As in the West, subsidies produced railroads, albeit heavily indebted, indifferently constructed, and quite fragile; and railroads, as intended, expanded the range of cotton by freeing transportation from the rivers. The railroads fed the new deep-water ports necessary to accommodate large steamships, and they hauled the phosphate needed to grow cotton on the uplands. In the words of the Carroll County Times of Georgia in 1872, the railroads in spreading cotton had achieved “a considerable revolution” in the South. Cotton had always been a slave crop, but now it became a poor white man’s crop
...more
