Of course they did. With 72% of the money funding Washington DC coming off the work of slaves, they wanted freebies from Washington DC to be paid for by others. These regions of the country *STILL* believe in freebies from the government.
The point of such public works was that they enabled an expansion of commerce for merchants and for farmers to move crops to market and gain cash income instead of remaining money-scarce subsistence farmers.
And guess who controlled their transport monopolies? If you guessed that same wealthy elite monied class in the Northeast that controls Washington DC, go to the head of the class.
Look up "The Graingers."
They enable banks to act as intermediaries so that wealthy people can convert cash into a source of income through capital investment.
Austrian school of economics calls this "rent seeking." They wanna be Lords. They want aristocracy where they don't have to work but the peasants do.
That is mostly accurate, but keep in mind that since slavery also required capital, its financiers made a lot of money. In the end, the bankers and the wealthy always make money somehow.
I've long said that if they had been successful in keeping their independence, it is likely I would be bitching about the wealthy elite in the South rather than in New York City and Boston.
In any event, public works and internal improvements are a traditional role of government. In Europe, the government paying for such work on a professional basis was a great advance over the feudal method of the hated corvee' that annually drafted peasants to build and maintain roads, canals, and other public works.
In the US in the first half of the 19th Century, most internal improvements were free for use by all or had only enough fees and costs to pay the bonds used to fund their construction. State and local government funded internal improvements were common, with some, like the Erie Canal, having transformative economic impact throughout their region.
The problem in newly-settled territories and states was that state and local governments were either yet to be organized or lacked adequate funds and tax base to conduct internal improvements. Federal support was sought in their absence.
Hating bankers and wealthy people is foolish because it is a way of rejecting capitalism and banks as wealth creators. The best remedy for rent-seeking is to attack it directly, not to attack all rents and interest payments indiscriminately.