When we left Morehead City, N.C. in the U.S.S. Raleigh heading for England, we went north along the coast to the vicinity of New York City and followed the great circle route. Running down to Charleston or Savannah would have been not that much more of a big deal than landing in NYC. In some seasons, it might have paid to offload in NYC because of potential bad weather, but it was surely more expensive to offload onto wagons or trains for transshipment to southern states. You'd even be better served off-loading in Charleston if you were shipping to New Orleans than off loading in NYC for the same destination.
Don't forget this was a time when you could sail around South America by Clipper faster than you could travel to California overland.
Bruce Catton also states in "The Coming Fury" that southern rail systems were feeder systems from the cotton producing areas --outward--. Bringing -in- cargo was not planned for -- and I don't believe it was done on any large scale.
>"To buy at home or abroad the the goods the army needed was one thing; to move them to the places where the army wanted them was quite another. Lacking a financial and industrial system equal to the demands of a large war, the South lacked also a proper transportation system. It had many railroads but no real railroad network, because hardly any of its railroads had been built with through traffic in mind.
Most of them had been conceived of as feeder lines, to move cotton to the wharves at river towns or at seaports...this handicap, to be sure, existed also in the north, but there it was not so serious. It had been recognized earlier, and it was being removed; and the significant point was that in the North it -could- be removed, and in the South, it could not.
--The Coming Fury, p. 438-439, by Bruce Catton
"....under the crushing Civil War tasks of moving gigantic quantities of food, troops and military equipment, Confederate railroads succumbed faster than Confederate troops. By midwar, an aid to the Confederacy's western commander lamented that, "locomotives had not been repaired for six months, and many of them lay disabled." The colonel knew "not one place in the South where a driving-wheel can be made, and not one where a whole locomotive can be constructed."
--The South vs. The South, p. 63-64 by William W. Freehling
"By an index that combines population and square miles of territory, the South's railroad capacity was not only less than half the North's, but also less than that of several European countries in 1860. Combining the two measures of industrial capacity [textiles and pig iron]...the South produced only one-nineteenth as much per capita as Britain, one-seventh as much as Belgium, one-fifth as much as the North and one-fourth as much as Sweden..."
-- BCF, p 91.
The south simply was not consuming a lot of goods from overseas prior to the war.
Walt
I wasn't suggesting that shipping goods from Europe to the South was more efficient routing through the Northeast because they could there be placed on railroads or wagons. Stopping in NYC allowed imports to be sorted there and placed (based on orders from jobbers/retailers) on more efficient intracontinental ships headed to various Southern ports. Meanwhile, the intercontinental ships could resupply at NYC or Boston and take an export load back to Europe.