I know you’re walking down the Mason Dixon line until you get to Tara, err, the fallacy that southern cotton paid for northern imports. Let’s see what people at the time said about that.
“When the valued exports and imports of any of the Southern states are compared, it is found that the former is invariably exceeds the latter, in consequence of the want of a consuming class… It is common theme for the Southern politicians to lament the want of enterprise among the merchants in conduct a foreign import trade… But the truth is, there are few imports required, for every Southern town tells the same tale.”
-North America, its Agriculture and Climate, by Robert Russell, Edinburgh 1857
“A very large part of our duties are collected on the class of goods for which there is almost no demand at all from the South, either directly or indirectly – woolen and fur goods, for instance; of the goods require for the South not a few have been practically free. The whole slave population of the South consumes almost nothing ... The majority of the population habitually makes use of no foreign production except chicory, which, ground with peas, they call coffee. I have never seen reason to believe that with absolute free trade the cotton States would take a tenth part of the value of our present importations. And as I can judge from observation of the comparative use of foreign goods at the South and at the North, not a tenth part of our duties have been defrayed by the South in the last twenty years.”
- The Cotton Kingdom, Vol. 1, by Frederick Law Olmsted, New York – London, 1861
I haven't suggested that. I just asked where the New Yorkers got their money to pay for European goods.
Could they have gotten it from their trade in Northern goods bought by Europe?