Replies

I don’t assume anything. I wanted to make sure I understood what you asserted, and allowed you the chance to rebut.

Now here’s where logic seems to break down. You and DiogenesLamp seem to believe that every dollar exported in Southern goods was returned penny for penny with imported goods one hundred percent paid by Southerners. This seems dubious at best.

For this to be true, every ship headed overseas would have carry only Southern produced goods, mostly cotton. There could be no mix of cotton and Northern grain or other foodstuffs in the holds. Since exports would be based on orders placed from foreign agents, then foreign needs would dictate the shipment. XYZ Company needing so much of this and so much of that might reasonably order different items at one times just as a retail store does today.

The image of segregation by region suggests the memory of “colored” drinking fountains during Jim Crow. One could imagine port signage reading Northern goods this way, Southern to the other.

Now, even if shipping WAS conducted this way, your assertion assumes that every plantation owner was in the import/export business. And IF they were, that every good they brought back home was destined for Southern markets. By simple mathematics then the demand for foreign goods in the South would have to about three times that of Northern residents. Since on average Southerners were richer, but the population was more stratified, this simply could not be.

The plain fact is you have no numbers for who paid tariffs, and as has been shown many times before, tariffs were in 1860. The Morell Tariff was passed AFTER the Southerners pulled out of Congress.

I don’t say “every”. I note that the overwhelming majority of exports were from the South. In the last decade or so before he war Midwestern grain started to become a significant export. The rest of the exports from the US other than Southern cash crops weren’t very significant.

Something like 60% of US exports were cotton. Yes, it was that important. Southern Cotton went either to Northern textile mills or was exported - most was exported. The South at the time had relatively few textile mills.

Not every manufactured good they bought was destined for Southern markets. They arrived in port and sold to anybody who wanted to buy. We know who did the exporting and those were overwhelmingly the same ones who did the importing. The Morrill tariff was certain to pass the Senate. All that was necessary was to pick off a Senator or two. That could be accomplished with a few payoffs to somebody’s local industry by adding something to the list of goods that would be subject to tariffs or by agreeing to do some infrastructure project in somebody’s state with federal money in exchange for their vote on the tariff, etc.