The money came back to them. They used it to buy things. Or they saved it in banks which lent out the money and earned interest for them. Then other people had money which they could use to buy imports. Simple.
If you are an oil sheik, you live a good life off the oil you export. It brings money back to your country. But are you really going to be such a jerk as to claim that everything anybody in the country buys is really yours because you are a big exporter? Are you really going to deny all value to the labor of others? If your workforce is mostly enslaved, you probably will, but is your belief logical, let alone fair?
They had laws helping them, one of which was the "Navigation act of 1817", which gave them a virtual monopoly on all shipping for the nation. Read Robert Rhett's observation of what happened to Southern Ship building and shipping.
He must have been an ignoramus. What doomed South Carolina ship building was the opening up of new cotton lands and the rush to become rich by growing cotton, rather than by building ships. In his memoir, Rhett says that the Navigation Act prevented Southerners from buying foreign ships and using them to conduct trade. That means that he'd already pretty much written off Southern ship-building. They weren't going to be building many ships in Charleston even without the act, and they may not have been doing much shipping either, preferring to let the British handle that.
But of course there were Charleston-based shippers, like Trenholm & Co. William Trenholm's family and Robert Rhett's were closely connected, first as enemies in politics, then after the war in business, and finally in literature and the movies, as Margaret Mitchell is said to have given Trenholm's exploits and Rhett's name to her hero.
In any case, there are problems with Rhett's claims. He was someone with an ax to grind, not an unbiased analyst of complicated developments.
But I have never supported the role of the bureaucracy to do this sort of thing, and I don't think it was as bad back in that era as it is today.
You miss the point. They feared Lincoln would use his power of appointment to build a party in the South that would eventually challenge slavery in the state legislatures. They saw it already beginning in the Border States. That was their fear and it was something they frequently mentioned.
What will be the result to the institution of slavery, which will follow submission to the inauguration and administration of Mr. Lincoln as the President of one section of the Union? My candid opinion is, that it will be the total abolition of slavery, and the utter ruin of the South, in less than twenty-five years. If we submit now, we satisfy the Northern people that, come what may, we will never resist. If Mr. Lincoln places among us his Judges, District Attorneys, Marshals, Post Masters, Custom House officers, etc., etc., by the end of his adminstration, with the control of these men, and the distribution of public patronage, he will have succeeded in dividing us to an extent that will destroy all our moral powers, and prepare us to tolerate the running of a Republican ticket, in most of the States of the South, in 1864. If this ticket only secured five or ten thousand votes in each of the Southern States, it would be as large as the abolition party was in the North a few years since. It would hold a ballance [sic] of power between any two political parties into which the people of the South may hereafter be divided. This would soon give it the control of our elections. We would then be powerless, and the abolitionists would press forward, with a steady step, to the accomplishment of their object. … Governor Joe Brown of Georgia, December 7, 1860
Already Lincoln had won 24% of the vote in Delaware and 10% in Missouri. The Blairs were organizing Republicans in Missouri and Maryland, and there was talk that activists like Robert Breckinridge (the vice president's uncle) and Cassius Clay would organize the party in Kentucky. Once the Republicans had attained 10% of the population in a state, they could serve as kingmakers, and tilt the state against slavery, or such was the fear among secessionists.
After Lincoln took office, and with pressure from him and his administration, a sufficient number of Northern states would have voted for it. As I said, Seward promised New York would ratify it, and if New York did it, it's network of satellite states would have done so as well.
So yes, the amendment had a very real chance of passing had the timing been a little different.
Timing is everything, and a miss is as good as a mile. The chances the amendment would be ratified were slim. The seceded states weren't going to ratify it. They were already gone, but for the time being those states still counted in the math of ratification. If those states were gone, Northern states might not have felt any urgency in ratifying it. Pro-secessionists in the Upper South and the Border States wanted revolution, not compromise. Lincoln's endorsement was lukewarm. His administration sent letters conveying the proposed amendment to the states, but no endorsement or recommendation was included.
What is radical about believing that the status quo would continue if people were elected who did not threaten the status quo?
There are several fine ways I could go with that. 1) Why wouldn't commercial relations between South and North (the status quo) continue as they had with or without secession? Why assume that secession would automatically ruin the North and enrich the South? Realistically, I mean, not with phony baloney, half-educated pseudo-economics. 2) What you think doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed-up world. I'm talking about what people at the time thought, and the secessionists back then had convinced themselves that a "Black Republican" holding office was a mortal threat to their way of life. Why do you think Lincoln got virtually no votes from the South, while tariff-supporting Whigs had always had some support there?