Those who feel, that for this great Republic a world task was and is reserved, may rejoice that no effort to secede was moved in 1838, but that does not effect the question of its possible success had it been attempted. Conditions in South Carolina were very much confused by Calhoun’s death. To supply his place in the United States Senate, Governor Seabrook first appointed F. H. Elmore and, upon his death in a month or two, Robert W. Barnwell, but upon the meeting of the General Assembly of South Carolina, six months later, that body elected R. Barnwell Rhett, who, for about a year and a quarter, strove for the accomplishment of the policy of secession and failing, resigned and gave way to W. F. DeSaussure, apparently in accord with the Georgia policy of pushing slavery to the Pacific, within the Union, and in the wake of Georgia, South Carolina moved until 1860, when her representatives again took the initiative with the full approval of the leaders of the Empire State of the South.[149] For the carrying into effect, in 1850, of the Georgia scheme of pushing slavery to the Pacific there were in Missouri 592,004 whites, in Arkansas 163,189, and in Kentucky and Tennessee 1,518,247, to which the entire South remaining could add 3,422,923, and even if Arkansas had doubled her white population since 1840, the 450,000 whites with which Ohio’s population had been increased in the same time, put in that State one-tenth of the total white population of the Union, which, with that with which Indiana and Illinois disposed of in about the same space as Kentucky and Tennessee below, furnished fully two and a half times as many to draw upon. It should have been apparent, therefore, that it would take all that the South could do to hold Missouri, much less invade the further Northwest, even if Iowa, at that, time did not have very many more white inhabitants than Arkansas. There was a chance to have affected Ohio in 1840; but by 1855 the movement from the East and the railroads had made it the powerful advanced outpost of the Abolitionists. The ten years between 1838 and 1848 practically determined the course of events, making more and more for war between the slowly separating sections, and for the steadily increasing black population of slaves in the South. If it is true that: “Transportation, after all, has determined both the course and the period of Western development.”[150]