But only if the goods were stored in a bonded warehouse. What logic is there to paying for a good in 2015 and not selling it until 2018?
Let it finally be said that data on tariff collection by the Treasury only shows where the money was collected on imports, and not where the eventual consumer resided.
But point of entry is a good indicator where demand lies. If 75% of all imports were consumed by Southerners then sending them to New York, landing them, paying the tariff, and then loading them on ships again so send them south does not make any sense at all. One would expect the goods to be sent to an entry point closest to where their largest number of customers are. So tariff collections are a very accurate indicator was to whether the majority of imports were consumed in the north or in the south.
Gotta partially disagree with you on this one. New York was the primary point of entry because it was about the closest to Europe. A given ship could make more trips in a year, and more money for the owner, than by making the much longer trips to New Orleans.
NYC also had probably the best rail routes to the interior of any eastern port. It was the port most immigrants wanted to go to.
The point, however, really ought to be that Williams’ claim is flat untrue, and the implication he tries to draw from that untrue claim is also inaccurate.
There is simply no reason to believe imports were consumed more heavily by southerners than by the nation as a whole. Thus they did not pay more in tariffs than anybody else.
They did have a legitimate beef about protective tariffs. But those were not sectional in their effects, they were occupational.
Workers and owners in the protected industries got the benefits. Everybody else, north and south, paid the costs.
A farmer in OH paid exactly the same tariff on imported machinery as a planter in MS.
NO, it is a good indicator of the most profitable route for the shipper and what the law required of overseas shippers.
PLEASE READ THIS VERY CAREFULLY DoodleDawg....this will answer all of the questions you have posed on this and one other thread.
Early and mid-19th century Atlantic trade was based on “packet lines” — which were groups of vessels under one company banner offering scheduled services. It was a coastal trade at first, but when the Black Ball Line started running between New York and Liverpool in 1817, it became a common way to do business across the Atlantic.
The reason for success was to have a profitable cargo going each way. The New York packet lines succeeded because they took in all the European bound cotton cargoes from the South, and Mid-West food exports.
The northeast did not have enough volume of paying freight on its own.
So American vessels, usually owned in the Northeast, sailed off to a cotton port, carrying goods for the southern market. There they loaded cotton, or occasionally naval stores, food, or timber, for Europe. They steamed back from Europe loaded with manufactured goods, raw materials like hemp or coal, and occasionally immigrants.
Since this “triangle trade” involved a domestic leg, foreign vessels were excluded from it under the 1817 law, except a few English ones that could substitute a Canadian port for a Northern U.S. one.
Since it was subsidized by the U.S. government, it was going to continue to be protectionist, and not subject to competition from any nascent Southern shippers.
By creating a three-cornered trade in the ‘cotton triangle,’ New York dragged the commerce between the Southern ports and Europe out of its normal course some two hundred miles to collect a heavy handling fees upon it.
This trade might perfectly well have taken the form of direct shuttles between Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, or New Orleans on the one hand and Liverpool or Havre on the other, leaving New York far to one side had it not interfered in this way. To clinch this abnormal arrangement New York developed the coastal packet lines without which it would have been extremely difficult to make the east-bound trips of the ocean packets profitable.
Even when the Southern cotton bound for Europe did not put in at the wharves of Sandy Hook or the East River, unloading and reloading, the combined income from interests, commissions, freight, insurance, and other profits took perhaps 40 cents into New York of every dollar paid for southern cotton.
The record shows that ports with moderate quantities of outbound freight could not keep up with the New York competition. Boston started a packet line in 1833 that, to secure outbound cargo, detoured to Charleston for cotton. But about the only other local commodity it could find to move to Europe was Bostonians. Since most passengers en route to England did not want the time delays in a layover in South Carolina, the lines failed.
As for the cotton ports themselves, they did not crave enough imports to justify packet lines until 1851, when New Orleans hosted one sailing to Liverpool.
Yet New York by the mid-1850s could claim sixteen lines to Liverpool, three to London, three to Havre, two to Antwerp, and one each to Glasgow, Rotterdam, and Marseilles. This was subsidized by the federal post office patronage procedure.
U.S. foreign trade rose in value from $134 million in 1830 to $318 million in 1850. It tripled again in the 1850s. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of those imports entered through the port of New York.
This meant that any trading the South did, had to go through New York. Direct trade from Charleston and Savannah during this period was stagnant. The total shipping that entered from foreign countries in 1851 in the port of Charleston was 92,000 tons, in the port of New York, 1,448,000. Relatively little tariff money was collected in the port authority in Charleston.
According to a Treasury report, the net revenue of all the ports of South Carolina during 1859 was a mere $234,237; during 1860 it was $309,222.
New York shipping interests, using the Navigation Laws and in collaboration with the US Congress, effectively closed the market off from competitive shipping, and in spite of the inefficiencies, were able to control the movement of Southern goods.
“What logic is there to paying for a good in 2015 and not selling it until 2018?”
Market economics! If the good is non-perishable, you might want to hold on to it until you can get a better price selling it (if you can afford to have your capital locked up in inventory for that long).