A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
Читать онлайн книгу.
when their time could be better spent managing the slave labor force to grow more cotton.
Besides banks, the city also had scores of maritime insurance companies willing to insure ships and their cargoes on the voyage across the stormy Atlantic. Finally, New York had a long history of building and outfitting ships that could ply the world’s seas carrying tons of whatever crops the South wanted to export.
New York’s harbor also had a huge advantage over Southern ports in that it already had a long history of handling imports from Europe and a burgeoning population that wanted European imports. The Southern ports might be able to load up a large, heavy ship with cotton bales heading to England, but the South’s smaller population meant there was less demand for goods coming from Europe to fill the same ship going back to the same port. In 1860, right before the war, New Orleans, the South’s most successful port exported 107 million dollars’ worth of goods (primarily cotton) while importing only 22 million dollars’ worth of goods.
To handle the trade imbalance, instead of sailing directly to Europe, Southern cotton was loaded in Southern ports, taken to New York, and off-loaded onto larger ships that then sailed to England or New England. The smaller ships that had delivered the cotton to New York then sailed back south loaded with whatever goods Southerners purchased from New York importers.
While the managers of Southern ports could try to argue that it was much easier and less costly to ship cotton directly to England or New England without the time and expense of off-loading in New York, those port managers had no answer if asked which Southern banks would handle the intricate financial transactions with the final buyers of the cotton who could be six thousand miles away. In 1845, the total number of banks in seven Southern states that produced cotton was 102, with a combined capital of $64 million and loans of $65 million. Alabama had only six banks in the entire state, and Mississippi, one of the major cotton-producing states, did not have a single one.
New York State alone had 150 banks with capital of $44 million and loans of $70 million. Most of those New York State banks were based in New York City.
In the early nineteenth century, within a decade of the invention of Whitney’s cotton gin, as much as one quarter of the cotton reaching England came through New York’s harbor. Just twenty years into the nineteenth century, cotton accounted for up to 40 percent of the city’s exports to Europe. In 1850, the New York Herald wrote that New York would be “a great distribution point” for cotton.
Even though shipping their cotton through New York added hundreds of sea miles and weeks of time before their product could reach their customers, Southerners put up with it. Their New York cotton brokers had convinced them the system worked.
While the cotton growers never did a cost-benefit analysis, it was obvious to New Yorkers that the system worked very well for them. A host of intertwined New York businesses fed off the huge profits that moving the cotton through the city’s ports generated. Off-loading the cotton from ships coming from the South and then reloading it onto ships bound for Boston or England kept thousands of stevedores employed on the docks. Tracking the handling of those same bales kept clerks employed. Taking the bales to a New England or English port and then returning with agricultural equipment and luxury goods kept shipowners, their captains, and crews employed. Selling the latest Paris fashions to Southern belles kept New York City dry goods store owners employed. Importing the latest English steel plows or selling the more expensive ones manufactured in New England to Southern planters kept the agricultural merchants employed.
Eventually, the New York brokers gave in to the complaints of Southern growers who sometimes watched the price of cotton fall while their crop was still languishing on a New York dock when it could have been already spun into cloth had it sailed directly from Charleston.
The tonnage of cotton actually passing through New York declined in the mid-1850s, but cotton remained the mainstay of Northern trade. The shipowners were New Yorkers; the bankers who advanced Southern plantation owners the cash to plant and raise cotton were New Yorkers; the men who insured the ships and the cargo were New Yorkers; and the merchants who sold Southerners expensive goods and furnishings once the cotton was sold were New Yorkers. About the only New Yorkers who lost out on the slow shift of direct shipping from grower to spinning mill owner were the city’s dockworkers. Everyone else continued to make money on the fiber.
Giddy New Yorkers and grumpy Southerners both estimated that as much as forty cents of every dollar exchanged for cotton went to New Yorkers. New Yorkers had not planted, cultivated, picked, or baled any cotton, nor had they taken on any of the risk of flood, drought, wind, hail, or insects destroying that year’s crop, but they reaped the lion’s share of the profits from cotton.
New York bankers defended their involvement by insisting that were it not for wise New Yorkers handling the financial transactions, the babes-in-the-woods Southerners would be taken advantage of by the wily British textile manufacturers.
“Without the intervention of the great capital and demand at New York, the producer would be entirely at the mercy of the buyer in whatever port abroad his cotton might land, and he would in no case find a greater economy than at present,” observed one banking insider.
Other Northerners insisted that Southerners should thank their lucky stars that Northern bankers deemed cotton growers worthy of receiving Northern loans.
“The growth in wealth in the cotton states may be traced almost entirely to eastern capital. Everybody knows that the cotton planters of the Southwestern states procure large supplies of clothing for their slaves and of every article required for their own consumption, upon credit from the neighbouring merchants, in anticipation of the next year’s crop,” wrote one economist.
And it was not just from raw cotton passing through the city both literally and figuratively that New Yorkers were getting profits. The New York Journal of Commerce, a New York City publication, estimated that just in 1849 alone, Southerners had purchased more than 76 million dollars’ worth of goods from New York merchants. A decade later, another economist estimated that figure had nearly doubled, and the five major cotton states of the South (Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama) had contributed more than $200 million in business for New Yorkers.
Even that considerable sum may be underestimated, as later economists believed that nineteenth century economists had not figured indirect financial benefits such as New York’s in-transit trade with New England and Midwestern states. These regions also manufactured considerable goods and foodstuffs that passed through New York on their way to the South. Inevitably, Northern culture and Southern culture began to touch each other, though both would have rejected merging either outright.
Southerners began to think of New York City as a vacation destination to see live theater, buy furnishings, shop for diamonds at Tiffany and Company (founded in 1853), and eat at famous restaurants such as Delmonico’s (founded in 1837).
In 1836, a Southern novelist sounded like a member of the New York Chamber of Commerce when he wrote: “Every southerner should visit New York. It would allay provincial prejudices, and calm his excitement against his Northern countrymen. The people here are warm-hearted, generous, and enthusiastic, in a degree scarcely inferior to our own southerners.”
Getting a tour of duty at New York’s Fort Hamilton was considered a plum assignment for all young officers. Lieutenant Robert E. Lee, U.S. Army, would often take the ferry from Brooklyn to New York City because he enjoyed riding his horse down Broadway.
Lieutenant Thomas J. Jackson would be less interested in the bright lights of Broadway, but more interested in studying religion at his stay at Fort Hamilton. Jackson would be baptized at St. John’s Episcopalian church in Brooklyn. Twenty years later when he was a professor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, Jackson, twice married, would bring both of his wives at different times to New York City. On one trip, he visited a famed New York hydrotherapist at 47 Bond Street (today’s Il Boco restaurant in NoHo). On another honeymoon, Jackson and his second wife climbed Trinity Church’s steeple to get a good look at the city.
Professor Jackson remained impressed with New York City for the rest of his life. When he bought a house in Lexington, Virginia,