I’m going to take the chance on replying, even though it apparently causes me to be confused with someone else, because I’m really interested in answers to what seems to be a disconnect between what you are saying and what the records show. In December 1864 wasn’t Lincoln reporting tariff revenue of over $100 million for the fiscal year that ended in June or July? And isn’t that amount greater than it was prior to the war? And wasn’t all that tariff revenue generated without Southern consumers?
Funny, that's exactly the same argument made by Non-Sequitur in the past. Here was part of my response to him/her in the past (linked to above):
After applying the tariff rates to the revenue to determine the value of the imports, I then adjusted the number by the inflation figure. I find that the value of imports to the North relative to the total 1860 import value was:
1860: 1.00
1861: 0.82
1862: 0.50
1863: 0.52
1864: 0.54
1865: 0.38
Don't you understand inflation, Doodle? An 1864 dollar was not worth near what it was worth in 1860 because of wartime inflation that the North underwent. The true value of 1864 imports went down in 1860 dollars compared to what it had been in 1860. If your savings are largely in money markets these days, you probably have more money now than than you did before because your money earned a little interest. But because the true inflation rate is higher than what the government says (though nowhere what it was during the war above), your money market savings will purchase fewer goods than they used to.
Let's look at what happened in 1861 with no inflation applied (from another old post of mine to Non-Sequitur):
Here's data on the change in the value of imports at the Port of New York from 1860 to 1861 on a monthly basis [Source of the data that went into my calculation: the 1865 Appleton's "Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events"]:
Month ... % change from 1860 to 1861
Jan ..... 23.5
Feb ..... -15.6
Mar ..... -22.8
Apr ..... -12.3
May ..... -11.5
Jun ..... -34.0
Jul ..... -40.0
Aug ..... -65.7
Sep ..... -55.1
Oct ..... -49.2
Nov ..... -37.5
Dec ..... -54.8
Hey, this is going to be easy. I can recycle all of my old responses to Non-Sequitur.
Tariff revenue for the years you mention is not germane to my comments.
I was pointing out the conditions between December 1860 and April of 1861 to demonstrate the reasons behind Lincoln's orders to send US Navy warships and civilian steamers loaded with troops to Charleston and Pensacola.