The Civil War ravaged the South; railroads were ripped up, cotton plantations were destroyed, and the few Southern industrial centers of the time, such as Atlanta, were burned down. The Southern rail system before the Civil War was a small patchwork of different gauges–the distance between the rails–that primarily transported cotton to the nearest port. By comparison, the North had triple the track mileage linking the industrial centers under one gauge (Josef, 2019). Northern money flooded the railroads after the war; by 1873 the nation had laid down 33,000 miles (53,000 km) of new track (Richardson, 2007, 131) and railroads employed thousands of demobilized soldiers from both the North and South. Railroads turned to governments and banks in search of capital; they also turned to European banks when they couldn’t get capital in America, as many European bankers wanted a piece of the expanding American market. The trouble was that railroads required constant investment to pay off their debts; any break in the system could bring everything down (Dove, 2014). Ultimately, the cause of the eventual crash of the railroads and ensuing panic was America’s monetary policies.