I think we are crossing over into the land of "everybody knows" history. There was no "recession caused by the end of the California gold rush"; the Midwest was booming in the middle 1850s; so was the South. What brought things to a screeching halt was the completely unexpected financial default of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company - the largest mortgage broker/lender (the 19th century equivalent of a modern S&L). They announced one morning that "oh, by the way, we don't have any coin with which to redeem our notes, and all of you account holders are out of luck."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1857#Failure_of_Ohio_Life_Insurance_and_Trust_Company
I defer to DaveBrt and his heritage. My question was guilty of the same kind of "everybody knows" ignorance that I am so quick to criticize. Cotton shipments were far more important than I implied. There is an excellent PhD thesis on the subject:
Organizing the South: Railroads, Plantations, and War. Steven Gedson Collins. Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College. It is available on the web through LSU's Digital Commons site. Collins has a bibliography that is comprehensive:
John F. Stover, The Railroads of the South. 1865-1900: A Study in Finance and Control (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1955); Maury Klein, The Great Richmond Terminal: A Study in Businessmen and Business Strategy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1970); Allen W. Trelease, The North Carolina Railroad. 1849-1871. and the Modernization of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Kenneth W. Noe, Southwest Virginia's Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Scott Reynolds Nelson, "Public Fictions: The Southern Railway and the Construction of the South, 1848-1885," (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1994); George R. Taylor and Irene D. Neu, The American Railroad Network. 1861-1890 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956); U. B. Phillips. A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (New York, 1908); Robert C. Black, The Railroads of the Confederacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952); Franz Anton Ritter V on Gerstner, Early American Railroads: Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner's Die Innem Comm unicationen (1842-1843) ed. Frederick C. Gainst, trans. David J. Diephouse and John C. Decker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997);