If all those dimond merchants were in Charleston then why would they send it to New York?
You did not answer the question.
Are you going to weave a biased story?
CHAPTER_X
Expansion and Conflict by William E. Dodd
New York.
Her tonnage had increased from a little more than 500,000 in 1830 to nearly 5,000,000 in 1860. The freight and passenger ships, built of iron, and encouraged by liberal subsidies from the Federal Government, employed 12,000 sailors and paid their owners $70,000,000 a year. They carried the manufactures of the East to the Southern plantations, to South America, and to the Far East. This great fleet of commercial vessels was owned almost exclusively in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, and its owners were at the end of the decade about to wrest from Great Britain her monopoly of the carrying trade of the world.
The merchants of that city imported three fourths of the European goods consumed in the country, and they in turn exported nearly all of the great crops with which the balance of trade was maintained. New York was also a distributing center for the manufactures of the East which were sent to the South, the West, or the outside world.
The planters, on the other hand, had spread their system over the lower South in a remarkable manner since 1830. From eastern Virginia their patriarchal[Pg 194] establishments had been pushed westward and southwestward until in 1860 the black belt reached to the Rio Grande. Tobacco, cotton, and sugar were still their great staples, and the annual returns from these were not less than $300,000,000; while the growth of their output between 1850 and 1860 was more than one hundred per cent. The number of slaves who worked the plantations had increased between 1830 and 1860 from 2,000,000 to nearly 4,000,000 souls, thus suggesting the comparison with the workers in the mills of the East. The exports of the black belt composed more than two thirds of the total exports of the country; but they were largely billed through Eastern ports, and most of the imports of the South came through New York, where a second toll was taken from the products of the plantation.