Money is fungible.
Look it up.
Hint: it doesn't mean it's a mushroom.
And there were other sources of income and wealth.
It's not like cotton was the root of all wealth.
Didn't the war prove that cotton wasn't really king?
Your argument requires the Southerners to be content to ship products without getting anything in return, because apparently the money they earned gets used by Northerners to purchase European goods.
Southerners bought products from the North. Moreover, that foreign money you're so obsessed about didn't end up in Southern pockets. What are you going to do with pounds and francs in the middle of Alabama or Mississippi?
Rather, foreign currency would have remained in accounts in New York and other cities. Maybe in Southern planter's accounts. Maybe in Northern manufacturer's accounts. Maybe on the books of banks and brokers.
Money is fungible. Money circulates. If you are a Southern slave owning cotton planter and you use money to buy things, you give up the money. You can't spend it and keep it. You can't use it and argue that morally it still belongs to you.
Call me silly ...
That would be letting you off way too easily.
And the sky is blue. The fact that money is fungible does not explain how the Southern Produced Money did not get spent by the Southerners who produced it.
Again, the Southerners make the money, and someone else spends it for them? How does that work? Are the Southerners content to never receive a return in value for those valuable things that were shipped off to Europe?
I know what you are trying to say. You are trying to say the Southerners earned money from their sales in Europe, and the Northerners acquired this Southern earned money by selling the Southerners products manufactured by the North, and the Northerners kept the European money that the Southerners earned.
But you aren't grasping the bigger point with this scenario. The Southerners were the natural base for the European products, but they didn't get them directly because of the protectionist nature of the whole system. They didn't have to buy Northern produced products if they weren't forced to do so. They could have bought European produced products instead, but for the laws preventing or making it ruinously expensive to do so.
And there were other sources of income and wealth.
There were not other sources of European money. Are you going to argue that the North traded gold or silver for those European products? If they didn't use the money earned by Southerners, how else would they recompense the Europeans for their products except by gold or silver?
As it happens, specie is listed in one of the Charts from that book I post from time to time, and my recollection is that it didn't amount to much compared to the Southern export trade.
There are two sources for the North to buy European import goods. Northern trade exports, (25% of the total) and Specie. (Gold amd Silver)
All of it together was dwarfed by the Southern produced income. So again, I ask, who was the trade base for European Trade?
It was the South.
Southerners bought products from the North. Moreover, that foreign money you're so obsessed about didn't end up in Southern pockets.
Not 40% of it anyway. That portion ended up in the North East to pay all the middlemen involved in the protectionist transactions.
What are you going to do with pounds and francs in the middle of Alabama or Mississippi?
Buy European products without the interference of the North East. They could have bought ships and crews and ran their own trade without the need to use North Eastern shippers, or Bankers, or Insurance, or Warehousing.
The could have bought locomotives from England, or Rail Track, or Steam Engines, or finished Textiles, or paper, or any number of things, and at a far lower price which would make their money go even further.
Rather, foreign currency would have remained in accounts in New York and other cities.
Exactly the status quo which the War was started to maintain.