crude as it may seem, was almost the only available one among a people whose capital was in the main locked up in land and negroes. We are warranted, therefore, in concluding, from these early efforts to connect Charleston with the West, and from later railroad enterprises of other Southern cities that cannot be treated here, that the failure of the ante-bellum South to show a marked urban development was due not to the backwardness and inertia of its influential citizens, but rather to unfavorable economic conditions that could not be speedily overcome.
The student of Southern history will reach this conclusion by following other lines of investigation. It is a well-known fact that in the decade before the Civil War annual commercial conventions were held in the leading Southern cities. These conventions tended also to become political in character and furnished an opportunity for the exploitation of some rather extreme propositions, such, for example, as that looking to the reopening of the foreign slave-trade. They serve to illustrate the important part played by the ante-bellum towns in developing and intensifying the movement toward secession; but it is more to the point here to
