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[209] Charleston, and Savannah, where the track leaves the Atlantic basin to connect with that of the Mexican Gulf at Macon. Along the intermediate line between the mountains and the sea, we find the names of Manassas, Gordonsville, Burkesville, Greensborough, Columbia, Augusta, and finally Atlanta, which is its terminus. At Atlanta, the central point between the three groups, we also find, in another direction, the principal artery of the Gulf basin, together with an important branch which, availing itself of a gap in the Alleghanies, runs direct from Chattanooga to connect the group of the Ohio basin with the other two groups. The States bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, more recently settled and less populated than those of the East, are naturally ill supplied with railways. Yet two lines contiguous to the Mississippi, and running parallel with its course, connect the great ports of Mobile and New Orleans with the Middle States; whilst another, having one terminus at Vicksburg on the Mississippi, and built during the war, for the purpose of opening easy communications with Texas, extends as far as Atlanta. In the Ohio basin, the western part, already exclusively favored by water-courses, is alone in possession of railways. One line, single at first, which runs southward from Cincinnati and Louisville, forks successively at Bowling Green and Nashville, and further on at Hardinsville, and spreading out like an immense fan south of Cumberland, extends its numerous arms from the foot of the high cliffs which terminate the Alleghany range, at the very point where the navigation of the Tennessee commences—so appropriately called Lookout Mountain—as far as the banks of the Mississippi, to Columbus at the west, and to Memphis at the south. A transversal line connecting the latter city with Chattanooga, and uniting the extremities of five branches of this fan, was not of the same importance for military operations as it had been before in a commercial point of view; being exposed in flank, it could easily be cut and rendered equally useless to both belligerents. More to eastward, the vast region of country comprised between the Ohio and the Alleghanies, already without navigable rivers, is also deprived of railways; it is the same with the section of country extending from the railway running
Philadelphia, Jos. H. Coates and co., 1876.
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