The civil war was a long time in coming and could have been prevented many years before. Unfortunately too many before him chose to kick the can down the road.
By the time Lincoln took office I doubt he could have avoided it if he had wanted to.
It HAS to be inevitable.
You have one side that wants to be left alone and succeed or fail based on their own efforts,
and the other side’s ideology is antithetical to letting us do that.
I agree. The seeds were sown many decades before. His anti-slavery stance was but an excuse. My own opinion is that certain hidden interests tried to essentially make the South into a land of serfs (those that weren’t outright slaves, that is) or a colony of the north. When the South, after many years of trade abuse, finally had enough, that’s when the war occurred.