As usual for you, x, your posting is intentionally misleading. Regardless of your misdirection, here for you is the strength of the Mississippi and the source of fear of the Northern business interests:
Before the beginning of the war, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s cotton, provided over half of all U.S. export earnings, and furnished 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Cotton exports paid for a substantial share of the capital and technology that laid the basis for America’s industrial revolution.
All of this began in the years from the Louisiana Purchase to the 1850s, which were golden ones for the deep South, witnessing intense growth and development, and significant changes in the internal structure of its economy.
The North America continent’s interior was drained by a single river system—the Mississippi. From the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Rockies to the Appalachians, the Mississippi with its vast network of tributaries, particularly the Ohio and Missouri Rivers, provided a natural waterway system for moving people and goods across the midcontinent of North America and down the Mississippi to its outlet on the Gulf.
Any city so strategically situated at the mouth of so splendid a transportation system would control the trade between the vast interior of North America and the rest of the world; and a city in so strange a situation might even determine the political future of North America.
These facts were as obvious to seventeenth century French explorers as they were to Thomas Jefferson, who said of New Orleans: “There is one spot on the globe, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.”
In 1803, New Orleans was basically 8,000 people directly or indirectly tied to moving goods from river vessels to dock to ship and vice versa. Its primary industry was the port, moving and storing goods. Ship chandelling, repairing, and building were a distant second industry, but rapid economic growth after 1803 spawned new economic interests.
For example, by the 1820’s and 1830’s, New Orleans was the commercial entry port and financial intermediary for goods from all reaches of the Mississippi. There were many more merchants to handle the growing trade and the financing of farms, plantations, and communities upriver.
There were growing wholesale, retail, and transient service sectors to supply the food, clothing, and goods of growing population of residents and visitors: and there was the inevitable growth of government to provide police, fire, and health services and to administer docks and levees.
After 1803, New Orleans was seldom troubled by labor shortages, except during epidemics. The city's labor force grew rapidly after the Purchase and was composed of individuals of different races, nationalities, and skills. In 1803, of the city's 8,000 residents, approximately 3,000 were whites, 3,000 free persons of color, and 2,000 slaves.
In addition to the emergence of new economic sectors, the focus of New Orleans’ economic activities began to change in the late 1830’s. Until then, about 90% of the city's trade consisted of downriver shipments of Midwestern foodstuffs.
In the 1830’s and 1840’s, the growing world demand for cotton led to the development of vast, efficient slave plantations in the lower Mississippi Valley that produced more cotton at lower prices.
By the late 1840’s cotton was king, and Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans and the Mississippi River planters were prosperous. Increased world demand for cotton had pushed New Orleans into a less national, more regional orientation and role. On the eve of the Civil War, port activity was way up, but more than ever it centered around the exportation of cotton and the importation of plantation-destined goods.
This is the same reason that Natchez, Miss. ranked highest in per-capita millionaires before the beginning of the Civil war.
As is usual for you, your posting is snarky, irrelevant and largely plagiarized. You claim to know what other people are thinking but you aren't even educated enough to know that you can't cut and paste whole paragraphs of someone else's work without attribution and pass it off as your own work. That's a pretty good indication of why I don't respond to you if I can help it and why I am surprised that anyone else does.
Yes, New Orleans was the city of the future, the metropolis of great promise, but the future was always in the future and the promise never quite panned out. You indicate a large part of the reason for that yourself:
In summer, the ports were virtually deserted as the heat, humidity, and falling water levels slowed dock workers, rotted any agricultural products on the docks, and hindered the river traffic. Many merchants and their families left the port cities to avoid the heat, yellow fever, cholera, and hurricanes. However, between January and March, many plantation owners and their families would visit in the cities, partaking of the social whirl of Mardi Gras, shopping, and meeting with their cotton factors, who acted as agents, bankers, and financial advisors.
The climate was unpleasant for many people. There were epidemics. Free immigrants avoided the city because of that and because slavery predominated there. The steamboats of the era couldn't carry as much as railroads could and transportation up the length of the river was slow and risky before snags and shoals were removed.
I don't mean to put the city down. It was a successful port in 1860, but much of what made the port of South Louisiana so important today waited until years after the Civil War. It couldn't be assumed that New Orleans would somehow outshine New York in the 19th century.
Now please slither back under your rock.