Value of Total U.S. Exports ..........$278,902,000
Value of Raw Southern Products:
....................Cotton .....................$161,435,000
....................Tobacco .....................21,074,000
....................Rice ............................2,207,000
....................Naval stores .................3,696,000
....................Sugar ..........................197,000
....................Molasses ........................76,000
....................Hemp .............................9,000
....................Other ........................9,615,000
________
Total ( 71% ) $198,309,000
Value of Southern manufactured Cotton exports ............4,989,000
Value of cotton component of Northern Manufactured cotton exports (60%) ......3,669,000
___________
Total ( 74% ) $205,459,000
Value of Processed Foods:
.............Bread-stuffs/processed fish/meats/corn...........$36,640,000
Total Southern Products ( 87% ) $242,099,000
Export Specie for Purchase or debts: ........$57,502,000 assume 20% for overseas purchase.
Total Southern Contribution ....................$252,000,000
U.S. Department of Commerce, U. S. Treasury, Report of L. E. Chittenden, Howell Cobb, Treasurer, Annual State of the Union Address, James Buchanan, J. D. B. DeBow, Charles Adams, Thomas Kettel, W. F. Taussig, Thomas Huertas, Historical Statistics of the United States Department of Commerce, pg. 106,432.
Go ahead and correct these figures.
You are giving the Confederate South credit for much more than it deserves, while failing to list exports for other areas of the country.
My post #248 includes a link to one source of data on US imports & exports of that period (see page 605).
It shows exports of goods as $334 million in 1860, while net of specie was another $58 million.
I assume that represents gold & silver from new mines out west.
This links shows a simplistic graphic of exports & imports at the time, with total exports put at $316 million.
For a detailed breakdown of what those exports were, see this link, referred to as the Hanson tables.
Hanson tables show raw cotton exports as $192 million, which is 54% of $357 total exports.
rustbucket: "I'm not sure where your 1863 figure comes from. Source please. "
Sadly, this link is incomplete, but does give some idea as to what was going on.
It shows:
Yes, some of that is inflation, but the real driver is growth in total GDP, from $4.3 billion in 1860 to nearly $10 billion in 1865.
Again, my point in all this is that while cotton was certainly important to the US economy in 1860, within just a few years the US had learned to get along just fine without it.
Cotton turned out to be less of an economic weapon than Confederates had believed it would be.
Finally, in my post #248 above I put 1860 exports at $357 million, which is a number I'd developed based on other sources, but which can be verified by these sources if we simply discount species exports by half.
Why discount species exports?
Well, like you, I'm not 100% comfortable with them, don't fully understand what the term means.
Anyway, that's how I get cotton exports down from your claim of 70% to a much more realistic roughly 55% of total US exports in 1860.