Southern statisticians, not satisfied with generalities, attempted to figure out how great was this tribute in dollars and cents.  They estimated that the planters annually lent to Northern merchants the full value of their exports, a hundred millions or more, “to be used in the manipulation of foreign imports.”  They calculated that no less than forty millions all told had been paid to shipowners in profits.  They reckoned that, if the South were to work up her own cotton, she would realize from seventy to one hundred millions a year that otherwise went North.  Finally, to cap the climax, they regretted that planters spent some fifteen millions a year pleasure-seeking in the alluring cities and summer resorts of the North.

=Southern Opposition to Northern Policies.=—­Proceeding from these premises, Southern leaders drew the logical conclusion that the entire program of economic measures demanded in the North was without exception adverse to Southern interests and, by a similar chain of reasoning, injurious to the corn and wheat producers of the West.  Cheap labor afforded by free immigration, a protective tariff raising prices of manufactures for the tiller of the soil, ship subsidies increasing the tonnage of carrying trade in Northern hands, internal improvements forging new economic bonds between the East and the West, a national banking system giving strict national control over the currency as a safeguard against paper inflation—­all these devices were regarded in the South as contrary to the planting interest.  They were constantly compared with the restrictive measures by which Great Britain more than half a century before had sought to bind American interests.

As oppression justified a war for independence once, statesmen argued, so it can justify it again.  “It is curious as it is melancholy and distressing,” came a broad hint from South Carolina, “to see how striking is the analogy between the colonial vassalage to which the manufacturing states have reduced the planting states and that which formerly bound the Anglo-American colonies to the British empire....  England said to her American colonies:  ’You shall not trade with the rest of the world for such manufactures as are produced in the mother country.’  The manufacturing states say to their Southern colonies:  ’You shall not trade with the rest of the world for such manufactures as we produce.’” The conclusion was inexorable:  either the South must control the national government and its economic measures, or it must declare, as America had done four score years before, its political and economic independence.  As Northern mills multiplied, as railways spun their mighty web over the face of the North, and as accumulated capital rose into the hundreds of millions, the conviction of the planters and their statesmen deepened into desperation.