DiogenesLamp quoting: "Deduct from the exports the silver and gold and the foreign goods exported, and the cotton crop of the South alone exported exceeds the other entire export of the United States, and when to this we add the hemp and Naval stores, sugar, rice, and tobacco, produced alone in the Southern States, we have near two-thirds of the value entire of exports from the South."
Sure, and you could say much the same thing today if you exclude whole categories of exports such as raw materials.
But why do that?
In fact, US exports in 1858 totaled $324 million, including specie (gold & silver).
Of that, cotton totaled $131 million, or 40%.
That's huge, but it's not "two-thirds".
DiogenesLamp quoting: "A separation would take from us this advantage, and it would take from the vessels owned by the North the carrying tradeof the South, now mostly monopolised by them."
DiogenesLamp: "In other words, *we* are correct, and BroJoeK is absolutely wrong.
This statement was contemporary and from OHIO, a Northern state."
No, "in other words" both you and this Cleveland newspaper are exaggerating for effect the importance of cotton & other Deep-South exports to the Northern economy.
Nobody denies they were important, just not as important as DiogenesLamp, PeaRidge and Confederates of that time imagined.
In fact, when there was no trade between Union & Confederacy the Northern economy made adjustments, prospered and prosecuted war without any Southern input -- effectively zero, zip, nada Southern inputs.
DiogenesLamp: "It also points out that the North had monopolized the shipping trade, just as we've been saying."
But the key word there is "mostly", meaning a majority not a monopoly.
The fact is no law prevented Southerners from building, owning and operating their own intracoastal packet ships, and some did:
Intracoastal packet, SS Planter, built in Charleston SC, 1860, loaded with 1,000 bales of cotton.
The US cotton crop in 1860 was approx. 5 million bales worth just under $200 million.