Railroads became commercially viable in the United States in the 1840s. The building of railroads greatly accelerated during the next decade as they provided the large-scale movement of goods necessary for the Industrial Revolution. By the start of the American Civil War, the American rail system was the largest in the world, with 30,000 miles of track. At the beginning of the war, there were 9,000 miles of track in the South as compared to the 21,000 miles in the North. The South had one-third of the freight cars, one-fifth of the locomotives, one-tenth of the telegraph stations, and one-twenty-fourth of locomotive production of the North. Judging the relative strength of the Northern and Southern rail systems by these numbers alone, however, can be misleading. The Confederacy’s white population of 5.5 million was only 22 percent of the Union’s 18.5 million. The South also compared favorably in the number of people living within fifteen miles, or a day’s journey, of a railroad
Richmond Examiner, “is the most mortifying feature of the war.” The editor of the
Lynchburg Virginian charged that prosperous farmers “were grinding the faces of the poor, and destroying the cause of their country.” A former army officer observed the speculation and fortunes that were being made in tobacco and wrote, “Lynchburg has gone mad running stark mad men, women & children … all tobacco tobacco from morning till night from night till morning.” Public meetings in Amherst, Buckingham, and Nelson counties denounced speculation and urged that the state legislature ban the growing of tobacco.
Virginia governor William Smith, in his inaugural address in January 1864, called for a legal ceiling on prices. Even Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who knew that inflation occurs “where the amount to be sold is too small for the number of consumers” and who urged a “radical reform of the currency,” joined in the chorus against speculators. He lamented that �