Old newspaper ads prove God’s chosen merchants primarily dealt in the slave trade. They owned the ships, therefore they benefitted not only in the import of slaves, but in the textile factories in the cities making textile from the cotton, then exporting the product on the very same ships. They make it seem like it was the white southern plantation owners that did this, but many of them leased their slaves from the merchants. The plantation owners may have seemed wealthy, but it was pennies compared to the merchants in the cities like New York and Philly who sold the slaves and the textile.