The history of the area is described in Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited From Slavery — a book that details how deeply the slave trade was entrenched in America's economy — by veteran newspaper journalists Anne Farrow, Joel Lang and Jenifer Frank. The authors wrote: "From 1825 on, in volume and value of imports and exports, the seaport of South Street outdid the combined trade of its two closest competitors in Boston and Philadelphia … long before civil war loomed, New York, after London and Paris, had become the third major city of the western world. Its glory was built largely of bricks of cotton," the product of backbreaking labor."From seed to cloth, Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York, controlled nearly every aspect of cotton production and trade," the authors continued. "Only large banks, generally located in Manhattan, or in London, could extend to plantation owners the credit they needed between planting and selling their crop … slaves were usually bought on credit."
https://www.theroot.com/how-slave-labor-made-new-york-1790895122
Thanks for that information. Will do some research on this.
Well, sure, if by "Northern" you mean everyone north of New Orleans and if by "many" you mean more than, say, three.
Otherwise it would be more accurate to describe an economic & political alliance of Northern (i.e., NY) & Southern (Washington, DC) Democrats who influenced & benefitted US international trade from roughly 1801 until secession in 1861.
New York City, not just Southern cities, was essential to the cotton world. By 1860, New York had become the capital of the South because of its dominant role in the cotton trade. New York rose to its preeminent position as the commercial and financial center of America because of cotton. It has been estimated that New York received forty percent of all cotton revenues since the city supplied insurance, shipping, and financing services and New York merchants sold goods to Southern planters. The trade with the South, which has been estimated at $200,000,000 annually, was an impressive sum at the time.Complicity of white America
Most New Yorkers did not care that the cotton was produced by slaves because for them it became sanitized once it left the plantation. New Yorkers even dominated a booming slave trade in the 1850s. Although the importation of slaves into the United States had been prohibited in 1808, the temptation of the astronomical profits of the international slave trade was too strong for many New Yorkers. New York investors financed New York-based slave ships that sailed to West Africa to pick up African captives that were then sold in Cuba and Brazil.
http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/161/cotton-in-a-global-economy-mississippi-1800-1860