You realize the distance from London to New York is significantly shorter than ANY port in the south. In a year, the ships could probably make another round trip.
Once stuff started coming out of the center of the country, the price to transport to the East was more expensive than shipping it.
You take this stuff personal, but it was all about business.
Yes. I point this out often when this subject comes up. New York had a natural advantage to intercepting trade from Europe. Charleston is 800 miles further to the South, and unless there is some incentive to go there, most people wouldn't take the extra time and expense to do so.
What would have caused a huge amount of traffic to eschew New York and head for Norfolk, or Charleston, or other points south would be 10-50% greater profits. If the Southern states operated on a much lower tariff system, cargoes could be sold in the South for much higher profits than would be available in New York, and this would have spurred a massive trade upswing in the South, with New York city being the loser in such a scenario.
New York city was extremely powerful and had incredible influence with Washington DC. Both were making enormous profits from the tariffs imposed by Washington DC, and both stood to lose enormous sums of money if the Southern states were allowed to trade directly with Europe, bypassing New York.
Greater Profits would have overcome New York's natural advantages, and most of the trade would have redirected to the South. The rice bowl of the most powerful men in America would have been threatened if this were allowed to occur.
You take this stuff personal, but it was all about business.
I do not take it personal, and yes, it was completely about business. I point out constantly that those invasions by those vast armies were the consequences of potential business losses that the powerful men of the North would have suffered if the South had been allowed to establish it's own trade system with Europe instead of funneling all that traffic and money through the hands of New York plutocrats.
The war was started because wealthy and powerful men in New York and Washington would be economically damaged if the South was allowed to do what it was trying to do.
The war wasn't started over "Slavery", and it wasn't started because everyone wanted to so rigidly uphold what they regarded as "Constitutional Law", the war was started because the South posed a serious economic threat to the men of power in that era.
The war was about money, and more specifically about who was going to lose it if the South wasn't stopped. Nearly the first thing Lincoln did was to throw up a blockade to stop trade traffic with Europe.
*THAT* is what the war was about.