One reason for that lack of infrastructure was the Southern philosophy against internal improvements. Or should I say the Jeffersonian philosophy .... the independent yeoman ( not that he really ever came about). In the 1840s the population growth had been 20 per cent greater in the free states than the slave states. Three times as many people born in slave states had migrated to free states than vice versa. While seven out of eight immigrants had settled in the North, where jobs were available. The fact is the South had possessed a goodly 44 percent of railroad mileage in 1840, by 1850 that had dropped to 26 percent. Only 14 per cent of canal mileage ran through the South.. In the 1840s the South had 38 percent of the this country's manufacturing capacity. By the 1850s it was only 18 percent, a decline of 20 percent. Yet Mississippi remained the richest state in the Union, why, because the South had based it's economy on staple agriculture. The price of cotton had doubled in the 1850s from it's low of 5.5 cents a pound in the mid-1840s. Nice profit there. The bad part of that was their economy was based on chattel slaves and land. When slaves went, do did the wealth.