This fact does not appear on the surface; indeed it becomes apparent only to the careful student of sources of which the Southern historian has not yet made full use. These sources are the local newspapers and the fairly numerous magazines--particularly the financial and commercial De Bow’s _Review_ published at New Orleans. The Southern historian, like his brothers of the North and East until recently, has laid disproportionate stress upon the colonial history of his section or else upon its political history, and thus has failed to bring out the interesting struggle between the old and the new economic orders of things that took place in the South down to the time of the Civil War. Hence it is that in the present volume we find in many chapters the gap between the surrender at Yorktown and the firing upon Sumter covered by only a few paragraphs. Some of the towns had a most interesting history during these years,--as we may judge from Dr. Petrie’s chapter on Montgomery,--but it has not yet been written. When it is, we shall get abundant evidence of a heroic if, on the whole, unsuccessful struggle for urban development. Charleston in particular made a most gallant fight to recover the importance as a port which she had lost through the rivalry of Baltimore and New Orleans. Her leading citizens, some of whom labored for the cause of public education and of literary and scientific development with an earnestness that should not be forgotten in spite of the paucity of results, saw clearly that something must be done to enhance the city’s wealth and growth if the State herself, or, indeed, the section, was to maintain an important place in the union of rapidly developing commonwealths. They saw, furthermore, what this something must be. The cotton of the South and the agricultural and other products of the great West must be drawn away from Northern ports to ships lying in the harbor of Charleston. The distance to be traversed and the mountain barriers made all thought of a canal similar to the one that had brought fortune to New York out of the question, and the hopes of enterprising citizens centered on the newly invented railway. As early as 1831 the first steam locomotive used successfully on rails in this country was put on its tracks at Charleston by the South Carolina Railroad Company, and, as Mr. Snowden tells us in his chapter, the longest railway in the world was at one time contained within the borders of what is not familiarly known as a progressive State. It was but a short time before ambitious plans were set on foot to connect Charleston with Cincinnati and the West.