You call that moving the goal posts? I simply point out where the money comes from, and you think it has nothing to do with imports? How do you think imports get paid for? Do you think the European suppliers simply give their stuff away? No, they want something in return.
Imports and exports are intimately tied together. You can't have one without the other.
By the way, again your stats are factually untrue. The South was NOT producing about 73% of all trade value with Europe.
Well, see now why I wanted you to find your own information? I knew you wouldn't accept what I said. So if you don't think the South was producing 73% of all the export value of the United States, how much do you think they were producing, and how do you arrive at this figure?
I know a couple of people who claim the South was producing 82% of all the export value, and they have told me this information comes from Official US government sources, but i'd like to see what you come up with.
The topic here is the myth that Northern tariffs drove the Confederate states to secession, thus igniting the American Civil War beginning with the attack on the Federal installation at Ft Sumter in 1861. I have shown how this could not be the case, because in fact tariffs had been lowered before the 1860 election. Indeed, the Tariff of 1857 had been written by Southern interests. Tariffs were only raised later, after the election, because the secessionist senators had withdrawn from Congress, otherwise the legislation would have been voted down.
You are moving the goalposts by switching the conversation to imports. I know you want to repeat the myth of King Cotton, and how the Southern economy drove exports. You want to restate the fallacy of the War Northern of Aggression, when in fact the South started the war. You want to blame Lincoln for waging war to protect the profits Northern industry made off Southern cotton, but that idea also defies logic.
The issue of GNP is relevant to the argument that export revenues were vital to the nation’s economy. The numbers show that exports were only one third of the total profits generated in the country at the time. Furthermore, Southen agriculture was not the totality of exports. At most it accounted for 60-65%, not three quarters. In the overall picture, the ratio of exports to GNP was about 9% in 1859.
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~dirwin/docs/exporttax.pdf
My information on the percentage of Southern production in total exports comes from various sources. Wikipedia states that cotton, the vast majority of Southern exports, were 60% of total exports in 1860.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton
The Federal Reserve Bulletin of 1923 states that cotton exports accounted for 53% of all exports in 1850.
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/FRB/pages/1920-1924/26396_1920-1924.pdf
The New York Times states that ALL American cotton exports, of which only 80% came from the South, were 60% of total exports in 1860.
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/when-cotton-was-king/
Another source puts Southern cotton at 57% of all American exports in 1860.
http://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/US_History_reader/Chapter5/southernecon.html
I would challenge you to produce any legitimate source to prove that Southern exports amounted to 75-80% of American exports in the antebellum period. That was never the case.
Nobel Prize-winning economist, Douglass C. North, said that cotton Cotton accounted for over half of all American exports during the first half of the 19th century, not three quarters.
http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/161/cotton-in-a-global-economy-mississippi-1800-1860
Of course even IF your facts were correct, and they are NOT, your reasoning makes no sense. If Southern production was so vital to Northern money interests then there was every reason to accommodate the demands of slave states. In reality every effort to do so had been attempted. That was aha the Missouri Compromise was all about.
Indeed, industrialists in the North opposed war, and wanted to appease slave interests to keep business going as usual. The mayor of New York City even proposed its own secession, but Unionist sympathies overwhelmed that idea. It was only after the war started thats Northern captains of industry joined ranks with Uncle Sam.
The CSA, had it been formed unchallenged, would have hardly affected the cotton trade, because those rich Southern planation owners would still need the rail and shipping assets of the USA to export their cotton. The whole idea that tariffs led to the war is ludicrous, and disproved by the statements of the Confederates themselves.