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""Now wait a minute. On Friday you were saying that your statistics came from the Treasury report supplement to Buchanan's 1860 State of the Union address. You said, in post #692, "The information is in the US Treasury Report section of President Buchanan's Message and Documents also known as the State of the Union speech. It requires some research." Well, I pulled up that report, read it over and over, and can't find anything like the information you said it contained.""

I did quote treasury figures. See import dollar value. If you have studied that data then what figure did the Treasury Report give for general imports for that year?

I should have been more specific. First of all, the data on consumption came from Encarta. I have not verified the source Encarta but did give you the figures from Kettell which were similar and verified the magnitude of the consumption.

Now that data was on value of goods consumed. The Treasury data was on value of imports..........two completely separate categories.

The import dollar value figures are produced by the Treasury department. They are from July 1 to June 30 each year. They are accurate but you should be careful you understand the data before you quote it. For example, I quoted the import dollar value for 1860 as $354,000,000.

That data is correct. But $336,000,000 was marked on the goods in the warehouse (according to the treasury department)as being for immediate consumption, and tariffs were charged. The balance went into storage, as was permitted by the warehousing act I listed above.

Now, the treasury reports I have do not say what happened to the $18,000,000 difference. Only 5% variance but it could matter to some.

"Now you're telling us that, well, those numbers are sometimes massaged..."

The data that was sometimes "massaged" was tariff revenue data, different that what we are discussing. I should have made that distinction.

"and in any event you got it from Encarta article. Can you post the link to it for everyone to see?"

I have already posted the Encarta article. See #623.

If you have studied that data then what figure did the Treasury Report give for general imports for that year?

$362,163,941

Well, the consumption figures were what we were all questioning. I don't think anyone challenged the overall import number.

As for the Encarta information, it still doesn't stand the smell test because it still means that southerners, with one fourth the population, were consuming ten times the imports--a per capita consumption 40 times greater. But what's more interesting to me in the article is this: "During 1860 the imports of the South were valued at $331 million; those of the North at $31 million. It was thus obvious that the South was dependent on Europe and on the North for material goods." Does this mean that the total for imports to the south includes goods "exported" from the north? If so, the numbers make a great deal more sense.