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.
Your usual reply...failure to deal with the facts and numbers.
But your determination to obfuscate is clear. You are not a Socratic scholar.
But you are who you are.
Yes, having a major regional power blockade your trade with warships and pummel you into submission has a tendency to interfere with future prosperity.
But what would have happened if people hadn't used war to stop their natural economic activity?