The single State of Massachusetts, has during the last fifteen years, expended $47,000,000 in building rail roads within her own borders. The N. O. Picayune pertinently asks, where the money came from, as the State possesses no gold or silver mines, and yet has somehow or other, found the cash to pay for all her contracts? The answer is plain. The Southern States have been paying Massachusetts to manufacture their coarse cotton and woolen goods, hats, shoes, & c., which could very well have been made at home, and the consequence is, that while Massachusetts has thus been enabled to lay a net work of rail road throughout her territory, thus bringing a market to every man’s door, the planters continue to haul their cotton to the river over bad roads, and pay all the expenses of transportation and manufacture, to receive it back in the form of cotton cloth, and at four or five times the price which the raw material sold for. Is it wonderful then, that Massachusetts, whose ships are paid for transportation, and her factories for spinning and weaving, should grow rich, while the cotton planter finds it hard work to make both ends meet? When the planters are thoroughly aroused to a sense of their true interests, and when the cotton and woolen factories, tanneries, &c., of the South, retain at home the money now sent abroad for the purchase of those necessary supplies, then we too shall have surplus capital to invest in internal improvements.
The Port Gibson Herald, and Correspondent, Port Gibson, MS, June 08, 1849