“Correct. The North could not afford to lose the enormous tax income from the south.”
If the South had such large tax revenues, why couldn’t the Confederacy afford to finance their war effort.
Probably because Ole’ Abe blockaded their port and captured two of the major ones right away.
The Taxes came from import Tariffs. The imports came in as payment for Southern Exports which made up about 80% of all US Exports to Europe.
First thing Lincoln did was to throw up a blockade that would stop trade between the South and Europe. No trade, no money. More importantly, the European powers never got to make the much larger profits they would have made with Southern independence.
Had the Europeans established normalized trade with the South and therefore reaped those larger profits, the Europeans would have been very interested in assisting the South in maintaining it's independence.
The War was about that 200 million dollars per year in trade going to the South instead of to New York and Washington DC.
There was enormous wealth in the south. In 1860, the value of slaves in the United States was more than the value of all of the nation’s railroads, factories, and banks.
Lincoln declared war to collect taxes. Plain and simple.
On April 15 and 19th, 1861: “Whereas an insurrection against the Government of the United States has broken out and the laws of the United States for the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed therein.”
On Dec. 25, 1860, South Carolina declared unfair taxes to be a cause of secession: “The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected, three-fourths (75%) of them are expended at the North (to subsidize Wall Street industries that elected Lincoln).
The north had been moving to an industrialized economy while the south had been content with selling high priced cotton to England and France.
So, to answer your question, the South couldn’t support their war effort because the North, rather strategically, rushed to capture Southern transportation systems for over-seas sales.
I could dive into for me what seems like the most concrete support that the war was primarily over taxes, and that is the Corwin Amendment.
I’m not racist, I think we’re all gods great gifts just with different wrapping paper, but I believe, through my research, the Civil War was fought between a mechanized north and an agricultural south that didn’t want to fund the same bullshit we have in both houses on congress today.