[spacecowboynj]

"Really? And here I'd always read that it was the Yankees inside the fort and the south starting the shooting at them."

You need to refer to something other than the one paragraph long high school textbook version of events.

Lincoln was advised by all of his top brass and his cabinet to abandon Ft. Sumter because of, you know, the Confederate forces unwillingness to tolerate a Union military base withing their boundries. Lincoln promised that he would not reprovision the fort but, in typical Lincoln fashion, lied. Instead he sent a heavily armed naval force to the Fort. Why would he do this? Historian Bruce Cotton explains why:

Lincoln had plainly been warned by [his military advisers] that a ship taking provisions to Fort Sumter would be fired on. Now he was sending the ship, with advance notices to the men who had the guns. He was sending war ships and soldiers as well...If there was going to be a war it would begin over a boat load of salt pork and crackers...Not for nothing did Captain Fox remark afterward that it seemed very important to Lincoln that South Carolina "should stand before the civilized world as having fired upon bread."

Many Northern newspapers recognized that Lincoln wanted war badly. The Buffalo Daily Courier editorialized that "The affair at Fort Sumter...has been planned as a means by which the war feeling at the North should be intensified."

And here's the New York Evening Day Book: :[Fort Sumter] was a cunningly devised scheme to arouse and if possible exasperate the Northern people against the South."

The Providence Daily Post wrote: "For three weeks the administration newspapers have been assuring us that Fort Sumter would be abandoned [but] Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to innaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of the aggressor."

It's many times the case that a deeper, scholarly reading of history overrides eventual assumptions commonly held by many. You just have to be up on this stuff.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

How about this quote from CSA Secretary of State Robert Toomb, speaking of firing on Sumter: "Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal."

Lincoln promised that he would not reprovision the fort but, in typical Lincoln fashion, lied.

When did he make this promise? In the first inaugural, he said, ""There need be no blood-shed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere."

It was the south that resorted to violence, "having fired on bread."

It's many times the case that a deeper, scholarly reading of history overrides eventual assumptions commonly held by many. You just have to be up on this stuff.

This from the guy who apparently doesn't know the difference between a tariff and an excise tax. Read some of the Declarations of Causes. Read Alexander Stephens' Georgia speech and his "cornerstone" speech.