[Ditto]

Cotton, tobacco etc. were all prominent EXPORTS of the south to the rest of the world. They were comparatively advantaged in each had virtually no reason to import any of them to begin with.

In 1860, they "imported" a total of $237M worth of goods into the Confederate states. Of course the word "import" must be modified here to say that $200M of that was inter-state trade from the North with only $37M being from the rest of the world. I'll have to look up the other end of the deal -- i.e. how much cotton, sugar and tobacco Northern states bought from the south, but with twice the population it's easy to assume that the North bought at least twice that $200M amount from the south. The South had to have a positive balance of trade with the North.

Those imports to the future confederate states included: $42M of woven cotton goods ($27M from Northern states & $15M from other countries)
$3M worth of Sugar (none from the north)
and $2M worth of Cigars --- all from foreign sources. (Cubans made damn fine cigars even back then.)

So of their total foreign imports in the year 1860 of $37M which were subject to US tariffs, 54% consisted of Cotton goods, sugar and cigars.

LOL. So you would have us think they were willing to go to war about tariffs they were paying on things they grew at home.

The damn war wasn't about tariffs GOP ---- It was all about slavery!

[GOPcapitalist]

Please post a source for your stats and/or how you derived your figures. As for woven cotton imports, where do you think Britain or wherever else got the cotton to make them? That's right. The south. And what was the import tariff on that - 15% or something? Well, the 1857 tariff had a rate of 17% and was considered to be the most openly free-trade of any tariff the US had imposed in half a century. So I would venture to speculate that the 15% rate they used was considered friendly to free trade at the time.