The Fitness of the South for Independence

From Cincinnati Daily Press December 14 1860

The Fitness of the South for Independence - Her Agricultural and Manufacturing Resources.

The New Orleans Crescent observes:

While we produce a plenty to live on, within ourselves, we have cotton, tobacco, hemp and other things to spare: and the whole world - not the North alone - for a market. The prosperity of a nation, like the prosperity of and individual, depends upon what is saved at the end of the year, after supplying all wants. This it is which gives the South so great and advantage. What has the North to export? Some breadstuffs, it is true - though in the South American and Cuban markets, and in Australia, it is a notorious fact that Virginia flour will fetch from $1 to $2 a barrel more than flour made in Ohio or Western New York. Cut off the South from the North as a market for manufactured goods, and let the cotton States buy breadstuffs from Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia, and what would become of the boasted power and wealth of the North?
We do not exult over the prospect of these things coming to pass. We are sorry, only, that Northern fanaticism has forced the South to take care of herself, commercially, as well as politically. The spectacle of the prostration of the manufacturing and shipping interest of the North is one which the South will not willingly look upon - but if they choose to bring it on themselves by a fanatical warfare upon an institution of the South which in no respect concerns them, it is their own business, and we presume they are ready for the consequences. The South is able to feed her own people and to clothe them besides, without going beyond her limits - and , if the occasion arise, in any other respect as in these.