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Post Civil War

 

            After the American Revolution, the United States was far from being a perfect country. It would take drastic changes over the nineteenth century to improve the condition of the country. The four revolutions effected the Northeast, South, and West, socially, structurally, economically, and politically. .
             Technical innovations in transportation such as the railroad had different social and structural effects on the three major regions of the country. The greatest social effect the railroad had was its ability to make the continually expanding United States a little smaller for it's residents. The amount of time and effort it took to travel from one city to another was less and less as the nineteenth century progressed. However, this was truer for the northeastern and western states than for the South. In 1850 northeastern and western states such as Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana had 1042, 1409, 900, 590, and 226 miles of railroad track respectively. Because the northeastern and western states were structurally linked, people and ideas could move about more freely. A person who may have only been able to see a relative on rare occasions because it took weeks to travel there by foot or wagon may have been able to visit that person more often because trains could make the trip in days or even hours. The train allowed for more interactions between people of the Northeast and West. Ideas on politics, agriculture, religion, and medicine could move from one end of the country to the other in a shorter period of time. This was not necessarily the case for the South. States such as Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee had only 60, 112, 249, and 481 miles of track respectively. Not only was there a lack of developed track in the South, but very little of it connected with any of the Northeastern and Western lines. This underdeveloped infrastructure of the South led them to become even more socially and structurally isolated from the Northeast and West.


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