The British tariff on Southern Cotton was 15%? Are you sure? Did the Brits tax imported cotton at all?
Here's the link for the data. It's a .pdf so I can't cut and paste, but go to the table on the last page and read the figures on what the south actually imported and how the Confederates set their tariffs. They were every bit as protectionist as the US tariffs of 1857 were.
No. The southern tariff on imported cotton manufactures was 15%. I looked up the southern tariff schedule, BTW. It taxed 431 import articles. 12 of those articles were at 25% - the highest rate in the confederate tariff. The remainder were 10% and 15% with an average overall rate of 13.3%. That made the confederate tariff one of the lowest for any nation in the world at the time. It was also lower than the 1857 US tariff, which had been considered the friendliest free-trade tariff in half a century. Here's the link for the data. It's a .pdf so I can't cut and paste, but go to the table on the last page and read the figures on what the south actually imported and how the Confederates set their tariffs. They were every bit as protectionist as the US tariffs of 1857 were.
A Virginia congressman stood up and informed them of his confidence in Virginia's ability to compete with tobacco from anywhere in the world, refused the tariff offer, and informed the northerners that his state had no interest in benefitting her producers at the expense of the nation or populace at large. Sure enough, the authors of that paper make virtually no mention of it in a paper that cannot be called anything other than a blatant overrepresentation of protectionist sympathies in the state.