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On what basis can you call these “roughly equal.”

On the basis that your number is a small percentage of the total trade. How about you add up the total trade? Go look on page 34.

I dare say that when you have totaled up all the trade between 1820 and 1860, you will discover your number (which I still don't see how you got) is a small percentage of the total.

And I now marvel at your willingness to go to all this trouble to ignore the fact that the South produced the vast majority of all Trade income for the US, while trying to salvage what you wish to believe by attempting to see if you could get the statistics to lie on your behalf.

I dare say you didn't even know the South was producing the vast majority of export income until I informed you of it. You still do not want to believe it, because it make my argument that the North attacked the South to prevent Trade competition, uncomfortably close to proven for your taste.

I have consistently agreed that between fifty and sixty five percent of exports were of Southern origins, subject to possible misinterpretation of origin as pointed out by other posters. What I am zeroing in on here is how the figures for EXPORTS somehow mean Southerners were paying for IMPORTS in the same percentage. You have made no such link.

You were the one who made the claim that exports and imports must balance, and that large trade deficits didn’t not exist in the antebellum era. The figures in this document disproves both notions.

I got these numbers from the chart. If you look at the aggregate figure for total trade deficit, found on the right hand side for 1860, the number is $379.2 million dollars. That is $10.5 billion in today’s dollars. Dividing that figure of $379.2 million by forty years is $9,450,000 per year, or $242.44 million in today’s dollars.

Last year we had a trade deficit of about $568.4 billion with a population of 330 million, or about $17.2 million per person. In 1859 the trade deficit was $26.2 million with a population of about 30 million, or about $877,333 per person. This is the equivalent of about $24.2 million per person today.

How are you going to deny that these numbers clearly refute all your earlier claims? How are you going to spin the fact that there was no balance of imports and exports to sustain your claim that Southerners paid the bulk of the tariffs prior to the Civil War?

DiogenesLamp to SoCal Pubbie: "And I now marvel at your willingness to go to all this trouble to ignore the fact that the South produced the vast majority of all Trade income for the US, while trying to salvage what you wish to believe by attempting to see if you could get the statistics to lie on your behalf.
I dare say you didn't even know the South was producing the vast majority of export income until I informed you of it.
You still do not want to believe it, because it make my argument that the North attacked the South to prevent Trade competition, uncomfortably close to proven for your taste."

And in these few sentences we clearly see that DiogenesLamp's argument is not based on actual history, but on his desperate need to "prove" his untenable thesis that "Lincoln attacked the South" strictly over economic concerns.

The power of DL's thesis means any and all data must be forced to fit it, regardless of historical reality.