“Where did the merchants in the area (New York) get the money to pay for European goods?”
Probably the same places where merchants get the money to finance business today. Supplier credit, bank loans, stock investment, past profits. What a dumb question.
The question is the most salient question which can be asked on this topic, it is your attempted deflection answer which is stupid. It ignores all the mechanics of how European money gets into the hands of New York merchants.
Somehow the money has to come from Europe or specie has to be traded for European products, and few people want to give up their gold. Most would rather trade their goods for foreign goods.
Somehow there has to be a trade of assets or services to acquire European currency with which to purchase European products.
What assets were New York merchants trading for European goods in order to buy them?
That act simply required imported goods to be shipped on vessels owned by companies in the US or in nations from which the goods were made. How is that unfair to one region or another?
That's another bit of complication of the situation that I would rather discuss at a later time. I want to focus on the big pieces, and then later we can come back and talk about the smaller pieces. After we've figured out where New York Merchants got their hands on that European money, then we can talk about how the Navigation act of 1817 handed a defacto monopoly to New York shipping interests.
You figure out who ran congress throughout most of the antebellum period, then we can end this asinine mental masturbation.
I know you’re walking down the Mason Dixon line until you get to Tara, err, the fallacy that southern cotton paid for northern imports. Let’s see what people at the time said about that.
“When the valued exports and imports of any of the Southern states are compared, it is found that the former is invariably exceeds the latter, in consequence of the want of a consuming class… It is common theme for the Southern politicians to lament the want of enterprise among the merchants in conduct a foreign import trade… But the truth is, there are few imports required, for every Southern town tells the same tale.”
-North America, its Agriculture and Climate, by Robert Russell, Edinburgh 1857
“A very large part of our duties are collected on the class of goods for which there is almost no demand at all from the South, either directly or indirectly – woolen and fur goods, for instance; of the goods require for the South not a few have been practically free. The whole slave population of the South consumes almost nothing ... The majority of the population habitually makes use of no foreign production except chicory, which, ground with peas, they call coffee. I have never seen reason to believe that with absolute free trade the cotton States would take a tenth part of the value of our present importations. And as I can judge from observation of the comparative use of foreign goods at the South and at the North, not a tenth part of our duties have been defrayed by the South in the last twenty years.”
- The Cotton Kingdom, Vol. 1, by Frederick Law Olmsted, New York – London, 1861