FlT-bird: "McPherson certainly is as are any PC Revisionists who think that WHERE the cargo lands and thus the tariffs are paid somehow means that locality or state are paying the tariff."
Obviously FLT-bird is hoping to misdirect us again.
Nobody has ever suggested Federal tariffs were paid for by city or state governments, that's insane.
Tariffs were paid by the merchants who landed, warehoused and sold their merchandise, simple.
But what FLT-bird, DiogenesLamp and others desperately hope to confuse us about is: who physically owned the merchandise on which tariffs were paid?
They wish us to believe it was Southern planters, when that is clearly absurd, as the example of a Walmart container in Long Beach adequately demonstrates.
Do Texas ranchers who sold their beef to China & Japan somehow "own" the Walmart container and so magically "pay for" whatever tariffs it's charged?
No, of course not, that's ridiculous.
The Texas ranchers were paid market price for their produce, so they are settled up, free & clear, they own nothing except potential responsibility if the beef is later found to have, for example, Mad Cow.
Whatever those cattlemen do with their money is their business, however, they can't claim that any tariffs Walmart's customers paid on that container was somehow "owned" by Texas cattlemen.
And yet FLT-bird & others want us to think New York imports were "really" owned by cotton state planters.
FlT-bird: "So all those commentators at the time, all those politicians and newspapers as well as a tax expert who has written about it were wrong and you are right?
Because the US was importing things in the midst of a war that means it was the Northern states doing the exporting/importing and thus paying the tariff all along?
Please tell me that's not your argument."
Deep South cotton was about 50% of US total exports in, say, 1860, but for every dollar they exported, they also imported a dollar from the North.
This meant, when those ships arrived from Europe in New York, neither their owners nor their customers were Deep South planters, regardless of how hard our Lost Causers hope to confuse us otherwise.
FlT-bird: "If the CSA had gone its own way and was thus free of the Navigation Acts that all but monopolized trade through those areas that had a larger shipping industry to begin with...ie NY and New England, then yes I'm sure they would import in ports that were in their own country.
Rhett and others said as much when he said Charleston would quickly become a great metropolis once the Southern states seceded."
In fact neither Robert Rhett in his "Address to the Slaveholding States" (December 20, 1860) nor Alexander Stephens in his "Cornerstone Speech" (March 21, 1861) made any such comments.
Indeed, both discussed their concerns over slavery far more than any other subject.
So just who, exactly were these great Confederate mercantilists & industrialists who were going to transform the Deep South away from cotton and up to become a world manufacturing, trading & banking powerhouse to rival New York?
Why have we never heard their names, huh?
Rhett & Stephens:
