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?
Exported a lot of stuff to Europe, did they? What exactly were they exporting to pay for their imports?
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.
The exports left from Southern Ports, but the *MONEY* came back through New York. New York had virtually total control of all Southern exports. BroJoeK posted a link a long time ago in which it explained that virtually all the export traffic was controlled by New York.
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.