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
DiogenesLamp quoting:
"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." This claim is far too vague to have any meaning -- 40% of what, based on what numbers and what calculations?
Admittedly, cotton was the US #1 export, by far, representing 50% of all US exports, and New York was a huge port city, producing circa 75% of all Federal import tariff revenues.
But half of US cotton shipped directly from New Orleans and easily 25% more from other Southern ports.
So 40% of what?
Of cotton exported through New York?
Maybe 20% of all US cotton exports?
Which would be 10% of all US exports?
And this is a huge problem, yet never mentioned by people at the time, why, exactly?
DiogenesLamp quoting: "The trade with the South, which has been estimated at $200,000,000 annually, was an impressive sum at the time."
Sure, here are some basic numbers from 1860:
- 1860 cotton exports: ~$200 million.
- Northern "exports" to the South: ~$200 million.
- Total US exports, including specie: ~$400 million.
- Total US imports: ~$400 million.
- Total US GDP: $4.4 billion
- Total US asset values: $20 billion.
- Total "market value" of US slaves: $4 billion.
DiogenesLamp quoting:
"Most New Yorkers did not care that the cotton was produced by slaves because for them it became sanitized once it left the plantation." Right, fellow Democrats -- economic, political & social partners: Northern Big City & Southern planter globalist Democrats ruled New York and Washington, DC, from ~1801 until secession in 1861.
Republicans then as now were a very different group of people -- rural, small town, suburban, religious, patriotic, professionals, small business, "middle class", anti-slavery, constitutionalists. ![]()
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. A fact that says less about the New York being the business and financial capital of America from colonial times to the present day than it does the south's failure to establish its own insurance, shipping, financing services and merchant class. As Louis Wigfall told a British journalist,
"We are a peculiar people, sir! You don’t understand us, and you can’t understand us, because we are known to you only by Northern writers and Northern papers, who know nothing of us themselves, or misrepresent what they do know. We are an agricultural people; we are a primitive but a civilized people. We have no cities—we don’t want them, have no literature—we don’t need any yet. We have no press—we are glad of it. We do not require a press, because we go out and discuss all public questions from the stump with our people. We have no commercial marine—no navy—we don’t want them. We are better without them. Your ships carry our produce, and you can protect your own vessels. We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from those nations with which we are in amity, and to lay up money besides."
The truth is that the southern cotton interests were eager to borrow money, buy insurance, and all the rest from the north and would rather do that than set up their own financial infrastructure. Apparently the south was only interested in industries that could utilize slave labor, and shipping, insurance, and finance don't qualify and were thus below the dignity of southern gentlemen.