Imports are payment for exports. Is that such a hard concept to grasp? They must be roughly equal over time. There will be slight variation from year to year, but so long as a trade deficit does not occur, the imports will roughly equal the exports. Close enough anyway.
Second, how much would you estimate that investment in new warehouses, ships and trains, as well as continuous operating costs of the same, plus additional insurance, unremembursed losses, commissions, etc. that Northerners carried before 1861 would cut into that 40% off the gross that Southern financial interests hoped to reap from cutting out the middleman?
There must be profit in those industries, else New York wouldn't have had such industries. With the South creating it's own versions of those industries, that profit would have been made by them. With an additional 40% in revenue pumping through their economy, (plus eliminating the costs of the US Federal Tariffs) they would have been able to finance their own startup costs.
New York was very much aware of the threat.
The predicament in which both the government and the commerce of the country are placed, through the non-enforcement of our revenue laws, is now thoroughly understood the world over....If the manufacturer at Manchester (England) can send his goods into the Western States through New Orleans at less cost than through New York, he is a fool for not availing himself of his advantage....if the importations of the country are made through Southern ports, its exports will go through the same channel. The produce of the West, instead of coming to our own port by millions of tons to be transported abroad by the same ships through which we received our importations, will seek other routes and other outlets. With the loss of our foreign trade, what is to become of our public works, conducted at the cost of many hundred millions of dollars, to turn into our harbor the products of the interior? They share in the common ruin. So do our manufacturers. Once at New Orleans, goods may be distributed over the whole country duty free. The process is perfectly simple. The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North. We now see whither our tending, and the policy we must adopt. With us it is no longer an abstract question of Constitutional construction, or of the reserved or delegated power of the State or Federal Government, but of material existence and moral position both at home and abroad. WE WERE DIVIDED AND CONFUSED UNTIL OUR POCKETS WERE TOUCHED."
New York Times March 30, 1861
Southern independence was a horrific financial threat to the Northern States that had built their industries on the belief that they would be handling most of the trade from Europe.
But they would have you believe it was a moral issue that prompted them to invade.
“Imports are payment for exports. Is that such a hard concept to grasp? They must be roughly equal over time. ”
Have you told the Chinese that?
DiogenesLamp: "Imports are payment for exports.
Is that such a hard concept to grasp?"
We've been over this ground now many times and everyone agrees that 1860 cotton exports were around $200 million, an all-time high to date.
So the first bones of contention are: what were total exports and how much more were "Southern products".
Well... if through exclusions you minimize "total exports" plus, by including everything shipped from Southern ports as "Southern products", then you can jigger the numbers to say, 80% or even 90% of US exports were "Southern products".
My response is, first, 1860 total exports including specie were roughly $400 million so cotton was about half.
Second, everything else classified as "Southern products" was also produced outside the Confederate South and therefore should not be counted as necessarily "Southern".
We see this in 1861 when Confederate exports were excluded from Union totals and excepting cotton, "Southern product" exports fell net-net only $3 million.
Indeed, some categories hugely increased.
DiogenesLamp: "Southern independence was a horrific financial threat to the Northern States that had built their industries on the belief that they would be handling most of the trade from Europe."
Such fears even if genuine in March 1861 proved unfounded or overblown.
But DiogenesLamp uses them to claim the Union was motivated strictly by economic issues and that is simply not the case.
When war started at Fort Sumter it was not over economics, but rather over who owned Federal property in Confederate states.
And Lincoln's first response was to call up 75,000 troops to retake those properties.
It was that call, not economics, which drove Virginia to flip from Union to Confederate, and along with Virginia the entire Upper South.
Yes, the next step was a blockade, based on General Scott's Anaconda Plan, but remember that plan was devised years earlier, likely while Jefferson Davis was secretary of war, and was not originally based on any particular economic issues, but simply as a potentially effective method for defeating some unknown future rebellion.
So while DiogenesLamp has a particular burr under his saddle for economic issues, and "New York power brokers" there were other more direct concerns including returning Federal properties, restoring the Union and, yes eventually, emancipation for "contraband property".