So, in other words, it's OK to theorize how a 'free trade south' would have doomed the North but wondering how that same south would pay it's bills is speculation off subject? You yourself noted that the govenment had relied of tariffs as virtually the only source of revenue. A free trade south would have had to come up with other ideas to fund the government. I wondered what they were.
I must admit, thought, that for a country that saw almost all it's revenue dry up - if your claims be true - the North sure didn't seem to suffer from it. Oh, sure, the war caused the budget to explode and increased the national debt to many times it's prewar level but the economy didn't grind to a halt. The North didn't have runaway inflation the way the south did. The north didn't have to fund the war by cranking out ton after ton of paper currency until it eventually became worthless. Maybe the government wasn't as dependent on southern exports as you claim? Or is that more 'speculation off subject'?
Not my speculation.....it was what was being said in the Spring of 1861 by your people.
A free trade south would have had to come up with other ideas to fund the government. I wondered what they were.
Read the Confederate Constitution.
From an American Heritage article on the National Debt:
After the Mexican War, the peace and prosperity of the early 1850s allowed the debt to be cut in half. Then a new depression struck in 1857, and the debt moved back up until, at the end of 1860, it amounted to $64,844,000. Only one year later it reached $524,178,000 and was rising at a rate of well over a million dollars a day.
The Civil War was by far the largest war fought in the Western world between the end of the Napoleonic era and World War I, and its cost was wholly without precedent. To pay for it, the federal government moved to tax nearly everything. Annual revenues, which had never exceeded $74 million before the war, were $558 million by 1866 and would never again drop below $250 million.
But revenues did not come anywhere near to matching outlays, especially in the early years of the war. In fact, 1862 would be the worst year ever -- so far -- for spending in excess of income. The deficit amounted to an awesome 813 percent of revenues (almost four times the worst year of World War II).
Now, the question, not speculation please, is who was lending this money to the Treasury?