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x: "Another question is whether Southern Democrats really had secession on their minds when they split the party, thus ensuring Lincoln's victory.
It's an appealing theory in some ways, but I suspect they were as short-sighted as anybody else, and were looking backward, punishing Douglas for what they regarded as his past disloyalty or unreliability, rather than looking forwards with some complicated strategy..."

And yours could also be an appealing theory, except that the very Fire Eaters who had campaigned in the South for secession for many years, those were the same delegates to the 1860 Democrat Convention in Charleston who walked out and split their previously majority party.
That splitting their majority Democrat party would cause defeat to "Black Republicans" and so justify (in their minds) secession may not, just as you argue, have been a formal written-down plan, but I argue it certainly was the Fire Eaters' fondest hope in 1860.

That's why I say Slave Power Fire Eaters engineered their own defeat by Republicans in 1860, then immediately began organizing for secession after the November 6 election.

Your continuous usage of the term "fire eaters" is a deliberate attempt to derogate and dismiss their concerns as unworthy of consideration.

It is simply evidence that you have no understanding of objectivity, and cannot argue from any perspective other than a subjective one.

I suppose it makes you feel good to mock and malign people with whom you disagree. This technique has a long usage in History. After the Nazis encountered stiff resistance from insurgent Poles, they started spreading Polish jokes to mock and make fun of the people they would eventually defeat.

It may be a coping mechanism for you, but it is unworthy of a rational man.

I guess the question is how much collusion, planning, discussion, articulation, etc. you need to make up a plan. If you have all that, you clearly have a plan or a plot. Otherwise what you've got is a result, and it can be hard to distinguish between an intended and an unintended result if people don't express the deeper, darker intention that is suspected by others.

I'd like to see more of the evidence. Lemme just say that I tend to interpret things like this in terms of the passions and emotions of the moment, rather than in terms of well-thought out plots or plans. I'm not saying that there wasn't a plot or plotting, just that I haven't seen the evidence and am giving the Southern Democrats the same benefit of the doubt that I've given unionists or abolitionists on other occasions.

Also, I'm struck by just how seriously people earlier in our history took the idea of presidential elections decided in the House of Representatives. They wouldn't have looked at the election they were going through in the same way that we look at it now. It wouldn't necessarily have looked like the Republicans would sweep the North and carry the Electoral College.