[davidjquackenbush]

Thank you. Let's form a betting pool on how soon a defender of the tariff theory of the Civil War will respond. I bet . . . . . six months.

[Non-Sequitur]

It may be sooner than that. There was one poster who used to spin a delightful scenario of Mr. and Mrs. Cottonplanter and their annual migration to Europe, accompanying their bales of cotton. Once there they would sell them and immediately spend everything on foreign goods that the nefarious Yankees would force them to bring in through New York. Never mind the fact that hundreds of thousands of southerners making an annual trip to Europe made no sense and if they spent all their money in Europe then there would be nothing left to keep the local economy going but that is how the sothron mindset works. The one inescapable fact is that if the south accounted for 87% of our imports then that kind of demand would lead to direct trade between southern ports and Europe. Charleston should have been pulling down $30 million per year in tariff revenues and New York should have been a ghost-town. But the opposite was true.