The South -- obviously an agriculture-based economy, and fragile at that -- thriving on cotton and tobacco -- simply toiled for its own survival, trading with whomever they could.
Get on the same page with your fellow liars. Your pal's whole argument is that the South was rich in the antebellum period. The Cotton South was booming in the 1850s. Planters and Southern intellectuals thought cotton would be king forever and supplying Britain would bring them even greater riches in the future. They said so. At length. Try reading DeBow's Review and other periodicals of the day. By the 1850s the Deep South wasn't the frontier country it had been two generations earlier, and it wasn't the nation's poor problem child it was in the 1890s or 1930s. Cotton planters and traders linked their fate with the growing British empire and even aimed at territorial expansion of their own.
Tariffs were intended to help America's "infant industries" grow -- to produce home-grown industries and end reliance on foreign production and global markets. That rationale was getting little outdated by 1860 and would become seriously wrong-headed with the tremendous growth of manufacturing after the war. But it would be stupid and absurd to argue that the small cotton spinner or iron forger of 1840 or 1850 was some kind of globalist elitist and the large-scale cotton planter was a "small is beautiful" localist. No, a substantial number of cotton planters were territorial expansionists who hitched their fortunes to the British Empire, and plenty of poorer Southerners resented them for their arrogance.
P.S. Ask the Irish or the Indians about your monopolistic political economic system that would control every aspect of their lives without representation. Heck, there were some people in the US who might have felt the same way back then.
Informative post ‘’x’’, thanks. We can argue this ad infinitum. It’s right and proper to discuss this very crucial period of American history and everyone here is certainly entitled to express their thoughts and opinions on the subject, naturally so. But the fact of the matter is the South launched a war it had every intention of winning, a war to preserve an economic based on the use of slave labor but the fact is they were doomed from the start. After their defeat at the bloodbath of Gettysburg and the fall of the Confederate capitol of Vicksburg the day after Lee and Jeff Davis should have seen the hand writing on the wall and stopped the slaughter but they didn’t and the blood letting continued for another two years. Many here often call Lincoln a tyrant and a murderer. To me it was Davis and Lee who were the tyrants and murderers. The two of them committed crimes that in any other time and era would have at least drawn them lengthy prison sentences or at the very worst have gotten them hung, as they should have been.