“By 1775 Brits had clearly begun war against their American colonies, in one well-known incident of which they sent Redcoats to Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, to seize American militia arms.”
“The 1861 equivalent was the Confederate’s assault on American Army troops at Fort Sumter.”
History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. Starting with 1861 and Fort Sumter ignores what came before.
In 1859 John Brown seized the armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in order to distribute the weapons and initiate a widespread guerrilla war within the southern states. Based upon his reputation for murder at Pottawatomie Creek Brown had been recruited and financed for this covert war by northern political activists.
The 1859 John Brown Raid marked the beginning of the northern war of aggression. Within two years the war against the people of the southern American states went from the covert violence of John Brown’s raid to the overt war of the Radical Republicans who regarded Brown as a messiah.
Nonsense.
Brown's raid was a criminal -- indeed terrorist -- act for which he was captured by Federal troops, tried and hanged.
The Federal government could not have done more, or acted more correctly regarding Brown himself.
Brown's northern supporters are another matter.
If I remember correctly, they were not known at the time, and when they finally were exposed fled the US to avoid prosecution.
As for the propaganda value of Brown's raid, in helping convert reluctant Northern Democrats into ardent abolitionist Republicans -- well, there is that small matter of the US Constitution's First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of the press.
So while the Slave Power did its utmost to suppress abolitionist literature in the South, there was no way they could prevent the Brown story from carrying a strong abolitionist message.
Bottom line: Brown's 1859 raid and hanging was no "war" against the South, but it was propagandized to help elect abolitionist Republicans in 1860.
And that's exactly the way the US Constitution intended such matters to be handled, FRiend.
In the end, as you well know: slavery had to be, and would have been, defeated one way or the other.
But the Slave Power in 1860 decided it would not (to quote Dylan Thomas) "go gentle into that good night..."
But would rather "Rage, rage against the dying of the light".
A rage that continues, now somewhat, ah, muted, to this very day... ;-)