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Interesting long post.

According to you, the South seceded and the North attempted to prevent secession, solely for monetary reasons. As far as I know, only Europeans who despised Americans, such as Dickens and Marx, made this argument at the time. Americans north and south knew much more important issues were at stake.

Let us assume that the South paid, in one way or another, 50% of the federal budget of $60M, or $30M. This works out to roughly $3 per year per southerner, hardly a massive burden. A federal tax rate of less than 1% of income. The equivalent today would be a family earning $50,000 which paid total federal taxes of $500.

Had the South been allowed to leave peacefully it would have been obligated to tax itself at a much higher rate than this in order to build an effective separate defense establishment.

Is it more likely that the South jumped ship in irritation at paying this $30M per year, or for the reason they themselves said at the time, because they wanted to protect a way of life based on the $3000M or so of capital invested in slaves? An amount, BTW, equal to approximately half the total wealth of the southern states, with most of the rest tied up in agricultural land values highly dependent on this type of labor to be productive.

You also claim that the Union states, to regain this revenue stream of perhaps $30M per year, were willing to tax themselves over four years to the tune of more than $6000M. Not a particularly wise investment!

The South did not secede because of the passing of a high tariff, since the Deep South states seceded right after the election, many months even before Lincoln took office, much less before the passing of the tariff. The tariff was passed as a war tax to raise money, not from the southern states, which had already seceded, but from the northern ones.

BTW, your contention that capitalism was financed by imperialism is the basic argument of Leninism, and is destroyed when careful study of the economics of modern empires is done. What it comes down to is that the areas conquered by 19th century empires were generally poor, often very poor. There was very little there to steal. Thus conquering and controlling them cost much more both initially and on an ongoing basis than just purchasing their meager resources would have cost.

We see this today in Iraq. Financially, we would have been much better off to buy oil from Saddam on the open market than to invade, conquer and occupy to get the oil. The same has been generally true of most empires for the last 200 years or so.

You will notice the absence of proponents of a US conquest of Mexico or South America. Morality aside, such a conquest would be very expensive and there is no chance we would ever recover the cost. Yet Latin America today is immensely more wealthy than most 19th century imperial conquests.

Tribute empires have existed in the past. Rome certainly made money by looting its conquests, as did the French revolutionaries and the Nazis. But the 19th century British, French and German empires all cost more to maintain than they yielded, often a large multiple. Individual Brits, Frogs and Huns did well out of the empires, but not the mother countries as a whole or their taxpayers.

Modern empires were built for many reasons, most of them related to prestige, nationalistic competition and dog-in-the-mangeritis. Getting rich by looting conquests was not one of them.