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DiogenesLamp: "Were the emotional component removed from your analysis, you would see that if 3/4ths of all the trade production comes from one area, and only 1/4 comes from the other, you would correctly conclude that 3/4ths of the imports were created by those exports when a normal balance of trade is maintained.
This is stark.
It's not "grey" at the margins.
If the trade production was closer to 50-50, you might be able to hide the economic reality by asserting all the intricacies of domestic distribution and other economic activity, but this is ridiculously lopsided in favor of the South, and the whole thing pokes out of the statistical noise to such a degree that no reasonable person can deny what was going on here."

In fact, it was 50%-50% because half, not 3/4 of US exports came from the secession cotton-South, the rest came from Union states, some of them slave-states.
Further, for every dollar "the South" exported, they "imported" a dollar's worth of goods from the North.

And the South's political clout in Washington steadily reduced Federal tariffs until by 1860 they were as low as ever.
So Democrats defeated the proposed Morrill tariff increases in 1860 and could have at least compromised them in 1861, had that been their goal.

But tariffs were not their big concern, slavery was, so they said.

Further, for every dollar "the South" exported, they "imported" a dollar's worth of goods from the North.

I doubt you will get this point, but when you have a captive market in which you can inflate your prices over that of the foreign competition, a "dollar's worth" of goods doesn't mean what you are trying to portray it as.

Yes, in the controlled, protectionist market at the inflated prices caused by this protectionism, the South brought in a "dollar's worth" of goods from the North.

Of course that same dollar would have brought in 1 1/2, to 2 times the same value in European goods, but they weren't allowed to get those at the fair market prices because of the protectionist policies of the USA.