[davidjquackenbush]

"foreign goods that the nefarious Yankees would force them to bring in through New York.

Is there some claimed mechanism for this coercion?

[Non-Sequitur]

No, other than the evil North forcing the south against its will to route all imports through New York and northern ports for transhippment to points south. The general gist of their arguement is that since agriculture accounted for 75% to 85% of all exports then the south accounted for the same amount of imports. It totally ignores the fact that the person growing the cotton was not necessarily the person exporting it. The concept of a middleman gets lost in there somewhere. It also ignores the fact that if the south really did account for such an overwhelming percentage of all imports then they would have had the economic clout the get the goods shipped directly to their ports and forget the routing through New York. The fact that it didn't happen that way is strong evidence that the demand in the south just wasn't there.