Replies

DiogenesLamp: "Apparently the South produced 3/4ths of all the gross trade from the United States in 1860. Wait! What?"
If the South was producing 3/4ths of all the trade, then how is New York paying almost all the tariffs?
Something doesn't make sense here! What the H3ll is going on?

Sorry, but regardless of how often you repeat & repeat that lie, it'll never be true.
In 1860 the cotton South produced half of US exports, not 3/4.
The balance was produced in Union states, some of them slave states.
Further, for every dollar "the South" exported, it purchased a dollar's worth of "imports" from the North.
That's how Northerners earned the money to pay for all those New York import tariffs.

Naturally every exporter, including cotton exporters sought and received Federal protection in the form of tariffs on imports of competing products.
And, every exporter wanted higher tariffs on stuff they sold and lower tariffs on stuff they bought, so resolving such competing claims is what politics was all about.
In 1860 US overall tariffs were as low as they'd ever been.
A proposal for modest increases had been defeated in 1860 by Southern Democrats and could have, even in 1861, been politically compromised, as was normally done.

But secession wasn't about tariffs, none of the early secessionists said it was.
Indeed, when Congress was making its mad scrambles in early 1861 to "compromise" with secessionists, none of the compromise proposals included tariffs, nor did any secessionist ask for lower tariffs.

Instead they said it was all about something vastly more existential than routine changes in tariff rates, it was all about slavery.

DiogenesLamp: "And then I learned the rest of the story because it was told in the economic data of the era, and so I changed my mind.
This is called 'objectivity.' "

Complete nonsense because you've now ben told the truth of this matter, & others, repeatedly, and none of it phases you.
You've got your opinions, and the real facts be d*mned.