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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 railr ....
SUMMARY Carter M. Braxton was a civil engineer, businessman, and a Confederate artillery officer during the American Civil War (1861–1865). A Norfolk native, he fought in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia‘s major campaigns, from the Seven Days’ Battles outside Richmond in 1862 to the Gettysburg Campaign in 1863 and the Overland Campaign in 1864. One account claimed that he had seven horses shot from under him, but he was never wounded in the fighting. Following the war, he published a map of the battlefield at Fredericksburg. In June 1866 Braxton became president of the Fredericksburg and Gordonsville Railroad, and later formed his own engineering construction firm, Braxton, Chandler, and Marye, in Newport News. Braxton also founded a railway company and was vice president of both a bank and a gas company. He died of Bright’s disease in Newport News in 1898. ....