What percentage of Railroads were in the North at the start of the American Civil War?

Question

I am currently taking a Civil War class and had a midterm and the true/false question statement was "The North had 2/3 of the countries railroads at the onset on the Civil War."

I put false, because I believed they had more. Now while I believe my Professor is going to mark it wrong, I think I can show him why I thought that through websites.

I found: "http://www.civilwar.org/cwe/AREA002.asp?9002003000000"

That says the North had MORE than 2/3.

MY QUESTION IS:

Can you guys help me find more on-line sources that say there may have been more than 2/3 rails in the North.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Sport..that was an esay question and you blew it. Check out the 9 part series "The Civil War" by Ken Burns. If anything...watch it and you'll learn more than you even thought you knew. The North was strictly industry. The south agraian. It was unbalanced from the very start.

As Rhett Butler said referring to the South fighting the North. "They have the factories and the cannons and the railroads. All we have is cotton and arrogance".

Answer 2

Here it is.......bingo! You are right. calculate the difference yourself.

Railroads were newfangled technology at the beginning of the Civil War and they had not been used much in military applications. American forces had used trains to transport troops to the front during the Mexican War about fifteen years earlier. The railroads had grown substantially since then and at the beginning of the Civil War the Northern territory had about 21,000 miles (34,000 km) of track while the Southern States had about 9,000 miles (14,484 km) of track.

If you calculate the total track in the U.S. at 66.5% the north had a bit over 1,000 miles more than 2/3 of the track, or roughly a bit more than 68%. Actually I recall reading statistics for this that were calculated by the U.S. dept of the Interior that put the percent the North had at the start at just over 70%. Unless the question stated "about" or "approximately" 2/3. You are vindicated.

And I agree with bigjohn B. True and False questions suck. They tend to be too "gray" at times.

I love a challenge. Here is a site that breaks it down for you in graphical terms. You'll notice that 20,000 mi. of track are registered to the northern states, while only 9,000 mi are registered to the south. But if you look at the "neutral" states, (Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, and MARYLAND) which were for the most part "controlled" by the north, You see that the north controlled another 1,700 mi. of track. And even these figures are not completely accurate, due to the fact that at the outset of the war there was no connecting railroad lines between Florida and the other southern states. The track in Florida was next to useless for moving men and material to the fronts. Therefore anyone with any practical military knowledge would tell you that it effectively made Florida a non-entity as far as railroads go. See: http://civilwarhome.com/statesdivison.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_the_American_Civil_War

Prior to the war, the network of railroads in peninsular Florida had no connection to the rest of the South. The Confederate government built a connection between the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad at Dupont, Georgia, and the Pensacola and Georgia Railroad at Live Oak, Florida, but it came too late to have much of an impact.

Answer 3

I think the percentage is not far off. Such a question is too narrow when the figures are so close. The RRs were a crucial thing in winning the war for the Union. While Union forces had the disadvantage of having to be on the offensive all the time, usually a very bad thing, the RRs gave the advantage of rapid movement of troops and materiel.

I never liked true-false questions. The only time I felt they were useful was when a student could write a short defense of their answer. Otherwise it can just be a crapshoot, right half of the time even if you do not know the answer. Not appropriate in an exam, I think.

Answer 4

The growth of railroads in the last decades of the 19th century was phenomenal. Before the Civil War there were approximately 31,000 miles of railroad track in the United States, which increased to over 252,000 miles by the early 1900's.