[FLT-bird]

“The Southern states WERE being economically exploited.”

You might want to rethink that.

You can’t be getting screwed or get a bad deal if you are rich? You can’t be still fairly well off but not nearly as well off as you would be if you weren’t getting screwed?

Of course you can. The South was doing most of the exporting. Had they been independent, they would have been far wealthier.

[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird: "The South was doing most of the exporting.
Had they been independent, they would have been far wealthier."

The cotton South overall was already hugely wealthy.
So the issue here is, who owned the transportation, banking, warehousing & insurance needed to get product into customers' hands?
No doubt some of that was already owned by Southerners, and I'd argue it certainly didn't require independence for Southerners to own more of it.
It only really required that more devote themselves to such enterprises, but here we run into the Wigfall rules:

"We are an agricultural people; we a primitive but civilized people.
We have no cities-we don't want them.
We have no literature-we don't need any yet.
We have no press-we are glad of it.
We have no commercial marine-no navy-we don't want them.
Your ships carry our produce and you can protect your own vessels.
We want no manufactures; we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes.
As long as we have our cotton, our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from these nations with which we are in amity."

Wigfall's words do not suggest a people chomping at the bit and raring to go towards modern industrialization and finance centered economies.