Your economic ignorance is showing again. Such persons are intermediaries in the market. They act at levels in between a good's production and its reciept by the ultimate buyer. The tariff costs etc. are ultimately transfered through their presence though by way of price.
Assuming, as you seem to be doing, that the planter spent all his money on imports
Not at all. You are again missing a key economic concept of trade. Trade does not occur out of the goodness of a seller's heart, non-seq. If I give my cotton to a buyer in Britain, I do so only because he is giving me something in return for that cotton. It may be a payment in money that he gives me. It may be manufactured goods of his own. It may be another foreign product sent to America by a roundabout way through what I use that cash on. But in the end, the only reason I will give him my cotton is because I get something in return for it. When the south as a whole trades out $220 million worth of products, they expect to get payment in return - either return products or money. And if the government puts a tariff in the way that blocks those return products from getting here, the whole circle of trade halts because the south isn't going to simply give away its cotton without something in return.
Which is nonsense since, as Senator Simmons pointed out, we're only talking about $3 million in revenue.
Not at all. As Clingman pointed out, goods can come in anywhere by sea on the North American continent. If New York has a tariff blocking goods from entering and Charleston does not have such a tariff, the foreign shippers will go to Charleston to avoid paying that tariff and the good is delivered. As a result, nothing will come in through New York and if nothing comes in through New York, no taxes are paid. The confederacy created exactly that kind of a situation for New York, and in doing so threatened to undermine the entire northern government's redistributionary government intervention-based economy. And if you still doubt Senator Clingman's arguments, answer me this - why were these exact same arguments used by the New York Times, an indisputably pro-north newspaper, only two weeks later in an effort to pursuade Lincoln to go to war?
And your arrogance is showing again. If the southern planter sells his cotton to a broker then where do tariffs come into play? The broker pays no tariff on the exports and the planter has his money to spend locally.
If I give my cotton to a buyer in Britain, I do so only because he is giving me something in return for that cotton. It may be a payment in money that he gives me.
And if I sell my cotton to a New York buyer then what do I care how he gets rid of it? You seem to be insisting that the southern planter was deeply involved with purchasing the goods in Europe for import. I believe that it was PeaRidge who offered the charming picture of thousands of southern planters riding their cotton bales across the pond to go on their shopping spree in Europe only to be gouged on their return by that evil tariff. A more likely scenario is that the southern planter played no part in the cycle other than selling his produce to someone who would then export it. It would stand to reason that the planter would want to limit his risk as much as he could. Selling it right out of the gin meant that he didn't have to run the risk of losing the goods in a shipwreck or be at the mercy of international trade variables. He had his cash in hand to spend as he wanted, on what he wanted.
As Clingman pointed out, goods can come in anywhere by sea on the North American continent.
And as Simmons pointed out the small amount of tariff money collected in the south indicates that there was little southern demand for the goods. Why should I accept Clingman's statistics over Simmons? Clingman offers nothing to back up his $150 million figure.
If New York has a tariff blocking goods from entering and Charleston does not have such a tariff, the foreign shippers will go to Charleston to avoid paying that tariff and the good is delivered.
If there was that much of a demand down south then the goods would have gone there directly, not through New York. They did not, so obviously demand was much greater up North than down south. The imports would have continued to go to the customer regardless of tariff because they would have done the New York merchant no good sitting on the dock in Charleston.