Don’t be too mystified about the cotton sitting on rail cars. The effect was like OPEC: The North was the South’s market for that cotton. With the cessation of trade, the price of cotton went up five-fold, MORE than making up for lost volume. Also, keep in mind, the cotton wasn’t owned by the government, but by the wealthy plantation owners whose fortunes the war was being fought to protect. They could no more have requisitioned the cotton cost-free than they could have requisitioned more rifles or warships cost-free. Finding alternative markets for cotton would have meant sea-faring, but the South’s PROBLEM was a lack of an industrial base to build up a navy.
The South’s problem wasn’t a lack of cash; They couldn’t simply buy more guns, more steel, etc.
The doom of the South was that they were insanely quick for war. Confederate apologists always take Lincoln’s talking down war and interference as insincere politics, but that’s absurd: if he were planning an invasion, the last thing he would do would be to politically undermine the case for war. The Union was withdrawing from nearly all southern bases. The notion that Ft. Sumter was some sort of effort to build a single, stronger base is belied by the utter failure to defend it.
A strategy for the continuation of the Southern cause would have been to build economic strength while exhausting all political and legal avenues to defend the notion of the States’ political autonomy.
I'm not so sure about that. Great Britain and Europe was the chief market for the south's cotton. That was the reason for the naval blockade which effectively cut the south off from its markets.
The rest of your analysis holds true.
An interesting (to me at least) aside was the privateer blockade runners. They were offered Letters of marque and reprisal and given incentives to act as an ad hoc confederate merchant navy in order to obtain the desperately needed munitions and supplies.
Only the privateers quickly responded to the pressures - and profits - of the market and devoted much of their talents at smuggling to bring silk and Champagne and other fineries to the slaver hoi polloi.
No, 75% of US cotton was shipped overseas:
"By the late 1850s, Southern cotton had accounted for
[Lincoln's] "...blockade restricted naval and merchant access to Confederate ports.
It proved to be highly effective, decreasing cotton exports to Europe from 3.8 million bales in 1860 to virtual nothing in 1862..."
So, if you read all that carefully, what it tells us is that Southern cotton exports in 1860 were approx. 5 million bales, worth $200 million, of which 75%, or 3.8 million bales worth $150 million, went to Europeans.
But even that 25% which went to Northern US mills need not have stopped, had serious efforts been made to keep the peace.
So, you say the Confederate government could not realistically requisition / tax / confiscate all that cotton?
But the market withholding action was not ordered by the Confederate government, it was voluntary, and resulted in the complete loss of that crop!
Of course, my proposed scenario for Confederate independence is not realistic, since it defies human nature and historical realities.
But hey... isn't that what this thread is all about?