[#3Fan]

This powerful clique of New England/New York/Chicago business interests "aroused the suspicions of the South," says Brown, since they were so vigorously lobbying Congress to allocate huge sums of money for a transcontinental railroad across the Northern states. Southern politicians wanted the route to pass through their states, naturally, but they knew they were outgunned politically by the political clique from "the Yankee belt" (New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio, the upper Midwest).

Why put the railroad in the South when it was the North that was more industrialized?

[u-89]

Why have taxpayers fund private enterprise???

That is the big question and the issue here along with politicians and other government employees getting profitable insider knowledge in return for funding private enterprise with public moneys and sculpting policy to favor the connected (and generous). Not who makes a better case for deserving the spoils of government largess.