That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources, which supply our treasury, will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe.There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop.
-- New York Post, Mar. 2, 1861
And The New York Times summed up the call to arms this way:
With the loss of our foreign trade, what is to become of our public works, conducted at the cost of many hundred millions of dollars, to turn into our harbor the products of the interior? They share in the common ruin. So do our manufacturers...Once at New Orleans, goods may be distributed over the whole country duty-free. The process is perfectly simple... The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North...We now see clearly whither we are tending, and the policy we must adopt. With us it is no longer an abstract question---one of Constitutional construction, or of the reserved or delegated powers of the State or Federal government, but of material existence and moral position both at home and abroad.....We were divided and confused till our pockets were touched." [Emphasis supplied.]
---New York Times March 30, 1861
So, how about this one, Non-Sequitur? It was about the Benjamins. It was about tariffs, and the tariffs were about business. It was all about business.
The Times editorialist threw in that little adjective, "moral", as an afterthought -- the statement was too raw, otherwise. Business came first. I would argue that business came first, second, and third -- with The New York Times, everyone in New York, and everyone in the North who participated in the real decision-making -- the decision to go to war to conquer the South, and make her behave. These editorials that trumpet this call to war (not merely secession, like the document you introduced) don't mention slavery once.
With federal legislation -- legislation favoring the New England shipbuilding industry, that forbade American coastal trade to be carried in foreign bottoms, that subsidized American ships by imposing penalties on exporters who shipped in foreign-flagged vessels, and other legislation like the Warehousing Act, which postponed import duties on goods stored in (New York's abundant) warehouses until they were sold -- the Yankee merchants captured the entire export trade of the South and the West for their own ports and profited mightily off that trade.
That was the real deal, your real cause of the Civil War. It was the tariffs, and sectionally advantageous federal legislation, and the businesses they favored.
My goodness, two newspaper editorials and the case is closed. No need for statistics or documentation. Never mind the fact that far from drying up, tariff revenue expanded greatly. And the fact that the Post was a Democrat paper probably doesn't enter into it either. And if you get right down to it, much of it doesn't make a lick of sense. If New Orleans is in an independent confederacy, a foreign nation, then how can goods come into New Orleans and be distributed nationwide duty free? At some point they travel from the confederacy to the U.S. and at that point then doesn't it make sense that the U.S. duty would be levied? So confederacy or no confederacy, the tariff would be collected regardless of whether the goods come in at New York or at New Madrid, Mo. The Benjamins would still come rolling in.
With federal legislation -- legislation favoring the New England shipbuilding industry, that forbade American coastal trade to be carried in foreign bottoms, that subsidized American ships by imposing penalties on exporters who shipped in foreign-flagged vessels, and other legislation like the Warehousing Act, which postponed import duties on goods stored in (New York's abundant) warehouses until they were sold -- the Yankee merchants captured the entire export trade of the South and the West for their own ports and profited mightily off that trade.
You make less and less sense as you go along. Millions of bales of cotton were exported from southern ports each year leading up to the rebellion, somewhere over 90% of the total. The largest cotton exporting Northern port was New York with the 1/7th the total imports of New Orleans alone. So all those ships arriving and leaving full of cotton. But they were apparently arriving empty since upwards of 94% of all tariffs were collected in Northern ports. So if the south imported such an enormous amount of goods from overseas, as you would have us believe, then why didn't they come directly to the southern ports? Why the roundabout way? Why drop off in New York, pay tariff, and then ship it south? And drop that "Warehousing Act" crap. The act was designed to allow goods destined for customers elsewhere to be warehoused under bond without paying duties. In otherwords, a New York merchant could by goods in London, get them in New York, and then ship them to a customer in Cuba or where ever without having to worry about customers. What other use for the law was there? You talk about merchants storing stuff in New York for later sale. Well how stupid is that? Why import something to begin with if you don't have a customer for it? Why put your money up to buy it, go through the expense of shipping it, then pay for storing it, and then look for a buyer? Just how dumb do you think they were?
That was the real deal, your real cause of the Civil War. It was the tariffs, and sectionally advantageous federal legislation, and the businesses they favored.
Which is, of course, why every compromise proposal floated in the Senate concerned tariffs and tariffs alone. Why Jefferson Davis, Robert Toombs, Robert Hindmann all proposed Constitutional Amendments on tariffs. Why Robert Crittenden headed the Committee of Thirteen to discuss tariffs. Why all the Declarations of the Causes of Secession mention tariffs and the Southern Tariff-Paying states to the exception of all else. Oops. Wait a second! Every one of those proposals, regardless of author, concerned slavery and nothing else. Every declaration mention slavery most of all, and describe the south as slave-owning states. And when the south started the war at Sumter they started it over slavery, and not tariffs.