Yet he was not the first one to resort to armed conflict. That was Jeff Davis.
Have the last word, but you know who started the war...and it wasn't Jeff Davis.
You are consciously and disingenuously evading Lincoln's massive responsibility for the outbreak of hostilities.
Not granting overmuch to Jeff Davis's temperateness and perspicuity, of course, or to the other political people's, who needed to have played a much, much cooler hand than they did. They believed Lincoln's menaces and acted with speed rather than deliberateness, thinking themselves threatened, and in so doing "took their eye off the ball".
The First Inaugural was widely reported -- even in the Northern press, whose quotes have been posted to you in another thread, and which you ignored because of their heavy implications for your image of Lincoln -- as a declaration of hostilities against the South. That Southerners should so take it cannot be surprising, and one of the differences between you and me is that I credit Lincoln with sufficient ability to connect the dots, that the meaning Southerners took from the First Inaugural had to be precisely what he intended them to, concerning his intentions. Otherwise he should have said something else, and they would have understood that instead.