Though, geographically speaking, it made little sense to tack on several hundred miles' sea voyage by sending the cotton up north first, instead of shipping it directly from Charleston or New Orleans to Europe, New York's merchants and bankers were able to control the trade by financing the plantation owners' debts between crop payments. Some irate growers estimated that, when interest, commissions, insurance, and shipping were factored in, the northerners had skimmed forty cents of every dollar paid for southern cotton. New York's deep commercial connections with the South led elements of its mercantile class to feel less than enthusiastic about the Union cause; that, plus the Draft Riots, gave the city a slightly Copperhead (proConfederate) reputation. As during the American Revolution, the rest of the country mistrusted New York's patriotism. No matter: after 1865, the city profited by the defeat of the South, just as it had by the war. In the peacetime era that followed, the most important change affecting the city's form was the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Opening in 1883, this East River span, the "eighth wonder of the world," lost Brooklyn its status as an independent city and led to its incorporation, in 1898, with Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx, into modern New York, all subordinated to Manhattan, the nerve center. In short order, a cat's cradle of the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, and many equally workaday bridges and tunnels (no longer wonders of the world) connected Manhattan to the other boroughs and New Jersey. In northern Manhattan, Hell Gate, a section of the East River from 90th to 100th Streets that proved notoriously difficult to navigate (a thousand ships ran aground there in an average year) was tamed by the dynamiting and removal of its most treacherous rocks, in a complicated demolition project that stretched from 1851 to the midi88os. At the northern tip, in an area bounded by the Spuyten Duyvil Creek and the Harlem River, the Harlem River Ship Canal was dug, splitting the Marble Hill neighborhood from Manhattan and joining it to the Bronx. Although the increasing use of steamships had shifted some maritime traffic from the East River to the Hudson in the midi85os, the piers along the East River in Lower Manhattan remained the center of the city's shipping until the start of the twentieth century. After that, the action moved the Hudson River side, since ocean liners and tankers required a deeper hannel and longer berths. In 1900, New York's shippers were still handling twothirds of the nation's imports and onethird of its exports, a percentage that held throughout the massive increase in trade that occurred during World War I and into the early 1920s. Though the port began to lose market share by the midi930s, New York dock workers in 1950 were still unloading and dispatching nearly a third of all foreign cargo. They could still look back to the vital role the port of New York had played during World War II.