“Why had not the work been given to Northern contractors, who had offered to execute it at a price 12½ to 15 per cent cheaper? The answer was comprehensive. The planters objected to imported free labor being brought into contact with their slaves. This was unfortunate, but the company could not antagonize an element which practically controlled the State; and in addition they had in many instances given the right of way. But further still, when the chief engineer obtained the floor, he challenged the correctness of the charge.”[58] Between 1830 and 1840, two Southern States, South Carolina and Maryland, leading the Union in railroad development, were endeavoring to effect railroad connection with the Northwest. A comparison of their conditions prior and subsequent to 1810, suggests one of the reasons why one succeeded and the other failed. From 1790 to 1810 the white population of Maryland increased from 208,649 to 235,117, or about 11.10 per cent. In the same twenty years the white population of South Carolina rose from 140,178 to 214,196 or about 51.20 per cent. It is quite true that in the same period the Negro population in South Carolina increased from 108,805 to 200,919 or 85.6 per cent, while that of Maryland rose only from 111,079 to 145,129 or only 30.07 per cent. Yet, when we bear in mind that the area of South Carolina was two and a half times as great as Maryland, had the efforts which had been made in 1816 and in 1822 to stop Negro importation from outside succeeded, the economic conditions of South Carolina between 1830 and 1840 might have been stronger. Indeed in 1822 Gen. Thomas Pinckney declared cheap Negro labor, even then, was steadily undermining the white artisan class in South Carolina.[59] He was patriot enough to so declare, although his own great brother was more responsible than any one else for the evil. In the three decades which followed 1810, and closed with the death of Hayne and the destruction of his five year effort to secure the Northwestern railroad connection, the colored population of Maryland, which did secure it, increased only 6,396, from 145,429 to 151,815, while its white population in the same period rose from 235,117 to 318,204, an increase of 83,087. In South Carolina in the same time the white population rising from 214,196 to 259,344 increased only 44,883, about one-half as much, while its Negro population rising from 200,314 to 335,344, or 134,395, about twenty times as much as Maryland. Viewed in the light of the unfair criticism directed against the South Carolina Railroad, was not the message of Governor Paul Hamilton in 1804, to the South Carolina Legislature, vindicated? “Viewed with reference to population it increases our weakness, not our strength, for it must be admitted that in proportion as you add to the number of slaves, you prevent the influx of those men who would increase the means of defense and security.”[60]