With Calhoun’s death, however, the party of action was without any recognized head. There was no South Carolinian, who could in 1850 take his place without question, and accordingly by 1852, the leadership of the South passed to Georgia from South Carolina, and to some extent it did so pass from and through the blind efforts of the Titan of South Carolina to mould all things to his will; for it was through Calhoun to a considerable extent, that Georgia had secured and waxed fat upon the great railroad up into Tennessee and to the West. As soon as the Western and Atlantic, from Atlanta, reached Chattanooga, meeting there in 1851, the road from Nashville, which ran some 35 miles from Chattanooga towards the West, another subscription was secured from Charleston,[137] for a road thence to that point on the Mississippi river opposite Arkansas, although, in this instance, with some glimmer of sense, it was conditioned upon the removal of the obstruction caused by the city of Augusta’s refusal to permit a bridge from the South Carolina shore across the Savannah river, by which alone connection with the railroad beyond could be made from South Carolina. But it was only, when, in despair of accomplishing this bridging of the Savannah river in 1852,[138] $500,000 was given to aid in pushing the South Carolina road on from Anderson, S. C., to Knoxville, Tennessee, that then, by purchase from Augusta, the right to bridge the Savannah river and connect with the Georgia Railroad was obtained; so that, in the end, some hundred or more miles of railroad had to be built beyond Columbia in South Carolina, merely to secure the connection with the Georgia road in 1853, for which Hayne’s great road had been stopped at Columbia in 1840. But by 1853, the futility of any hope of great benefit to South Carolina trade from the Georgia connection having possessed the minds of those directing affairs in South Carolina, $500,000 from Charleston and $1,000,000[139] from the State was granted to promote the second of the two routes with which Calhoun had obstructed the French Broad Railway from its inception. For five years, with repeated disasters, the construction of this second string to the bow of Calhoun, was energetically pushed, with the vain hope of securing for South Carolina, at that late day, what had been thrown away eighteen years earlier in blind obedience to a great man’s imperious dictation. And it was in asking for an additional $1,000,000 from the State and resisting the arguments concerning the resurrection of the French Broad route that Mr. Memminger, later Secretary of the Treasury of Confederate States, declared of Hayne’s railroad: “Although that great work was abandoned from causes beyond our control, yet it has been the mother of all our interior railroads and has not cost the State a single dollar of her money.”[140]