The Southern states laid down over 8,300 miles of track in the 1850s, a huge increase over its 1840s network. In fact, 75 percent of the total railroad mileage that the Confederacy would have at the start of the Civil War was newly constructed in the 1850s. Only the northwestern states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Iowa could match this new mileage or boast a similarly rapid growth rate. The two regions, the South and the Northwest, shared equally in the claims of vast progress, constructing almost all of the 22,000 mile built in the United States during the decade. Their beautiful depots, brilliant locomotives, and buoyant enterprises were plain to see.
The southern states spent more that $128 million in state aid on railroad building before 1861. Government bonds and stock purchases paid for over 57 percent of the South's total railroad investment. In the North and West, however, public investment was on the wane and accounted for much less, approximately 20 percent of the total. In Virginia the state and local governments spent over $31 million on railroad development, nearly 70 percent of the state's total railroad construction capital.
With a total of more than $252 million invested in its rail network, the South constructed not only one of the most expensive rail networks in the world but also an advanced vision for its economic and social future. The feverish railroad building in the 1850s coincided with the rapid transfer of slaves into the southwestern region, and slave prices skyrocked with the expansion. Some of the fastest-growing regions of the South were also the fastest-growing railroad regions. Missouri spent more than any other state on rail construction in the 1850s , and in the same decade its total slave population rose 30 percent. Ever within older slave exporting states, such as Virginia, one-third of its counties experienced raped slave expansion. Slavery, it appeared, could follow the railroads and might potentially thrive in the western territories. pp26
In a decade the South had vaulted itself into a comparable position with much of the North in its access to railroads and all that they signified. The states of Georgia, Tennessee, Maryland, Virginia, and South-Carolina, despite their difficult mountainous terrain, led the South in the percentage of fee residents living within fifteen miles (a day's journey on an oxcart) of a railroad depot. In these five states over 60 percent of residents lived in what we might call the railroad access zone. Although some northern states had higher percentages of resident living along the railroads, the South's overall per capita density of railroad structures, such a depots and junctions, for its free population was higher in many states than in the North. Mississippi and South Carolina, for example, had 3.1 and 4.8 depots, respectively, per 10,000 free residents, while Ohio had 1.7. By this measure, taking into consideration what was built on the ground, whites in the South could claim by 1861 an extraordinary level of railroad penetration, investment, and accessibility.
And although the South had relied for decades on its extensive river system for transportation and communication, railroads became the essential means to break the region's geographic barriers. The rail network created a "second nature" system, overlaid on existing rivers and natural features. The Vast and complex natural geography of the South only heightened the significance of the newly assembled web of iron rails, ties, and locomotives. Plank roads, turnpikes, macadamized roads, and even canals combined with railroads to create a deep transportation "system". Because steam-powered railroads in the 1850s required a depot every eight to twelve miles for watering and fueling, the technology created a high lever of access whether the populations it served were dispersed or concentrated. pp28 The Iron Way by William G. Thomas.
Yep, it would seem, the South was pretty serious about their Railroads. Also during this period, economically, diversification was happening. Shifting more away form Agriculture and into manufacturing and Trade.