Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [347]
Joining the packets on the Atlantic run were ships flying the distinctive pennants of the city’s principal commercial houses. Some of these, like LeRoy, Bayard, and Company, were venerable Knickerbocker establishments. But in the 1820s mercantile supremacy passed to New England Yankees: the Grinnells, Griswolds, Howlands, and Goodhues who had come down in the Napoleonic boom and a swarm of newcomers that now followed them.
The newcomers tended to specialize in particular commodities. Anson G. Phelps and Elisha Peck, originally from Hartford, opened a metal import firm in 1818. Phelps, in New York, shipped southern cotton to England. Peck, in Liverpool, used the proceeds from cotton sales to purchase tin plate, sheet copper, and brass wire, which he sent over to New York. Phelps then shipped the metal goods south by packet or, via the Erie Canal, upstate and out west to thousands of country stores. When Peck retired in 1832, Phelps partnered with another Connecticut Yankee, his son-in-law William Earl Dodge. Like Phelps, Dodge, and Company, the Tappan Brothers carved out a specialty niche in the European trade. Arthur Tappan moved from Boston to New York City in 1815. By 1827, when his brother Lewis came down to join him, he had built up the nation’s largest silk-importing house, drawing on suppliers in England and Italy.
Other New York firms broke into new Latin American markets. Spain and Portugal’s South American colonies had long been off limits to American traders, but now the Creole revolutions were in full swing. John Jacob Astor ran guns and flour past Spanish blockades to revolutionary governments, a profitable if dangerous enterprise. With independista victories, a steadier and more sedate trade emerged: between 1816 and 1822 the number of ships returning to Manhattan from Central and South America rose from nine to fifty-two; by 1825 it had climbed to in. In their holds were Brazilian coffee, hides from Argentina (a specialty of the De Forests), and Mexican silver (a speciality of Edward K. Collins). In exchange, the New Yorkers sent flour, domestic textiles, furniture, carriages, horses, and machinery for sugar mills. In manufactures, however, they were at a disadvantage because the British could better tailor their products to local markets. Despite President Monroe’s insistence that Europeans should clear out of the hemisphere, British finance, British industry, British diplomacy, and the British navy remained paramount in the region.
In the Caribbean, however, British policy backfired. By stubbornly blocking American trade to Jamaica, as it had done since the Revolution, Britain succeeded only in destroying the island’s economy while New York merchants moved on to new opportunities in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Though the islands were still Spanish possessions, the mother country had opened them up to free trade, lest they join South America in revolt. Proximity gave New Yorkers an advantage over their British rivals, and the city finally reestablished its old Caribbean lifeline. South Street commission merchants took up residence in Havana, Cuban planters fell into chronic debt, and Spain’s former ward became an economic dependency of the United States in general, and of New York in particular.
In the 1820s the city also assumed the lead in trade between China and the United States. The Chinese preferred to be paid in silver or gold for their wares—those teas, silks, furniture, fabrics, and blue porcelain tureens, platters, and punch bowls so beloved by well-to-do New Yorkers. With no American mines to supply precious metals in quantity, merchants had to rely on expensive silver imports from Mexico, and they were always on the lookout for cheaper alternatives. Fur was one—which was why John Jacob Astor dominated the China trade in the postwar years. His American Fur Company shipped skins from Mackinac and St. Louis to company warehouses in New York, where clerks repacked them for shipment to Canton.
Another alternative to specie was opium, and in 1816 Astor became America