The promoters of the road were not discouraged, however, by Governor McDuffie’s pessimism. They organized their bank, purchased the road which already connected Charleston and Augusta, known as “The Charleston and Hamburg,” began a branch to connect the State capital, Columbia, with this road, and commenced to realize on the popular subscriptions to the stock. But they had not counted on the panic of 1837 and the continuing financial depression, in the midst of which their bank was forced to suspend, nor had they expected to lose by death their efficient president, Robert Y. Hayne, Webster’s famous opponent. The great interstate scheme soon shrank to state proportions; and by 1842 people were congratulating themselves that they had at least a gratifying extent of railway mileage within the borders of South Carolina itself. This seems a small return for a large outlay of energy, yet after a careful study of the complicated history of the road it can scarcely be said that General Hayne and his associates made as bad a compromise with their magnificent dreams as the majority of our more recent railway promoters have done. Certainly the way in which the public responded to their efforts spoke well for the energy and the civic intelligence of a people of planters. The effects of the panic and of Western indifference could hardly have been foreseen; the banking attachment was natural enough in an era of wild banking to which the lessons of experience were wanting; and, finally, the method of securing capital by instalments of subscription, crude as it may seem, was almost the only available one among a people whose capital was in the main locked up in land and negroes. We are warranted, therefore, in concluding, from these early efforts to connect Charleston with the West, and from later railroad enterprises of other Southern cities that cannot be treated here, that the failure of the _ante-bellum_ South to show a marked urban development was due not to the backwardness and inertia of its influential citizens, but rather to unfavorable economic conditions that could not be speedily overcome.