South of Washington there were no public conveyances to be had at all - Genteel poverty the norm

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 34.

South of Washington there were no public conveyances to be had at all, no roads that wagons could traverse, no bank between Alexandria, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina, and no call for one. Three-quarters of the nation’s workforce of 1.9 million worked on farms, almost all practicing methods unchanged for a thousand years before, steadily exhausting the soil, making whatever clothes they wore themselves, threshing grain with two sticks bound by a leather hinge or trodding it with horses or oxen. Two thousand men in the entire nation, about evenly divided between textiles and primary iron and steel production, earned their wages in basic manufacturing. Houses, even of the wealthiest planters, were run-down; a French visitor to Virginia at this time found genteel poverty the norm: “one finds a well-served table, covered with silver, where for ten years half the window panes have been missing, and where they will be missed for ten years more."