Studies in American History 
257 
gether with the scarcity of towns tended to discourage the ex- 
tension of numerous railroad lines. The bulk of the freight 
business was cotton which was largely marketed between Sep- 
tember and January. Thus traffic was light during a large 
part of the year since there were few towns and cities to 
help the passenger business. Finally the railroad had to com- 
pete with the large number of navigable rivers in the South 
as well as with the numerous dirt roads and smaller number 
of turnpikes. Bulky products like cotton could be hauled by 
water much more cheaply than by rail, and since the steam- 
boat had the advantage of being several years ahead of the 
railroad in this territory, it developed a trade which it was 
difficult for a competitor to capture. The seasonal distribu- 
tion of labor on a plantation was also quite a help to the river 
traffic. The period when cotton was marketed was a slack 
period for labor, and cotton was often hauled by wagon to 
a river town or to a seaport as far as a hundred miles.® 
Not only had the North outstripped the South in the num- 
ber of miles of railways but these lines were far better organ- 
ized. Neither section had great systems as we have today, 
and a large number of the roads in the South were espe- 
cially local tho relatively long because cities were far apart. 
This was due largely to the fact that local lines had been 
promoted by ambitious cities like Charleston, Mobile, Nash- 
ville, and New Orleans to direct business to their markets and 
to supplement river traffic.^ The tendency is for such small 
systems to work in opposition to each other rather than to 
cooperate, and cooperation is absolutely essential in times of 
great stress. In some respects this situation has not been 
much improved up to the present for in many of the smaller 
railway centers and even in some of the largest cities the 
traveling public is inconvenienced by having to transfer from 
one railway station to another often located on opposite sides 
of the town. The lines meeting at Petersburg, Va., and in 
many other cities both North and South were not linked to- 
gether, and it seems that military authorities could not get 
them connected because of the opposition of the local transfer 
® Balthasar Henry Meyer in commenting- on the scarcity of railroads -in the South 
adds to the reasons given above the lack of “floating” labor and the absorption of able 
southern leaders in agriculture. 
® Ellen C. Semple, American History and its Geographical Conditions (New York, 
1903), 372 ff. 
