No Southern or Northern citizen paid one red cent in taxes to the Federal Government. Say tariffs if that is what you mean but do not hide it as taxes, they were not. Southerners were perfectly free to ship all of the cotton they wanted to Europe and use British or French, or Chinese merchant ships to carry that cargo to Europe. The law required cargo being shipped from a United States port to another United States port had to be carried by a United States flagged ship. That trade accounted for about 15% of the Southern Cotton crop which was sold to Northern cloth manufacturers. If there was a Southern owned ship that they wanted to hire to transport that cotton, they were free to do so.
Stop with the sophistry. You know exactly what I mean. The South paid the vast bulk of the Revenue for the Federal Government, even though they only had 1/4th of the citizens of the nation.
Today we call that "taxes."
Southerners were perfectly free to ship all of the cotton they wanted to Europe and use British or French, or Chinese merchant ships to carry that cargo to Europe.
And pay huge and ruinous fines to the Federal government for doing so. This is like Barack Obama saying people could build power plants, but he would make sure they went bankrupt if they did so.
If there was a Southern owned ship that they wanted to hire to transport that cotton, they were free to do so.
Southern Shipping and ship building companies were forced out of business by subsidies paid by the Federal government to Northern owned shipping companies and a deliberate preference from the New York shipping companies towards using North Eastern ships and shipping companies.
The Northern power brokers were just as protectionist to their shipping industries as they were to their other industries, and they held the upper hand in congress. The South was never going to get equity in a system where the Northern interests could keep voting themselves money out of the Southern pockets.