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The extraordinary system of rivers flowing through the Midwestern states allowed merchants, miners, planters, and hunters to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one — the Mississippi — and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city—New Orleans.

The original levees surrounding this city below sea level were erected in 1718, the date of the foundation of the city, and they were vastly expanded to accommodate trade. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargoes stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. New Orleans was, in many ways, a key pivot of the American economy.

By 1860, New Orleans in terms of tonnage had become the forth largest port in the Union. The port city was a series of docks and warehouses stretching for miles that served as the staging and organizational point for the flow of wheat, flour, furs, corn, tobacco, minerals, and cotton flowing from Southern and Mid-western states and territories to the European markets.

A simple way to measure the value of the New Orleans port to the Union is that it was where the bulk commodities of Midwestern and Southern agriculture went out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism came in. The commodity chain of the global cotton and European food industry largely started there, as did that of Southern industrialism. If these facilities were gone from the Union, more than the price of goods shifted: The very physical structure of the Union economy would have to be reshaped.

If the Mississippi River was shut to Midwestern traffic, then the foundations of the Union economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories would not come in, and the agricultural wealth would not flow out under Federal control.

Compared to overland shipping, river transport was cheap, and most of the agricultural products had low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system serving the Midwest of the 1860s was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. If Louisiana left the Union, there were not enough wagons or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities — assuming that the economics could be managed, which they could not be.

The United States historically depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river could not be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States.

3/21/1861 The following from the New York Herald, as quoted in the Memphis Daily Appeal, gives an understanding of thought about the effects of the tariff:

“The last Congress, in a spirit of mingled vengeance and fanaticism, enacted a tariff doubling the duties on many articles of foreign manufacture, and advancing them to a prohibitory point on others; and this was done to protect the manufacturing interests of the Northern States at the expense of the South.

”It is doubtful, however, if this blundering instrument can ever be intelligibly interpreted by any collector of custom, or enforced at all in its present shape.

”But at the same time the Congress of the Southern Confederacy has adopted a tariff reducing the duties on imports, the consequence of which will be that the importations will abandon the ports of the North and enter those of the South, and will then find their way to the interior by the Mississippi river and the railroads of the border States.

”The result of this proceeding will be of course to destroy the trade of the North; and the very first portions of it to suffer will be New York, New Jersey, and New “England. The imports here will be cut down to an insignificant figure; and the manufactures in the New England States will be seriously damaged; both business houses and factories will be transferred to the South; and, in fact, the northern tariff adopted to protect the manufacturing interests of the North will have no interests left to protect. The actual effect of the tariff, then, will be to reduce the revenues of the Government at Washington and increase the revenues of the Southern Government.

”The Congress at Washington may attempt to avert this course of affairs, even to the extent of inaugurating a blockade of all the southern ports; vessels of war have been ordered home from all the foreign stations to enable the Administration to be prepared for this policy; but to such an event France and England would act as they did with regard to Texas; they would acknowledge the independence of the Southern Confederacy, and send their fleets across the Atlantic to open every port in the South.

”Thus we find the country involved in a fearful commercial revolution through the policy of a fanatical party, which, for thirty years, has been endeavoring to overthrow all the best interests of the Republic for the sake of an abstraction. We see the whole current of commercial prosperity turned out of its channel, the wealth and importance of the northern cities struck down at a blow. We have experienced many commercial revulsions before now from time to time — in 1817, 1825, 1837 and 1857 — but these were the results of overtrading, of excessive speculation, and other financial causes which may produce like consequences in any country. The present revulsion, on the contrary, arises from purely political causes, and will be as disastrous in its effects as it is novel in its origin.