[BroJoeK]

Sherman Logan: "Lincoln outplayed Davis, bluffing him into firing the first shot."

Thanks, I agree with everything you posted, except this notion that Lincoln somehow "tricked" Davis into firing the first shots.

In reality, the Confederacy was eager for a confrontation -- in my words "cruisin' for a bruisin" -- precisely because that is what secessionists, especially in Virginia, needed to satisfy Virginia's ratification statement requirement for:

"powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression..."

Without some serious incident which secessionists could label "injury or oppression", Unionists still dominated at the Virginia secession conference in Richmond.
That's what motivated Jefferson Davis, not some "trickery" by Abraham Lincoln.

There is a fascinating account of Virginia's change from Unionist to Secessionist in Nelson Lankford's 2007 book, "Cry Havoc, the Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861."

[Sherman Logan]

Except that an attack on the USA by the CSA hardly constituted oppression of the people of the South that would justify their secession.

There is a longstanding and untrue myth that the Upper South states, including VA, seceded in reaction to Lincoln’s call for militia to “suppress insurrection.”

In actual fact, the move shifted dramatically throughout the region as soon as the CSA fired that first shot, and secession was from that point inevitable. That the CSA fired the first shot didn’t make any difference in the Upper South, it was the outbreak of fighting itself that led them to spring to the assistance of their regional brethren.

OTOH, in the Border states and in the North, especially the Lower North, the CSA firing first made a huge difference in the public perception of the war.