The Civil War did not start over slavery

It's occurred to me that an awful lot of people do not understand that the reasons that Southern states seceded and the reasons the Civil War was fought are not the same.

As I have posted, the South seceded to protect and even expand the institution of slavery, and for no other reason.

But South Carolina did not fire on Fort Sumter to protect slavery. After the CSA was formed in Feb 1861, "Its conservative government, with Mississippian Jefferson Davis as president, sought a peaceful separation, but the United States refused to acquiesce in the secession," according to History.com.

Had the war not broke out in Charleston harbor, President Lincoln would have made sure it broke out somewhere. His correspondence and public utterances make it clear that he was absolutely determined, even including war, that the Union would not be sundered.

There was at the time, and remained for three or four years after the Sumter battle, a substantial peace movement in the North that urged the Southern states be permitted to depart in peace. Lincoln adamantly refused this position, stating that the Union of states was unalterable and no state, once admitted, could separate itself from the Union. (This was, btw, explicitly contrary to the position of one Thomas Jefferson, but let it pass.)

In his First Inaugural address, after the CSA had been formed, Lincoln made this explicitly plain:

I therefore consider that. . . the Union is unbroken; and. . . I shall take care that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem simple duty on my part; and I shall perform it. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend, and maintain itself.

But of course this was a threat, raw and naked, and all his contemporaries understood it that way.

South Carolina seceded on Dec. 24, 1860. Why did they wait until April 12, 1861, to fire on the fort? Because they did not want war. Jeff Davis even sent a delegation to see Lincoln to negotiate the transfer of Fort Sumter to the CSA. The delegates were authorized to set an amount to pay the US government for the fort. Lincoln refused to see them and sent them home.

As late as the day before the battle, Confederate Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker directed that if Anderson and his men evacuated the fort, they would not be hindered by force. Anderson actually told CSA military emissaries on April 11 that he intended to evacuate on April 15, a date that was accepted by the Confederate commander. (Anderson also admitted that he had only a few days' provisions on hand.)

But with a US Navy task force to reinforce and resupply Sumter having arrived and sitting at the harbor's entrance, Confederate Gen. P.G.T Beuaregard knew that dates and timetables meant nothing any more. He sent word to Anderson that the fort would be fired on beginning at 4.30 a.m. the next morning.

By no stretch of the most active imagination can it be credibly maintained that the South fired on Fort Sumter to protect slavery. Having declared itself to be part of an independent nation, S.C. worked for four months to convince the Union to abandon a fortress sitting in command of the harbor's approaches. The state and its new nation would either be sovereign over its territories or they would not. And as long as the fort was staffed by Union troops, they would not. This is how the CSA's leaders understood the situation. They could no more accept a Union-garrisoned fort in Charleston harbor that George Washington would have agreed to permit a British fort in New York harbor after 1781.

There is a widely accepted, though not universally agreed-on analysis of April 1861 that,

... the situation at Sumter presented Lincoln with a series of dilemmas. If he took action to maintain the fort, he would lose the border South and a large segment of northern opinion which wanted to conciliate the South. If he abandoned the fort, he jeopardized the Union by legitimizing the Confederacy. Lincoln also hazarded losing the support of a substantial portion of his own Republican Party, and risked appearing a weak and ineffective leader.

Lincoln could escape these predicaments, however, if he could induce southerners to attack Sumter, "to assume the aggressive and thus put themselves in the wrong in the eyes of the North and of the world." By sending a relief expedition, ostensibly to provide bread to a hungry garrison, Lincoln turned the tables on the Confederates, forcing them to choose whether to permit the fort to be strengthened, or to act as the aggressor. By this "astute strategy," Lincoln maneuvered the South into firing the first shot.

Even in the North, there was widespread acknowledgment that Lincoln was the one who began the war, including among members of Congress (many of whom approved). After the battle, The New York Evening Day-Book editorialized:

We have no doubt, and all the circumstances prove, that it was a cunningly devised scheme, contrived with all due attention to scenic display and intended to arouse, and, if possible, exasperate the northern people against the South…. We venture to say a more gigantic conspiracy against the principles of human liberty and freedom has never been concocted. Who but a fiend could have thought of sacrificing the gallant Major Anderson and his little band in order to carry out a political game? Yet there he was compelled to stand for thirty-six hours amid a torrent of fire and shell, while the fleet sent to assist him, coolly looked at his flag of distress and moved not to his assistance! Why did they not? Perhaps the archives in Washington will yet tell the tale of this strange proceeding…. Pause then, and consider before you endorse these mad men who are now, under pretense of preserving the Union, doing the very thing that must forever divide it.

The Civil War began because of the singular determination one man, Abraham Lincoln.

Interesting trivia:

1. The surrender ceremony was held April 14, but the barrage had lasted 34 hours. No one was killed on either side during the battle.

2. The South did not take Anderson or his men prisoner. In fact they ordered a 100-round artillery salute to be fired to honor them. But a cannon malfunctioned in firing the salute barrage, killing a cannoneer, the only fatality of the whole sad affair and the first fatality of the Civil War.

3. Maj. Anderson was himself a former slave holder. He served the rest of the war in Union service.

4. Fort Sumter was not even completed when S.C. seceded.

5. After an overnight awaiting high tides, a South Carolina vessel sailed Anderson and his men to the Union ships where they were transferred to Union hands without incident.

6. The United States flag was raised again over Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865, exactly four years after it had been lowered. The officer raising the flag was Robert Anderson, then a medically-retired major general.

7. Below, Fort Sumter as seen from The Battery in Charleston, where the CSA guns were (my photo from 2010).