If the CSA hadn’t fired on Ft Sumter would Lincoln have been able to deploy troops to punish them?
I think if the CSA had merely ignored the presence of this fort and the authority of Lincoln’s government the dispute might’ve been settled without a war.
It was only the overt act of attacking Ft Sumter that allowed Lincoln to cast the CSA as the aggressors. Without this I doubt that the citizens of the north would’ve been willing to go to war.
Your observation is one that has tortured the American soul for 150 years. “What if’s” can be as tragic — or even more tragic — than the original question.
Eventually, the south would have done in ‘60 what they did in 32 - threaten to nullify and secede again if they didn’t get a reduction in the tariffs.
The other economics of the time that hasn’t been addressed was what the cost of emancipation would be on producing commodities. Even if the South had been willing to emancipate (England wanted that very vociferously), the tariffs likely made it much harder to do and stay afloat.
If you ever fly in to DC, you’ll see that what was true in 1860 in terms of unbalanced infrastructure spending is truer now in 2014.
This is an excellent thread.
The answer to that is no.
But on the flip side, if Jeff Davis had not fired on Sumter, his little Cotton States republic would have collapsed under its own incompent weight in a few months. The people of those states would have come to their senses after a while.
Davis needed a shooting war to move the Upper South, especially Virginia, off the spot, and firing on Sumter, forcing Lincoln to respond was the only reason Virginia, sided with them.