Why were the southern states against improvement in transport and communication facilities
Answers
The period between the end of the War of 1812 and the Civil War was a time of swift improvement in transportation, rapid growth of factories, and significant development of new technology to increase agricultural production. Americans moved with relative ease into new regions and soon produced an agricultural surplus that changed them from subsistence farmers into commercial producers. Manufacturing became an increasingly important sector of the economy and set the stage for rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century. The economic and technological developments brought important changes to American society.
The growth and expansion of the United States in the decades before the Civil War were closely tied to improvements in the nation's transportation system. As farmers shifted from growing just enough to sustain their families ( subsistence agriculture) to producing crops for sale ( commercial agriculture), demand grew for cheaper and faster ways to get goods to market. Steamboats made river ports important commercial points for entire regions; canals had a similar impact in the Northeast and the Midwest, particularly near the Great Lakes. Railroads, which carried mostly passengers at first, became essential for moving both farm products and manufactured goods by 1860.
Inland waterways. As settlers moved into the trans‐Appalachian region, they found the river systems crucial for exporting products to distant markets. Many streams were navigable, and they led to larger rivers such as the Tennessee and Cumberland, which in turn fed into the Ohio, which merged with the Mississippi River and flowed past the port of New Orleans. With roads unable to handle bulk traffic, farmers in Tennessee, Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and the Ohio Valley could take their harvest to an eastern city such as New York by riding down river to New Orleans and then taking a ship around Florida. The Mississippi River was thus a major means of transporting agricultural products from the Old Northwest to the East Coast, and its free navigation was vital to American interests.