Yeah, the south was a real hotbed of commerce in 1861, wasn't it? I suppose that Union blockade was really a trade measure.
----------
As the Daily Chicago Times editorialized on December 10, 1860:
The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of the country. Last year she furnished seventy-two percent of the whole . . . We have a tariff [the Morrill Tariff] that protects our manufacturers from thirty to fifty percent, and enables us to consume large quantities of Southern cotton, and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe. This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor, of millions annually
Yeah, I guess it was... I wonder if the Daily Chicago Times was one of the papers the tyrant shut down when he didn't agree with them?
Nah, his home state? If he didn't bother them when forcefully arguing against his own state's black codes, I guess he wouldn't now either < /sarcasm>