“It's very unlikely that most of those imports made their way South.”
But you do not know that and it is an absurd conclusion based on your opinion, which we all know is highly biased.
In the past you have been given the data on this subject from posters such as GopCapitalist, Rustbucket and myself, but you show no evidence of intellectual curiosity.
Had you considered the data, you would see how wrong you are.
I haven't seen any "data" except Diogenes's silly drawing, which doesn't prove what he claims it does, and a random, unsourced statistic you pulled out of your backside.
If you have accurate figures that show that more imported goods ended up in the South than in the North and if you can provide a legitimate source for them, then produce them now, or crawl back into your cave and die.
One thing to be truly thankful for in this holiday season: we may be entering a second decade of not hearing from "GopCapitalist" - assuming he's not still lurking here under another alias.
I do find this fine post from him from a decade and a half back, though:
The idea that the South would pay a disproportionate share of import duties defies common sense as well as facts. The majority of imports from abroad entered ports in the Northeastern US, principally New York City. The importers paid duties at the customs houses in those cities. The free states had sixty-two percent of the US population in the 1850s and seventy-two percent of the free population. The standard of living was higher in the free states and the people of those states consumed more than their proportionate share of dutiable products, so a high proportion of tariff revenue (on both consumer and capital goods) was paid ultimately by the people of those states -- a fair guess would be that the North paid about seventy percent of tariff duties. There is no way to measure this precisely, for once the duties were paid no statis tics were kept on the final destination of dutiable products. But consider a few examples. There was a tariff on sugar, which benefited only sugar planters in Louisiana, but seventy percent of the sugar was consumed in the free states. There was a tariff on hemp, which benefited only the growers in Kentucky and Missouri, but the shipbuilding industry was almost entirely in the North, so Northern users of hemp paid a disproportionate amount of that tariff. There were duties on both raw wool and finished wool cloth, which of course benefited sheep farmers who were mostly in the North and woolen textile manufacturers who were almost entirely in the North, but it was Northern consumers who ultimately paid probably eighty percent of that tariff (woolen clothes were worn more in the North than the South, for obvious rea sons). Or take the tariff on iron -- it benefited mainly Northern manufacturers (though there was an iron indus try in the South as well), but sixty-five percent of the railroad mileage and seventy-five percent of the railroad rolling stock were in the North, which meant that Northern railroads (and their customers, indirectly) paid those proportions of the duties on iron for their rails, locomotives, and wheels. One can come up with many more examples. Source