[DiogenesLamp]

Exports of products by region (South, West, and East):

How are the regions defined? I presume "West" meant California, Washington, etc? Or was it referring to the near West?

I assume "East" meant the North Eastern coastal areas.

If we could find out how much each region produced in terms of the Gross National Product, we could determine how significant the European Trade was to the New York/New England area.

(And therefore how much money was at stake if the South became independent.)

[PeaRidge]

Yes, having a GDP number would be good.

To my way of thinking, having the amount and value of domestic goods shipped out by port, gives you that number. However, the South shipped all sorts of goods North each year for their consumption, so the port figures would reflect the GDP fairly accurately. How much was shipped by rail or wagon is another matter.

One author/economist did develop figures of regional productions that came from the census and customs records.

Name is Thomas Kettell. His work can be found on line.

[rustbucket]

How are the regions defined? I presume "West" meant California, Washington, etc? Or was it referring to the near West?

I assume "East" meant the North Eastern coastal areas.

The map shown by first link in my post 1536 might define the Southern states, but I'm not sure what the various books of economic data mean by the term. I suspect the term, the West, may refer to the Midwest. As you pointed out above, gold and silver were largely the products of California and Nevada. They aren't credited to the West in the first link I provided in post 1530. That source credits gold and silver to the East.

The East didn't produce enough products to purchase what they imported so that region had to pay cash to buy imports. The cash probably came from items they sold the West and the South at tariff-inflated prices. One could argue that the East had a trade deficit they made up for with cash taken from the rest of the country by means of the protective tariff.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp; "How are the regions defined?
I presume "West" meant California, Washington, etc?
Or was it referring to the near West?"

In Civil War era terms, "the West" meant west of Pennsylvania, i.e., Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, etc.
California & Nevada could be called "far West".

DiogenesLamp: "I assume "East" meant the North Eastern coastal areas."

From Pennsylvania north.

DiogenesLamp: "If we could find out how much each region produced in terms of the Gross National Product, we could determine how significant the European Trade was to the New York/New England area."

rustbucket responding to DL: "The East didn't produce enough products to purchase what they imported so that region had to pay cash to buy imports...
One could argue that the East had a trade deficit they made up for with cash taken from the rest of the country by means of the protective tariff."

Or not.

1. First, "the East" did not purchase everything they imported, much re-shipped & sold in other regions of the country.
   
2. Second, those tariffs protected US producers anywhere, north, south or west.
   
3. Third, when cotton exports ended in 1861, according to PeaRidge's numbers, US import tariff revenues fell only 25%.
   That suggests the US was less dependent on cotton than is often claimed.

Bottom line: in terms of this discussion, "the South" can only really include the Deep South hotbed of Fire Eating secessionists, the source of half of 1860 US exports: cotton.
Border slave-states which refused to secede, and even Unionist regions of Upper South states cannot be considered economically as "the South".
One reason is: those regions continued to produce exports for the Union throughout the Civil War.

Note significant manufacturing in many southern states:

[rustbucket]

How are the regions defined? I presume "West" meant California, Washington, etc? Or was it referring to the near West?

I assume "East" meant the North Eastern coastal areas.

I was able to turn up some information that might help. I did find a table of cotton manufactures by state, grouped by region in the 1860 edition of the book "Southern Wealth and Northern Profit" by Kettell.

He lists as Southern states all the ones on the map of Southern states that I posted a link to earlier in post 1536. On the map the Southern states included Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Kettell includes those four states with sll of the other Southern states. The Southern States had cotton manufactures in 1850 of $9,367,331.

Kettell groups the states New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and all the New England states into another category. I suspect he would call that group either the North or the East or the Northeast for that matter. Those states had cotton manufactures of $52,062,953 in 1850.

Kettell lumps the rest of the states and territories together in a third group that includes the Western regions Utah, New Mexico and Oregon as well as what we know today as the Midwest (Ohio through Iowa, Minnesota, etc.). Only Indiana and Ohio had any cotton manufactures by 1850. By Kettell's logic, California would fit in his Western group. The Western group totaled $438,900 worth of cotton manufactures in 1850.

Kettell also makes the point, "...If a Massachusetts factory can make a certain style of cotton goods as cheap as the English, it has a duty of 20 per cent., and 10 per cent. charges, or 30 per cent. preference over the English, which insures it the market at a large profit.”

I note that by 1860 there were a number of mills in the South making cloth and other cotton goods. They would have the advantage of much reduced transportation costs to get the cotton to the mills, but perhaps not the possible economy of scale of Northern mills if Northern mills were larger than Southern ones. The South could possibly export any excess cotton goods to Mexico or other places in the Gulf or Caribbean regions and have a transportation cost advantage over English or Northern cotton goods.