A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

The rise of upcountry cotton farming represented only one part of a fundamental reorientation of Southern trading patterns and a wholesale shift in regional economic power. As railroad and telegraph lines worked their way into the interior, merchants in rapidly developing market towns for the first time found it possible to trade directly with the North, bypassing the coastal cities that had traditionally monopolized Southern commerce. Atlanta, whose rise was stimulated by its selection as state capital and the opening of rail connections to the North, was the quintessential upcountry boom city, serving as a gathering point for cotton grown in Georgia’s Piedmont and a distribution center for Northern goods.