But it was when taking up for consideration the condition of the Northern States after 1833 that the absolute ineffectiveness of the revision of the tariff, at that time, to cure the wrongs of trade was most glaringly exhibited. Even with a declining export, Massachusetts, in the six years brought in goods to the amount of the value she had imported in the previous twelve, and with those of Maryland, exceeded those of the Gulf ports. The trade of Pennsylvania was indeed crippled. But while the exports of New York fell behind those of Louisiana, in the value of import goods in the six years, the importation of the previous twelve were exceeded. The revision of the tariff in 1833 had not only not got at the root of the trouble, it had apparently aggravated it; for it had while injuring Pennsylvania, stimulated Massachusetts, New York and Maryland to make on importation what they had lost on manufactures; while, in place of the money so expended remaining in circulation in the United States, a great volume of it must have gone abroad. The panic of 1837, which came in the spring, and which followed the greatest of New York’s importations, a figure not attained again in fourteen years of increasing population, had its origin in New York. It did much to cramp the Southern railroad movement of that date; but neither it nor the panic of 1839 did as much to ham-string Southern effort as the divided councils and unfortunate rivalries of South Carolina and Georgia and Hayne and Calhoun. It might have been unreasonable to have expected Georgians to have assisted a road to the West to pass through North Carolina from Charleston, to the neglect of their own State, and they had every right to start their “rival system,” as an apologist styles it; but for South Carolinians to abandon what was under way in their own State backed by North Carolina and Tennessee, however weakly, and to pour their money into Georgia, when at the very threshold there was refusal to permit the bridging of the Savannah river for them, was the very extremity of folly, no matter by whom advocated, and for writers of history to characterize as a bubble and fiasco the great scheme launched by the Knoxville Convention in 1836, is simply to indicate a lack of understanding of all that was involved in that undertaking, and to resolutely shut eyes to the nature of the obstructions which blocked its progress at the time it was most essential to push it most determinedly.