Nonsense. Blockades are intended to weaken the enemy's fighting capacity. Finance is directly related to the ability to fight. Confederates recognized that. They believed cotton would win them the war. The Union took them at their word and struck at the source of their wealth.
Seriously, economic competition as the "*ENTIRE* reason for the war"? That's crazy. You are so in love with your idea that you don't see how ridiculous it is. In 1860 even the North was still agrarian and not that well off, the idea that the South was going to leap to affluence simply by imposing lower tariffs is absurd.
It would create them wealth, which over time equates to power.
Cotton planters already had wealth. They weren't about to turn that into industrial capacity or mass affluence. They had no intention to do anything like that. There were industries in the South, but there were limits to how closely slave society and modern industry could mesh.
Slave labor undercut free wages. Free workers didn't want to go to the slave states. Slaveowners wanted tight control over their labor force to the point where it hurt the economy. And even those Britons who loved Southern cotton recognized that slave societies were inherently unstable and didn't like to invest in them.
If you are going to keep applying modern morality in an anachronistic fashion, you are just going to keep the discussion going around in circles. Stay with the zeitgeist currently in discussion.
You like to accuse people of judging the past by present-day standards. You do the same thing -- only worse. You say that slavery couldn't be an issue because Northerners weren't immediatist abolitionists or color-blind anti-racists, that Northerners were indifferent to slavery because they weren't lovingly kind and accepting of Blacks.
That wasn't going to happen. But people can morally object to the treatment of an oppressed group without wanting to live with them. They can care about freedom without being paternalistically occupied with every aspect of the well-being of others. That desire for freedom isn't wholly selfish. A desire for a prosperity and economic growth isn't wholly materialistic. If you'd rather live in a free society or a wealthy society, than an enslaved or unfree society, are you only being selfish and materialistic?
You give your beloved cotton planters every benefit of the doubt. Every Northern attitude is crudely reduced to materialistic terms, but what's by your own standard a very mercenary and materialistic motive on their part is accepted without investigation as legitimate. Of course it's possible to criticize Northern attitudes to slavery and race and find them lacking by today's standards. But one has to apply the same degree of scrutiny to Southern attitudes and behavior or one's analysis is worthless.
It didn't.
The Union took them at their word and struck at the source of their wealth.
They struck at the source of Wealth that was denied them because of Southern Independence. The losses of that Wealth to the Union were immense, and the competition which would have been created by normalized Southern Trade with Europe would have been even more immense.
You are being foolish if you do not recognize how much lost *MONEY* was at stake for the Union.
In 1860 even the North was still agrarian and not that well off, the idea that the South was going to leap to affluence simply by imposing lower tariffs is absurd.
Why do you keep cutting off pieces of my argument? Lower Tariff's would have had a role in enriching the South, but returning the profits directly to their places of origins (such as New Orleans) would have a greater role.
That excerpt I quoted in an article above indicated that New York/New England shipping/banking/insurance/etc was skimming off forty percent of the value of that trade.
Are you going to tell me that a 40% increase in your income stream would be irrelevant to an increase in your wealth?
Direct Trade would build Banking/Insurance/Warehousing/etc industries in the ports to which such trade was entering and leaving. Cutting New York out of the loop would result in a buildup of Industries in the source ports for exports. More involved manufacturing would eventually follow.
Those in a position to lose great sums of money from an independent South could see those losses clearly, even if you do not seem to be able to do so.