To the Contrary. It undermines your point. Why would anyone in their position want to start a fight with someone at five times the population and 10 times the industrial might?
Did Poland initiate Hostilities with Germany? The only reason why they might is if they knew an attack was coming anyway. That makes far more sense, and it also helps to explain the urgency of General Beauregard's letter to Captain Anderson.
To be fair, they defended their homeland to such a great extent that it truly was insane to keep killing so many people in an effort to subdue it.
Worst loss of Life in American History.
In early 1861, the first seven Deep South seceding states had a combined population of about 2.5 million whites and 2.3 million slaves.
The Union then still had 25 million whites, but of those, another six million were in the Upper South and Border slave states.
All of them had voted not to join the Deep South's Confederacy.
Only one thing could force those slave-state Unionists to change their minds and join the Confederacy, and that was war.
What Davis hoped to accomplish by starting Civil War was to double the number of states and triple their white population so that the odds, Confederacy vs. Union, were reduced from ten to one to a more doable two to one.
If successful, the new Confederacy would have over 8 million whites, facing fewer than 20 million Northerners.
And Davis' war was highly successful -- four Upper South states soon switched from Union to Confederacy, and pro-Confederates in three more Border States did everything they could think of, including war, to make them change.
But ultimately, the Border States remained majority Union, so when the dust settled, the Confederacy included about 5.5 million whites with 3.5 million slaves versus a Union of around 22 million whites with hundreds of thousands of free blacks, some of whom even voted.
Lincoln himself said that if he had lost the Border States, he might not win the war.
But Border slave states were, in fact, about two to one Unionists, and there was no way they would support the Deep South Slavocracy.
Bottom line: Davis started war at Fort Sumter in hope of tripling the Confederacy's population.
In that effort he successfully doubled its population, but still left it with overwhelming negative odds.
So, the real question is not "why did Davis start a war", but rather, why didn't Davis soon move to end the war, instead of fighting on to the bitter end of Unconditional Surrender?
The answer, in a word: slavery.
Because they knew that one Southern boy could beat any ten pasty faced Yankee mechanics, plus that Abe Lincoln was an ignorant uneducated monkey who would never be able to out smart those refined southern gentlemen.
Read the southern press from the day. They actually believed their own propaganda. Seems some around here still buy that nonsense.