“I concur in the opinion that we ought to take the highest ground on the subject of African Slavery, as it exists among us, and have from the first acted accordingly; but we must not break with or throw off those who are not prepared to come up to our standard, especially on the exterior limits of the slave holding States. I look back with pleasure to the progress which sound principles have made within the past ten years in respect to the relations between the two races. All, with a very few exceptions, defended it a short time since on the ground of a necessary evil to be got rid of as soon as possible. South Carolina was not much sounder 20 years ago than Kentucky now is and I cannot but think the course the Western Baptist and Methodists took in reference to the division of their churches has done much to expel C. Clay and correct public opinion in that quarter.”[129] Now if we go back twenty years from this expression of Calhoun’s, we will be within one year of the date of Hayne’s great speech in the United States Senate of 1827. In the twenty years, as well as can be arrived at, the whites had increased to the extent of about fifty per cent, the Negroes to the extent of about sixty per cent. Apparently he had expected too much. The increase rate of the whites had not been as great as that of the Negroes, no matter what were the causes, and with the increase, the estimate of the Institution increased. In the light of these facts it is scarcely surprising that in 1848, although railroads from Columbia to two points on the North Carolina line, were again under way, and an application for a charter for a third, along Hayne’s route to Spartanburg, pending, the City of Charleston was induced to give $500,000 to complete the railroad from Nashville to Chattanooga, in spite of the protest[130] of some of the citizens of Charleston, that it was not right to use corporate funds for work outside of the State, and even if it was, it was not expedient to do so, as long as Augusta refused, as she was then refusing, to permit a bridge to be built across the Savannah River at the terminus of the Hamburg road, by which alone the South Carolina Railroad could connect with the Georgia system. Upon Calhoun’s return from the trip to the West which had been urged upon him by the president of the South Carolina Railroad, Gadsden, he expressed himself to his son-in-law, Clemson, as satisfied with his reception in Memphis and elsewhere; but he could hardly have been pleased at the tone taken by Gadsden very shortly after with regard to the tariff.