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I didn't realize the significance of that map when I first saw it. It wasn't until later when people informed me that nearly 3/4ths of the earned export value of the USA came from the Southern States. As soon as I realized that the Southern states were making all the money, yet the money was ending up in New York that I realized there was a much bigger picture here than what I was taught when growing up.

I have since filled in additional details. Not only was the North going to lose huge sums of money if the South became independent, but the South would have subsequently built competing industries to the North, and eventually brought all the Midwestern states within it's sphere of influence.

It would have eventually became the larger and more powerful of the two sections of what used to be the USA. The only way the North could stop this was to stop Southern independence, and for that they needed a war.

DiogenesLamp: "Not only was the North going to lose huge sums of money if the South became independent, but the South would have subsequently built competing industries to the North, and eventually brought all the Midwestern states within it's sphere of influence."

All false because based on false data.
First, in 1860 Deep South cotton exports ($191 million) paid for roughly half, not 3/4, of US imports.
Other Confederate state exports (i.e., tobacco, rice) added less than 10%.
When all such exports were removed in 1861, the results reduced Federal import revenues only 26%, after which they grew in following years by 19%, 37% and 51%.
This demonstrates that Deep South cotton was not as big a deal as pro-Confederates in 1860, or today, claimed.

Second, in 1860 roughly 10% of the US white population lived in the Deep South, another 10% in Upper South Confederate states.
So about 80% of US citizens lived in Union states whose international trade needs were supplied through such Union cities as New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore.
Nothing that happened in 1861 could ever force those Union citizens to use Confederate ports for export & import of international products.

Bottom line: pro-Confederate dreams of grandeur, then and now, were based on false assumptions and misunderstood data.
As it turned out, Confederate cotton was not nearly as important to either the Union or their European customers as some Southerner defenders had fantasized.

"The only way the North could stop this was to stop Southern independence, and for that they needed a war." and a president who did not mind turning the US Constitution on its ear criminally.

DL you might enjoy "When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession" Paperback – December 23, 2004 by Charles Adams

My go to book for Civil War facts.

merry Christmas :))