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"I repeat, most of these are second- or third-hand citations. They aren't consistent in their wording and don't give the time and place where such comments were allegedly made. They are folklore rather than fact."

There are several first hand citations. Where are your first hand refutations?

"You've asked me to show you where you make unsupported jumps or leaps in reasoning. And here's one: when the subject was first discussed Lincoln's military advisers counseled against using force to reinforce Sumter or remove the danger to it."

Correct. (You begin with a commonly accepted statement).

"They also did not support reinforcement, but advised evacuation."

Correct. (and more of the same).

And here comes the famous x twist:

"Knowing that Lincoln attempted resupply and the result was war, you assume 1) that the military advised against resupply because it would bring war..."

You used the term, "you assume".

I do not assume. Here are the facts:

3/9/1861 One day after Congress had adjourned, Lincoln conducted his first formal cabinet meeting.

Lincoln invited a group of military and naval experts to give their views. They were all against military excursions to Ft. Sumter. Most believed that the resources needed to forcibly re-supply Ft. Sumter were too large, and that this effort would certainly prompt a military response from the Confederacy, with war sure to follow.

Secretary of Navy Gideon Wells said,

“By sending or attempting to send provisions into Ft. Sumter, will not war be precipitated?

4/7/1861 Major Anderson received a letter from Secretary of War Cameron telling Anderson that the President intended to send a fleet to Charleston.

Major Anderson immediately replied to Secretary Cameron. He was stunned at the cabinet’s decision to send the fleet. It was apparent that the government was willing to risk war, which he had so skillfully avoided.

“I…confess that it…surprises me greatly…(that these orders) contradict the assurances of Mr. Crawford that Fort Sumter would be evacuated. I trust that this matter will be at once put in a correct light, as a movement made now, when the South has been erroneously informed that none such will be attempted, would produce most disastrous results throughout our country.

“It is, of course, now too late for me to give any advice in reference to the proposed scheme of Captain Fox. I fear that its result cannot fail to be disastrous to all concerned…Colonel Lamon’s remark convinced me that the idea (of re-supply), merely hinted at to me by Captain Fox, would not be carried out. We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced"

According to commentary from Captain Montgomery C. Meigs, who led the Ft. Pickens re-supply effort,

“This is the beginning of the war which every statesman and soldier has foreseen since the passage of the South Carolina ordinance of secession.”

Meigs placed the responsibility of the bloodshed to come, not with the Confederacy, but “in the office of the President.”

In the record.....not assumptions.

"and 2) that Lincoln sent supplies to the fort because he wanted war."

He certainly liked the outcome of the expedition:

5/1/1861 In a letter to Gustavus Fox, President Lincoln said,

“You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Ft. Sumter, even if it had failed; and it is no small consolation not to feel that our anticipation is justified by the results.”

"But neither one of these leaps of assumption is proven to be true, and both may be false."

It does seem that his military advisers did conclude that action at Sumter would bring war. It also seems that Lincoln was pleased with Fox's results.

So as you can see, neither of the points you provide are "leaps of assumptions". and using your logic, both may be true.

"From what I've read, both are false."

Reading the Kool-aid labels again?

Revenue was collected at Charleston, not at Sumter. You may see some nefarious plot at work. To me it looks more as though Lincoln were trying to maintain the pretense that the Union was intact. It's hard to see how holding onto the fort would bring any more money into the federal coffers.

You find quotes that Lincoln cared about revenue and tariffs. That's only natural. Administrators spend a lot of time with budgets and revenues are important to any enterprise. And it's only natural that a President would write to his Secretary of the Treasury and Attorney General about the Treasury's ability to go on collecting taxes in a time of national crisis. The obsession, if obsession is what were talking about, is more DiLorenzo's and the neo-confederates' than Lincoln's. It involves digging up every reference to tariffs and ignoring the rest of the record to create a mistaken impression.

You are still thinking of things as too clear cut, and don't see how things changed after the fall of Pickens. I notice for example, that at the meeting you referred to, Army and Navy leaders disagreed about whether Sumter could be successfully reprovisioned. And resupply and a military expedition were considered as separate options and deserved to be. As time went on most of the cabinet came to support resupply, with only Seward dissenting.

I certainly don't argue that Lincoln always chose the right course of action. But it also looks to me mistaken to argue that he had some secret agenda throughout the crisis. So far as I can see Lincoln did believe all along that he could not absolutely give in and leave the nation with no symbolic presence in the rebel states, but that's hardly nefarious. Lincoln's handling of the crisis was far from perfect. There were mistakes and false starts, confusion and misunderstanding, panic, mixed motives and confused messages. But the messiness of the Union response works against the hypothesis of some hidden agenda or clear covert course of action.

If I'm not coming up with a lot of quotes, it's because I don't have predigested accounts at my fingertips, but have to find out things on my own. I do notice, for example, that your sources misuse the Meigs quote, taking it as some final judgment that the responsibility of the war lay "in the office of the President." In fact, it's nothing of the kind. It's an exhortation at the time to the effect that the war is beginning, and you in Washington have to commit resources to it now. Meigs assertion that the war had been expected since secession is rhetoric, designed to convince at the moment of action, not a considered judgment of the factual record after the fact. It simply wasn't true. But Meigs wasn't writing to be true, but to express an emotion and instill the same emotion in his reader. And Meigs does not assign responsibility for the beginning of the war.

Similarly, the quotation from Anderson reflects his reaction to a specific action at a specific moment under specific circumstances. He had not been opposed to resupply as such and indeed, had called for it earlier. It may have been just that his knowledge or assessment of affairs at given time and Washington's didn't coincide. There was a three or four day communications delay from Charleston to Washington and back and with both Sumter and the government in communication with Confederates directly or indirectly it was difficult to coordinate outlooks and actions between the fort and the capital. But Anderson's frustration at that moment can't be taken as a verdict on the policy of resupply. If these examples are typical of how neoconfederate historians use or abuse the official records, it's an indication that they aren't trustworthy.

Now as before, your suggestion that Lincoln ought to have been working on emancipation at a time when that was what Southern leaders feared more than anything else is a true "red herring" and provocation thrown in out of ignorance, carelessness, perversity, or malice. At a time when every "compromise measure" involved extending guarantees to the slave states that nothing would be done about slavery -- at the demand of slave owners themselves -- it's clear that working towards any sort of emancipation wouldn't have cooled things down.

And if you think that any government doesn't have contingency plans for dealing with military crises at home and abroad, you are exceptionally naive. Any recently elected President is briefed on what dangerous military situations exist and what the possible responses are. It's only prudent for an elected head of state to examine what dangerous situations exist and what the possible responses are.

Elected officials expect to be able to exercise the powers of their office. And Lincoln expected to be able to do so. His expectations came into conflict with the wishes of the Confederate leaders, and that conflict had to be resolved in some way. Lincoln wasn't simply going to lie down and let the rebels have everything that they wanted the way they wanted it. He was firm in that -- in maintaining the idea that the union was unbroken. That certainly wasn't something the rebels wanted to hear or put up with, but it would be a distortion of history to portray Lincoln as scheming for war or repression. His conviction was that patriotic sentiments would prevail in the South if he acted with firmness. That conviction may have been mistaken, but it was an honorable one.