And in retrospect, slavery is focused on the most because it's the thing that made the winners look best.
I need that on a plaque somewhere.
@nenjin: Don't agree about the North being responsible for the lack of infrastructure, or at least not in the sense of war damage. The South lacked major infrastructure outside the coastal regions even before the war. That's one of the reasons it was so easy to divide and conquer it -- blockade the Mississippi, the Gulf Coast and the Mid-Atlantic Coast and you basically shut it down. Sherman's March and other efforts didn't help, but it's not like we had gleaming roads and the finest of bridges prior to the war. Most of the infrastructure damage was that done to farmsteads and light industry like grain mills. Which contributed to urbanization (see below).
There are a lot of reasons the South has long lagged behind in infrastructure development. One of the first being that a lot of rail infrastructure was built to service
industry. The North had more industry, hence more infrastructure development. Hell, one of the major issues Democrats and Whigs ran on in the South was using Federal money to build public rails and roads.
The second is
population density. The Northeast has always had a relatively high population density. The South has not. Which continues to be a problem hindering industrial development. Back in the day, you could build factories and mills in the South if you provided housing, because people would leave subsistence farming (especially if your farm was burnt to the ground and your livestock slaughtered) if offered a place to dwell. But there's few subsistence farmers left, and extremely few workplaces that are going to give a house/apartment to unskilled workers. And lower population density means less bang for your buck whether it's building factories, railways, ports, etc. Also means less chance of finding skilled workers for niche industries. And it also makes government assistance more costly and inefficient because of distance.
Even when you do have concentrated populations, the relative cheapness of land and the lack of large-scale established agriculture to hem in cities has led to decades of
urban sprawl, which creates an extra economic burden. Poor people in New York can ride the bus/subway for a couple bucks a day. A poor person here who say, lives in Durham and works in Raleigh, is going to need a car because the mass transit options around here are laughable, and they're going to burn more than a couple bucks in gas each day, on top of the cost of owning, financing and maintaining a car.
Urban sprawl also eats up a greater proportion of public funds for maintenance. The bigger you make your 'burbs, and the further out they go, you wind up needing almost exponentially more roads to connect them and service the traffic load.
But urban sprawl is really only an issue in the more urbanized southern states (Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Texas). You get sort of an opposite extreme elsewhere. When I visited Mississippi for work a couple years ago, I drove from Jackson to Vicksburg, about a 50 mile trip. I forgot to hit an ATM in Jackson, so I thought "No biggie, I'll just get off at the next exit and find a bank". There were TWO exits in that 50 miles. And both of them just kinda disappeared into the woods, and I'm pretty sure I heard "Dueling Banjos".
You get states like Mississippi where there are maybe only one or two "cities" and the rest of the population is sprinked lightly around the rest of the state, too thin to justify major infrastructure investment, but not so empty that you can just leave large chunks of it as unserviced wilderness, as in the Rocky Mountain states or Alaska. So you wind up with a lot of people living in small communities with the bare minimum of infrastructure and not a lot of hope of seeing an improvement. And then the whole
poverty->weak tax revenue->lack of infrastructure->poverty cycle takes hold.
Honestly, it's not dissimilar to the challenges faced by development NGOs in Africa.
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1390010 times)