Read Complicity. They laid out the numbers. https://www.amazon.com/Complicity-Promoted-Prolonged-Profited-Slavery/dp/0345467833 Why do you think Representative Reagan said this on the eve of secession?
"You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the operation of our revenue laws, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of northern capitalists. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and institutions.
We do not intend that you shall reduce us to such a condition. But I can tell you what your folly and injustice will compel us to do. It will compel us to be free from your domination, and more self-reliant than we have been. It will compel us to assert and maintain our separate independence. It will compel us to manufacture for ourselves, to build up our own commerce, our own great cities, our own railroads and canals; and to use the tribute money we now pay you for these things for the support of a government which will be friendly to all our interests, hostile to none of them."
Why do you think Robert Barnwell Rhett said this?:
"The legislation of this Union has impoverished them [the Southern States] by taxation and by a diversion of the proceeds of our labor and trade to enriching Northern Cities and States. These results are not only sufficient reasons why we would prosper better out of the union but are of themselves sufficient causes of our secession. Upon the mere score of commercial prosperity, we should insist upon disunion. Let Charleston be relieved from her present constrained vassalage in trade to the North, and be made a free port and my life on it, she will at once expand into a great and controlling city."
I’ll say this about Rhett… he was a big BSer and a professional liar. Vast millions? The South paid almost zero in federal taxes. The railroads, cities canals… they paid nothing. What balance of exchange did the North have on the South? Rhett was a liar.
Let me ask you this. What was the total Federal revenue in 1860? How many “Vast Millions” was it. And how much of it came from the South? And actually, who controlled the Federal government in 1860?