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3 posted on 05/11/2002 9:46:51 PM PDT by VinnyTex
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To: VinnyTex
In his book "Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the Civil War", Stephen R. Wise posts the net tariff collected from the dozen or so largest ports in the year prior to the Civil War. The figures he gives are quoted from Exec. Doc. No. 33, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 1860. The figures given are:

New York - $35,155,452.75
Boston - $5,133,414.55
Philadelphia - $2,262,349.57
New Orleans - $2,120,058.76
Charleston - $299,339.43
Mobile - $118,027.99
Galveston - $92,417.72
Savannah - $89,157.18
Norfolk - $70,897.73
Richmond - $47,763.63
Wilmington, N.C. - $33,104.67
Pensacola - $3,577.60

How can you continue to make the claim that the south paid the majority of the tariff when some 95% of all revenues were collected up North? And the reason the collections were so small had nothing to do with an inability of ports to handle imports. In his same book Wise points out that New Orleans exported almost 1.8 million bales of cotton to overseas destinations in the year prior to the war. Mobile exported almost half a million bales, Charleston over a quarter of a million bales. The capacity to handle imports was there, the reason why comparatively few goods were imported through these ports was that demand for the imported goods was not. Had the south been the largest consumer of imported goods then the financial incentive to ship those goods directly to the market would have guaranteed that New Orleans would have been collection the lions share of revenue and New York would have been deserted. The fact that it was the other way around shows that the demand for the imports was in the North and the overwhelming majority of the tariff was paid by Northerners.

4 posted on 05/13/2002 2:07:25 PM PDT by Non-Sequitur
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