When we look closely at the South's railroad network, the South's experimentation …
When we look closely at the South's railroad network, the South's experimentation with and investment in railroads and other technologies, it turns out, was consistent with the rest of the nation. In both regions railroads grew fastest in the new western border regions. And in both railroad development had leapfrogged over the mountain regions, leaving big gaps in some areas, such as Pennsylvania, middle Georgia, and western Virginia.
Southern railroad mileage outpaced Northern mileage in the 1850s. Virginia and Tennessee …
Southern railroad mileage outpaced Northern mileage in the 1850s. Virginia and Tennessee built more miles of railroad in the decade than the six state region of New England. Florida went from 21 miles of rail to 402, a 1,814 % increase. Historians have downplayed the effects of southern railroad development in these years. Richard Brown in The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (Hill and Wang, 1976) argued that southern rails were built cheaply "to bring cotton to market" and nothing more. Other historians have followed this line of argument. Scott Reynolds Nelson in Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) also considered Southern railroads limited, one-dimensional, and ineffectual before the Civil War.
For every state there was a saturation point, a point of diminishing …
For every state there was a saturation point, a point of diminishing returns, in the development of railroad mileage and access to the network. Here too, the pattern of Southern development was impressive and consequential. Beyond a certain point each mile of railroad added to a network included an increasingly small percentage of the population.
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