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If you had read up on this you would know that the North Eastern shippers had set their prices just below what it cost to use Foreign Ships and Crew under the penalties imposed by that aforementioned law. They were gouging.

I don't see any serious analyses of coastal shipping rates in the 19th century online or in book form. I do see references to rants by slaveowning politicians and secessionist propagandists about how Yankee shippers were charging all the traffic would bear, but there's nothing objective or unprejudiced or serious about such complaints.

Whenever there's sectional or ethnic conflicts you hear complaints about middlemen taking more than their share -- all the more so, when the complainers are used to getting services and labor without having to pay for them -- but they aren't often accompanied with serious breakdowns of prices and costs.

Presumably, there was more than one ship or one shipping line running between New York and Charleston or New Orleans. Of course, any restrictions on market entry would keep rates higher than they otherwise would be, but there would be some competition, and it stands to reason that would help keep pricing from being predatory.

Plus, I'm not entirely sure what makes you think that British or European shippers would be cheaper and more efficient that US lines. Surely, American crews were as good as foreigners, and more familiar with the local waterways. And there was every reason why Americans would want to develop their own coastal shipping, rather than rely on foreigners.

And "coastal shipping" is what we're talking about. So far as I know, the rates and penalties only applied to shipping between US cities, not transatlantic trade. If US coastal shippers were so predatory and New York warehousing was a rip-off, Southern cotton planters were free to ship directly to Europe without having to pay the exorbitant fees imposed by the Northerners.

If your argument is correct, direct shipping between Britain or Europe and the South would have been the norm. If it wasn't, and most trade went through New York, there must have been very real reasons for that, and New York or the North wouldn't have been exploiting the poor, dear, rich slave owners you are so concerned about.

I don't see any serious analyses of coastal shipping rates in the 19th century online or in book form. I do see references to rants by slaveowning politicians and secessionist propagandists about how Yankee shippers were charging all the traffic would bear, but there's nothing objective or unprejudiced or serious about such complaints.

I will see if I can find you some of this material. I recall reading some of it on another Civil War thread, and BroJoeK actually provided some interesting links on the subject.

I don't see any serious analyses of coastal shipping rates in the 19th century online or in book form. I do see references to rants by slaveowning politicians and secessionist propagandists about how Yankee shippers were charging all the traffic would bear, but there's nothing objective or unprejudiced or serious about such complaints.

I found what I believe is the BroJoeK source I mentioned. The Link to it is contained in this message.

Since this "triangle trade" involved a domestic leg, foreign vessels were excluded from it (under the 1817 law), except a few English ones that could substitute a Canadian port for a Northern U.S. one. And since it was subsidized by the U.S. government, it was going to continue to be the only game in town.
Robert Greenhalgh Albion, in his laudatory history of the Port of New York, openly boasts of this selfish monopoly. "By creating a three-cornered trade in the 'cotton triangle,' New York dragged the commerce between the southern ports and Europe out of its normal course some two hundred miles to collect a heavy toll upon it. This trade might perfectly well have taken the form of direct shuttles between Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, or New Orleans on the one hand and Liverpool or Havre on the other, leaving New York far to one side had it not interfered in this way. To clinch this abnormal arrangement, moreover, New York developed the coastal packet lines without which it would have been extremely difficult to make the east-bound trips of the ocean packets profitable."[2]
Even when the Southern cotton bound for Europe didn't put in at the wharves of Sandy Hook or the East River, unloading and reloading, the combined income from interests, commissions, freight, insurance, and other profits took perhaps 40 cents into New York of every dollar paid for southern cotton.

x: "I don't see any serious analyses of coastal shipping rates in the 19th century online or in book form.
I do see references to rants by slaveowning politicians and secessionist propagandists about how Yankee shippers were charging all the traffic would bear, but there's nothing objective or unprejudiced or serious about such complaints."

Here's a serious question, not a trick question, I don't know the answer and maybe others do:
First, is it true that Southern shipbuilding, owning & operating dwindled & died out after, say, 1830?
Second, if so, why, and why did not alleged Northern price "gouging" revive Southern shipping?

I should note here Bubba Ho-Tep's (post #73) stunning quote from Texas Senator & Fire Eater leader Louis Whigfall:

"We are a peculiar people, sir!
We are an agricultural people; we are a primitive but a civilized people.
We have no cities – we don’t want them.
We have no literature – we don’t need any yet …
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."

Add to that LS post #30 on another thread:

"Study after study has shown that slavery was profitable.
Moreover, even though manufacturing was almost THREE TIMES as profitable, the South clung to its slaves.
Gee, wonder why?"

Statistics on the Civil War blockade say that about 1,500 Confederate blockade runners were captured or sunk -- would those not have mostly been Southern owned & operated?
About 80% of 2,800 blockade runs got through -- over 90% in 1861, down to 65% in 1865.
This suggests the total numbers of ships serving Southern ports in, say, 1860 must be in the thousands.
Do we know how many were Southern owned?

So I question: were Southerners really forced to give up shipping, did they just lose interest?

USS Constellation built first in Baltimore, 1797 (left), rebuilt in Norfolk, VA in 1854 (right):