the writer, the very fact that the railroad contractors were offering to pay $120 per hand per year, payable monthly, and could not procure them, was sufficient to prove the fallacy of the assertion that the people were not able to live upon the present produce of their labor.[1]
It was admitted by the Union men that the South suffered somewhat under the tariff, but they thought that the evils thus suffered were light when compared with those brought on by the continued agitation in which the state was kept by the advocates of nullification. Foreign merchants, they said, would not send their goods to South Carolina at such a time; real estate was of no exchangeable value; peaceable citizens left for other states; and society in general was disrupted.[2]
- ↑ Courier, April 26, 1832.
- ↑ Niles' Register, December 1, 1832, speech by Joel R. Poinsett, October 5. The Courier published a letter from a commercial house "of high respectability" in New York, on December 8, showing the "bad commercial effects of the prevailing madness of South Carolina on Charleston." It was no longer considered safe, the writer said, to do business in Charleston; he canceled all orders for cotton and rice not already executed, and asserted that many houses were transferring orders from Charleston to Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans (Niles' Register, January 5, 1833).
On the other hand, a report of a meeting of Columbia merchants stated, in contradiction to rumors, that they did not find any
