Bull Snipe to DiogenesLamp:
"your opinion is a cabal of New York bankers and Abraham Lincoln decided to drag 31,000,000 people into Civil War to protect tariffs the government collected and insurance and shipping that might have gone elsewhere." Among the Lost Cause proof-texts is this one, said to be from the New York Times March 22, 1861:
"At once shut down every Southern port, destroy its commerce and bring utter ruin on the Confederate States."
So first, can we confirm the quote itself as being both legitimate and
in context?
Answer: no.
Second, here's this New York Times, from the day just before, March 21, 1861:
"There is growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go."
But we don't have the context for either quote and the one from March 21 suggests the next day's opinion may be more in the nature of "one option" than an outright demand.
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"At once shut down every Southern port, destroy its commerce and bring utter ruin on the Confederate States."
So first, can we confirm the quote itself as being both legitimate and in context?
Answer: no.
There should be some way of using the NY Times archive to find the quote if it was in the paper. I haven't been able to find it myself. One needs the context to figure out what one-line quotes like this mean. Very often writers use "indirect speech" to convey what they think other people are thinking and saying (They are saying this, not that I necessarily agree with them"). Or they speak hypothetically ("If we do this, that will happen"). So one can't always take such one-sentence quotes at face value.