New York Merchants. Before a piece of English ironware, a bottle of French wine, or any other imported item could reach an American consumer, it had to pass through the hands of a foreign exporter, a domestic importer, a jobber or wholesaler, and a retail seller. By the 1830s more than half the value of all imports entered at New York, and it was New York's wholesale merchants who dominated this network of middlemen. Their huge auction houses and warehouses on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan supplied the vast majority of regional wholesalers and country merchants throughout the nation, with domestic as well as imported items. Storekeepers and regional jobbers from the West and South made annual pilgrimages to lower Manhattan, where they purchased (usually on credit) and arranged for the shipment of goods for their stores. Wholesale merchants specializing in coffee...