260 Indiana University 
Farther to the east the Louisville and Nashville intersected 
the line connecting Memphis, Corinth, and Chattanooga, while 
the latter city was connected with Atlanta and Richmond by 
other lines which will be mentioned later. 
Southern statesmen and economists were fully aware of the 
advantages, both commercial and political, of binding the West 
to the South and of making some southern city like Nashville, 
Memphis, or New Orleans the center for great continental sys- 
tems. The yearly economic conventions held in the South 
seriously considered these problems,^' and Calhoun and Jeffer- 
son Davis were intensely interested in them. In fact careful 
investigation may bring to light the fact that the enmity of 
southern leaders toward Stephen A. Douglas was not entirely 
due to his indifference to slave interests, but also to his in- 
fluence in securing governmental aid for railroads centering 
in Chicago, thus blocking the efforts of southern politicians 
to secure such aid for cities of their section. 
But in spite of the desires and efforts of southern statesmen 
the products of the West in constantly increasing amounts 
were deflected to eastern manufacturing centers especially 
during the decade 1850-1860. Thus when southerners boasted 
that “Cotton is king” believing that New England and Great 
Britain must have the great product of the plantations of the 
lower South, and also that the West was economically de- 
pendent on the South, they were thinking in terms of earlier 
experience when water transportation was dominant and so 
did not take into account the fact that rapid railroad com- 
munication and a hungry factory population had won for the 
East the support of the economic interests of the West.^® In 
drawing the foregoing conclusion, it must not be forgotten 
that the European market was quite important to the West 
and that the railroad was carrying products to this market 
by way of New York and other eastern ports whereas in 
earlier times it went down the Mississippi. This lessened the 
strength of another bond between West and South and 
strengthened the tie between East and West. 
No sooner had the war begun than the vast part that rail- 
roads and railroad centers would play in the strategy of the 
great game was evident. The events at Baltimore on April 19, 
Charles H. Ambler, “The Cleavage between Eastern and Western Virginia”, in the 
American Histwical Revieiu, XV, 4 (July, 1910), 771-773; Cotterill, op. cit. 
Semple, American History and its Geographic Conditions, 283, 284. 
