[BroJoeK]

rockrr: "Virginia seems to have been the first, in 1631, with a duty of two and one half per cent on goods imported by foreign subjects, and five per cent on all goods imported by foreigners..."

If I follow it correctly, PeaRidge's argument seems to go like this:

Some Northern shippers were exclusively given US mail subsidies effecting a handful of ships.
These subsidies were so lucrative, and so exclusively limited to Northerners that they stamped out the previously prosperous Southern shippers from any of the many hundreds of ships required to transport Deep South exports like cotton or rice.
And because of their monopolistic practices, these government subsidized Northerners were able to extract 40% of the revenues from Deep South cotton.

And that's the real reason making Deep South declarations of secession "necessary", they say!

But the problems with their argument are almost too many to enumerate, beginning with: if these "subsidies" were indeed so "lucrative", then why did SS Baltic's owners, the Collins Line, go bankrupt in 1857?
Might we not better suppose that far from being guaranteed profitable, shipping was actually risky business, that not everyone wanted to get into?

For example, if you were a Southerner of means, which would seem the better investment to you -- building & owning a ship to transport cotton to Europe, or buying land & slaves to produce & sell cotton?
Well, the numbers clearly show that slave-grown cotton was both more profitable and more reliable than shipping.
For one thing, ships normally only depreciate, whereas slave families over time grew and appreciated.

So it could have nothing to do with alleged Washington discrimination against Southerner shippers and everything to do with where were Southerners best advised to invest their money?

[rockrr]

Apparently Pea feels that the south couldn’t afford to wait for Title IX to grant them “equal” (guaranteed) opportunity to a piece of the pie.

[x]

If you were running shipping lines between the US and Europe wouldn't it make more sense to ship European products to an East Coast port, and then transship to a Gulf Coast port?

I can't see getting the goods to New Orleans and then having to backtrack to Eastern ports. Or taking goods from the East Coast to New Orleans to send off across the Atlantic.

There were perfectly logical reasons why New Orleans or Mobile or Galveston couldn't fully compete with ports on the Atlantic. The population centers were still in the East, so shipping would be heaviest between East Coast ports and Europe.

Why it was New York that came out on top, rather than Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, or Norfolk is another question, but in the 19th century geography stacked the deck against the Gulf ports.