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“Federal government helped destroy Southern shipping and ship building.”

What legislation did the Congress of the United States pass that impacted Southern shipbuilding.

Southern shipbuilding failed to keep up with the changes in ship construction that started in the 1840s. They could still build small and medium sized vessels out of wood with sails. The rest of the shipbuilding industry was converting to iron framed, iron plated and steam driven ships. the ship builders in the South did not have the technology to make the change and were reluctant to make the financial investments necessary to convert their yards for wood hull/sail powered ships to ships built with iron hulls and steam propulsion. The Federal Government had little to do with this set of circumstance.

Interesting. The iron and steel industry was concentrated in the North and Northerners were more skilled at dealing with machinery. Also the money and the entrepreneurs left Charleston to go west and grow cotton, rather than stick with shipbuilding. Shipbuilding did continue at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. You could think of the shipyard as a government subsidy to the South, but apparently, Virginia didn't exploit that in the way that other states did.

I wouldn't take Southern complaints about shipping and shipbuilding at face value. There were Southern shipping companies, as well as companies with offices in the South, the North, the Border States, Britain and Europe that it would be hard to characterize as entirely of one region. Southerners complained that US laws closed US coastal shipping to foreign shipping companies. If those laws were repealed, it might have benefitted planters, but would have done little or nothing to encourage native Southern shipping and shipbuilding.

What legislation did the Congress of the United States pass that impacted Southern shipbuilding.

I'll link you to PeaRidge's excellent synopsis of what the government did which impacted Southern shipbuilding.

https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/3443027/posts?page=929#929