This is a photograph of a ship somewhere along the Mississippi before the Civil War. What you are seeing are bales of cotton being sent downriver to New Orleans. What’s the big deal? The South wanted a railroad to run through the South to cut the import cost of goods from the North. But a railroad is not economic if there is no backhaul. The profit for a Southern railroad was cargo both into and out of the South. But Southern planters wanted their cotton to go down the Mississippi on steamships. Then, in New Orleans, the cotton was put on slow-moving ships to work their own way up the coast to New York. Because the South would not use the railroads, it increased the cost of cotton in New York and made a railroad network through the South uneconomical.
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