[DiogenesLamp]

It tells me that New York had good port and transportation facilities and could send goods cheaply to large numbers of paying customers.

Yes it did, but that is beside the point. Those tariffs represent import trade from Europe, all of which must be balanced by export trade from the United States.

The vast bulk of that export trade constituted products from the South.

If this book (written in 1860) is correct, Southern export value for 1859 is $198,389,351.00, and Northern export value for that same year is $78,217,202.

That means that 72% of the trade value represented by those tariffs represent money that would have gone to the South if it were an independent Nation, but instead ended up in New York because of laws imposed to make it difficult for ships to trade in Charleston.

So that money ended up mostly in New England.

Those railroads were built with significant portions of money that came from the South, and this "vigorish" system had been in place since at least 1817.

The prospect of that money pile moving from New England to Charleston is why the Union went to war. Their objection wasn't to those d@mn Southern people using slaves, it was that they were going to get cut out of the deal.

[x]

That is the physiocratic idea that land and agriculture are the basis of all wealth. So if landowners give up their money to buy manufactured goods in a sense the wealth and money is still by rights theirs because they "earned" it from the soil.

In fact, plantation owners used their money to buy goods from the North and elsewhere or they invested the money in New York banks. They got full value for the money they earned from exports. Northerners then could use the money they earned in those exchanges to buy foreign goods.

This was (as we all should know by now) the subject of a bitter polemic between Thomas Prentice Kettell (Southern Wealth and Northern Profits) and Stephen Colwell (The Five Cotton States and New York). Colwell demonstrated the fallacies of Kettell's thesis.