to St. Louis where the Mississippi and the Missouri met. From this main line must run several branches: one south to the Chattahoochee near Columbus, Georgia, ‘to meet the projected railroads from Montgomery and Pensacola’; another down the Tennessee to join the Decatur Railroad, around the Muscle Shoals and thence by the ‘projected’ railroad to Memphis; ‘another between the Tennessee and Nashville to Cincinnati,’ and finally one ‘from. . . the Ohio to Lake Michigan.’ ‘Projected,’ imaginary, but still ‘the most important and magnificent work in the world.’ ” ³³

“Georgia thought otherwise. Georgia financiers had evinced no interest in extending their railroads for the benefit of Charleston. Hence, the question was, Where should the route start— along the valley of the French Broad River, through North Carolina, as suggested by Robert Young Hayne, or by the little-known ‘Carolina Gap,’ along the old Cherokee Path in a beeline from Charleston to Nashville and on to St. Louis, as urged by Calhoun? ”

“That Hayne’s route— serving, as it did, the entire Carolina up-country— was more advantageous to his own state, a single glance at the map will reveal. But Calhoun, bent on his grand design of ‘uniting . . . two sections,’ was thinking beyond the borders of Carolina. It was to the Far West that the South must look, not to Cincinnati or Lexington, whose natural trade outlets were not South Carolina, but Maryland and Virginia. Basically both Hayne and Calhoun sought the same end— intersectional unity through trade; but where Hayne indulged in roseate dreams that rail lines between Kentucky and Ohio would make for social ties and affection between the sections that might even allay the Northern repugnance to slavery, Calhoun’s plan dealt far more with practical economics. ActuaIIy his railroad scheme was only a part of his long-range program for a balanced and broadening Union, voiced first in his days as a Congressman and as Secretary of War, and to be climaxed with his Memphis Memorial of 1846.”

“Politically, of course, Calhoun’s plan was inadvisable, because from a superficial standpoint it slighted his own state. But he was no man to be deterred by such considerations. Back in 1836 he had determined that the Carolina Gap was the direct highway to the West, far superior to Hayne’s alternative French Broad route. Well, he had decided, he would see for himself. Only if he proved to himself that he was right, could he demonstrate the truth to others. Maps were not enough. He would walk the first stage of his route, across the mountains from Fort Hill to the mouth of the North Carolina river, Tuskaseegee.”

“To another man the scheme might have seemed fantastic. To the ‘active, energetic’ Calhoun nothing was impossible that he had set his mind upon. And in mid-September, 1836, accompanied by his friends Colonel James Gadsden and William Sloan, he had started for the mountains.”

Isonomia.US

LandGrab.US
Eminent Domain - Condemnation:
reduces Private Property to a priviledge,
and creates Nomads.