F. H. Elmore was more definite in his endorsement of the road to Memphis. He wrote Calhoun: “A railroad communication based at Memphis, in a slave region and extended direct to Charleston, passing through the most martial portion of our people, and who have, as at present situated, the least interest of all the South in slavery, would render their relations with us at Charleston and Memphis so intimate and advantageous that their interests and ours would be indissolubly united. They would be to us a source of strength, power and safety, and render the South invulnerable.”[127] Of course it was not only possible, but not at all improbable, that in pressing the original route along the line from Charleston to Cincinnati, free labor might have injured the institution of slavery in South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee, even more than familiarity with it might have softened the feelings of the inhabitants of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois towards slavery. But whichever way it worked, it must have knit more firmly together the sections, by the identity of thought, which would have made itself felt with closer commercial intercourse. What Elmore hoped to sustain in 1845, Conner saw beginning to crumble in 1849, for he writes Calhoun at that date: “The cities all of them are becoming daily more and more unsound, and all for the same reason. The infusion of Northerners and foreigners amongst them. And their interest is being felt in the interior. The draymen and laborers of New Orleans are all white and foreigners, and they will not let a Negro drive a dray. He would be mobbed or killed. The steamboats all employ white servants, and their captains are mostly Northerners, and the issue of Free Labor against Slave Labor will soon be made at the South. Our own people many of them are desponding. They begin to think that the institution of Slavery is doomed.”[128] In the light of this letter in 1849, we may well ponder what might not have been accomplished for peace had not what might have become a great artery of trade between Cincinnati and Charleston been so recklessly cut in 1840. It is hardly possible to doubt, that in the cutting, commercial conditions were made absolutely subservient to political in the cultivated growth concerning the Institution in which the disciples were continually forging ahead of the masters and teachers. In 1846 Calhoun had suggested, to J. H. Hammond, the propriety of eulogizing Rev. Henry Bascomb for his vindication of the South on the occasion of the division of the Methodists, and Hammond had replied at some length with a declination. Calhoun’s rejoinder is of some interest: