That's a great set of natural and acquired advantages. As a socialist, you naturally resent the city's success and view it all as illegitimate. You'd rather shake things up and you assume that somebody else would come up on top once you've displaced those who were successful, but it wouldn't work. New York businessmen were good at what they did, good enough for wealthy people in other parts of the country to entrust them with their money.
No other avenue of redress was available to them. Offering them protection for slavery would do nothing about the money drain from the South to the North. It's why they didn't care about the Corwin Amendment. It wouldn't address their real complaint.
I assume you are talking about cotton planters here, though you don't make that clear. There was no "money drain." Plantation owners used money to buy things they wanted or needed that were produced elsewhere. They also clearly found it convenient to keep sums with bankers in New Orleans or Charleston or New York or London and to work with brokers and factors in those cities.
The whole cotton business was illegitimate or immoral by today's standards but there was nothing illegitimate in planters wanting to do business with those who lived outside the cotton-growing regions. They weren't obligated to do for themselves what others had more experience doing. And yet you find the fact that some areas specialize in agriculture and others in commerce an affront to your socialist sensibilities.
Yes it does, and what is the primary purpose of a harbor? Is it not trade?
Would you say "trade" was the life blood of New York?
I am not a socialist. I hate those bastards and everything they stand for. It is not my job to "share the wealth."
But I have learned that Nazi style "crony capitalism" is also a threat to liberty. When influence becomes so large that it can set government policy, it has become a threat to the rest of the nation.
