I am also skeptical of White if he is implying that access to capital was a central limiting factor in the Civil War; a more focused problem was that by far the largest industrial complex in the South was located in Baltimore, Maryland. Since neither opponent, whatever its funding, was in a position to be building new cities during the conflict, the de jure loss of its largest city limited the Confederacy's production of war materiel. In fact in a counterfactual USA where the robber baron Gilded Age had been the first Renaissance of a seceded CSA, I can imagine that a lot of the period's economic development and chicanery which occurred in Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey would have been located in Maryland and of course Virginia.
> Cooke had donated millions of dollars to Grant’s winning re-election bid for the presidency in 1872. Before that, Cooke had grown immensely wealthy by building an investment network that sold more than $1.6 billion in Civil War bonds to small-time investors across the North. Grant had lauded him for ensuring the Union’s successful campaign against the Confederacy, which had far less capital.
> Cooke later harnessed his pioneering direct-to-consumer investment concept to offload bonds in a scheme selling the latest technology—railroads—to the next generation of individual investors. “It was like selling to crypto investors today,” says historian Richard White, author of Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. “These investors were basically living off of the promises of famous people they had trusted before.”