They did. Until their finances took a horrible turn for the worse. Pea Ridge posted a article/letter regarding New York businessmen imploring Lincoln do something about it.
3/18/1861
It took only a week for Northern newspapers to understand the meaning of the low Confederate Tariff announced the week earlier in Montgomery.
The Boston Transcript wrote,
“It does not require extraordinary sagacity to perceive that trade is perhaps the controlling motive operating to prevent the return of the seceding States to the Union.
“Alleged grievances in regard to slavery were originally the causes for the separation of the cotton States; but it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding states are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centers of traffic can be changed from Northern to Southern ports.
“The merchants of New Orleans, Charleston, and Savannah are possessed with the idea that New York, Boston, and Philadelphia may be shorn, in the future, of their mercantile greatness, by a revenue system verging upon free trade.
“If the Southern Confederation is allowed to carry out a policy by which only a nominal duty is laid upon imports, no doubt the business of the chief Northern cities will be seriously injured thereby.”