> Avoid confiscatory import taxes.
Import taxes (tariffs) were quite low between 1846 and 1861.
The laws had been written by Democrats who did all they could to oblige Southern agricultural interests.
Tariffs were going to go up after Lincoln was elected but Southerners in Congress would have been able to resist large increases if they wished to.
What the secessionists could do (or thought they could do) in the Confederacy that they couldn't do in the Union was secure the survival of slavery.
They may have been wrong about that, but that doesn't justify your being even more glaringly wrong in writing about what was at stake in 1861.
“Tariffs were going to go up after Lincoln was elected but Southerners in Congress would have been able to resist large increases if they wished to. What the secessionists could do (or thought they could do) in the Confederacy that they couldn’t do in the Union was secure the survival of slavery.”
Your comments are interesting.
You argue that the South could not secure the survival of slavery in the Union even though a constitutional amendment requires a vote of two thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three fourths of the states (similar percentages if Convention used.)
At the same time you argue the South could have stopped confiscatory taxation where tariff proponents needed just a majority.
Your arithmetic does not add up.