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The more I think and read about the months between November, 1860, and the First Inaugural, the less I can find in Lincoln's action any serious attempt to forestall disunion; but on the contrary, I can count any number of high-handed gestures (such as rebuffing the Confederate commissioners come to discuss property issues, such as rebuffing the Virginia peace delegates -- Virginia still being in the Union -- with the words "You are too late", such as telling the governor of South Carolina one thing about Sumter while doing another in secret) that he had to have known would enrage Southerners and inflame the situation.

No oil on the waters. But plenty of oil on the fire. You can't get out of it either, capitan: Lincoln's behavior during this critical period wants a thorough review. Did he or didn't he want to preserve the peace? I am being gradually moved more and more to believe that he didn't -- particularly after reading his confession, in a letter of 1855 (printed and discussed in David Donald's Lincoln [1999]), that he could not find a constitutional way to abolish slavery and remove the cognitive dissonance from the American vision statement, the Declaration of Independence, in contrast with the Constitution and American socioeconomic folkways.

I think he decided for war -- war that would be their fault. And he got it. Was the war an accident instead? Accidents do happen, but when they're this big, and you have as large a player as Lincoln at the center of events, you really have to wonder, particularly when the events happened to be exactly what he needed, to obtain the outcome he wanted, given the situation as he found it.