[FLT-bird]

x: New York and Brooklyn, then a separate city, were major manufacturing cities in 19th century America. Plenty of wealth, apart from shipping and finance, was generated there, and the large population provided plenty of consumers. And yes, New York was the center of a distribution network, but it's easy to forget how much of that network was clustered around New York. Hartford, New Haven, Springfield, Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Elmira, Paterson, Newark, Trenton, Scranton, Allentown, Reading: all were manufacturing centers which generated their own share of the country's wealth and bought much in imports, whether for business or for household use. New York was a major distribution center in good part because it was so close to so many industrial cities, and those cities were successful because they had access to the consumers and transportation facilities of New York City. Actually, there was direct transportation of cotton from Charleston and New Orleans directly to Britain and Europe. Fraser and Trenholm or John Fraser and Company or Trenholm Brothers was a major Charleston shipping firm with branches in Liverpool and New York City. But there were limits to how much in imports Charleston and other Southern cities could absorb, so it made sense that much business was done through New York. BTW I just found Ezekiel Donnell, Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton (New York: J. Sutton & Co. printers, 1872) online. He says that in 1853-1855 fully half of all cotton exported to Britain was shipped from New Orleans. The book gives statistics for other years. It looks like most of the cotton trade did not go through New York City. Most of the cotton from smaller ports, like those in Florida, made its way up the coast, most likely to New York, but New Orleans definitely was the major player, and became more dominant over time. So have we been arguing about nothing all this time?

New Orleans was indeed a major port - big enough to ship directly to and from. With the introduction of packet shipping lines especially, much of the cargo from other Southern ports like Pensacola, Mobile, Charleston, Savannah, etc etc was carried up to New York, unloaded, warehoused, consolidated, repacked onto larger ocean going vessels and then sent off across the Atlantic.

What New York offered in addition to a large shipbuilding industry were a lot of export services like banking and insurance and the "Factors" (today we'd call them middlemen) who arranged a lot of the business side of exporting. The Northeast but specifically New York actually made more money from these business services than the Southern Planters made from producing the cash crops. The Imports flowed through the same channels in reverse. Plenty of those coastwise trade vessels carried cash crops north and manufactured goods South. The loss of this business in addition to the loss of tariff revenue and the loss of the Southern states as a captive market for manufactured goods would have been an utter disaster for the Northeast. This is why their editorials quickly turned extremely bellicose. Before the business "movers and shakers" got involved, there were plenty of Northern editorials saying essentially that they should let the Southern states go in peace.

[x]

Mobile was also a major port for direct shipment to Europe, as was Charleston. Smaller ports in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina did ship most of their cotton to other ports, most likely New York. That makes sense. There wasn't enough business from those ports to support direct trade with Britain or Europe.

If New Yorkers made more money from shipping than cotton growers did, a reason might be that they were also shipping many other goods to and from Europe, not just cotton. Another reason why New York prospered might be that the cotton growers could never be sure they'd have money when they needed it, so they were a market for loans and credit from New York banks, the economy of the cotton states being so dependent on cotton that Southern banks may not have had the money when the planters needed it.

New York and the Northeast did fine economically after the slave states seceded. Among those who were most inclined to let the secessionists go in peace were those who did business with the South. They assumed that, given peace, business relations would go on much as they had. They appear to have been more worried about the Southern states renouncing their debts than about tariffs or the South yanking away their business, and they weren't at all keen on war. The mayor of New York even wanted the city to secede from the United States and keep up the cotton trade with the Confederacy. The attack on Fort Sumter changed that. Source