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That excerpt I quoted in an article above indicated that New York/New England shipping/banking/insurance/etc was skimming off forty percent of the value of that trade.

Hey guys! Diogenes believes insurance is a scam. For punishment he should have to do with out insurance and put up with total losses when disaster strikes. Or -- what's worse -- spend a few evenings with an insurance agent.

He also believes banking is a scam. He's on solider ground there, but if you have money in the bank, it's not like the bank stole it from you or skimmed it off. You can't say, "I have all this money invested but I should also have it in cash in my pocket or it's not fair." You can't have your cake and eat it too, even if you are the kind of rich cotton planter Diogenes wishes he was.

For that matter, if slave driver Diogenes doesn't actually have ships to take his cotton to market he's going to have to hire some -- and then complain about how the profits he created with his own hands have once again been stolen from him.

Seriously, isn't everybody getting tired of his theory? It takes a lot for a city to rise to economic preeminence. Sometimes not all the factors are present. The idea that a change in the tariff would have made Charleston something like New York is nonsense. For one thing, Charleston never wanted to be like New York. You can read about the contempt Southern planters had for Northern money grubbers.

Beyond that, slave societies had trouble attracting free labor. The also had trouble attracting investment because they were seen as inherently unstable. And wherever unpaid slave labor was available, technology lagged.

x: "Hey guys! Diogenes believes insurance is a scam."

That figure of 40% comes from New York's reporting, though exactly what it consists of is not told.
One can easily suppose that 30% of it came from shipping, transfer & warehousing costs, 7% from interest on loans and 3% from insurance.

Shipping would consist of small packet ships plying east coast waters and picking up small lots of cotton from small ports & river-side docks.
Packets took cotton to a large port (i.e., NYC) where it was transferred and warehoused until arrangements could be made for shipments on larger ocean packets to Europe, or elsewhere.
Each time cotton changed hands, so would money and possibly ownership, such that by the time bales reached manufacturers in, say, Manchester, England, it's price could easily be double what the small planter in, say, Georgia, received for it.

So that's the middle-man markup driving our poor DiogenesLamp crazy.
As a born Marxist, he thinks there must be something immoral or illegal about all those middlemen making profits off the sweat of his slaves!
And he thinks there just must be "jiggered" laws forcing the poor Southern planters to use all those evil, wicked Northern merchants to transport & sell their cotton.
And that's why they went to war!
They needed to protect their privileged economies, and so they invaded the South to force slaves to continue growing cotton and selling it to Northern merchants.

Oh... wait...
Northern armies didn't force slaves to grow cotton, they freed the slaves.
Plus both during and after the war, the cotton economy went to h*ll anyway, so it was a lose-lose all around...

Oooops, never mind.

Hey guys! Diogenes believes insurance is a scam.

Okay, now how did you get that assertion out of anything I've said?

He also believes banking is a scam.

Another Strawman assertion. My position is that people should employ banking, insurance and shipping when they wish to do so, not because someone is forcing them into it.

It is the difference between consent and coercion. The Northern monopolies were using government enforced coercion to compel patronage of these industries, and *that* was wrong.

At the time, hiring ships outside of that Northern Coastal monopoly, you would pay 55 cents per ton in taxes/penalties. (Because of that Navigation act of 1817.) Hiring American ships under the control of that monopoly cost only 6 cents per ton, but they charged higher rates such that they were just barely under the cost of penalties for hiring a foreign ship. Again, this was simply more "Protectionism" for this North-Eastern shipping monopoly.

I mentioned how they jiggered the laws to favor the North East. This is but one example of that.

The idea that a change in the tariff would have made Charleston something like New York is nonsense

There you go again, cutting off pieces of my theory and then attacking the remnant. I keep telling you that the tariff's were only a part of the bigger picture. According to that excerpt I posted above, New York was siphoning off about 40% of all Cotton revenues.

Slice it any way you like, but 40% more money will have a substantial economic impact on ports which are shipping out the product. Most of those piles of coins represented in that Map I post would have ended up in New Orleans. It would have been a huge loss to the New York economy.

I cobbled this together quickly, and it is likely not accurate, but it more closely resembles what the eventual trade would have looked like had the North Eastern Crony Capitalists not convinced their Mercantilist President to launch a war to prevent it.

Don't lie to yourself. Southern Trade unencumbered by protectionist laws favoring the North East, would have blossomed into a large economic powerhouse.

And *THAT* is why the North Eastern controlled Union invaded the South. *THAT* is why they launched a war to protect their money stream and stop competition.