That's nice and all, but unless Lincoln was offering as a gesture of good faith to defend the ports of his neighbor to the south, your said function of those forts of providing common defense was not an issue in 1861, meaning Lincoln's troops had no purpose being there other than one of disingenuous nature.
And Sumter was built by the federal government using stone shipped in to create an Island.
Sure it was, but where is it said that when a country literally splits into two halves, one half gets to keep ALL of that country's federal possessions including those located in the other half, while that second half gets nothing? Common sense dictates that the half in which property X lies gets to keep property X, especially considering that the other half has no _legitimate_ practical use of a military installment inside of its counterpart.
A bit of consideration of the complexities of the situation would have been advisable, rather than resorting to force.
Ideally, yes. But considering that Lincoln indicated early on that he was of the uncompromisable position that the north gets to keep all, and the south gets nothing, such consideration of those complexities was not feasible.
So it looks like the Confederacy was worse than Mao's China or Franco's Spain at least in this respect, that it did not trust to law and diplomacy but chose the path of force
How so? The confederacy only resorted to force after the other side indicated that no ammount of diplomacy would facilitate the turnover of the property. South Carolina actively attempted to arrange the peaceful turnover of the fort from Anderson from December 1860 until April of 1861, and only resorted to force after Lincoln sent a fleet of three warships to "provision" the fort with military supplies and troops. In other words, they actively tried negotiation, but the other side was simply unwilling to negotiate.
A bit more patience, statesmanship and foresight and you could have had independence
Could it have? Even though Lincoln asserted a position that he would never permit independence and would fight a war to stop it? And even though Lincoln's only response to attempted southern negotiation of the turnover of the fort was to send a fleet of warships to increase that fort's garrison?
The Confederacy had suceeded in getting most of the federal installations evacuated.
Indeed, except for the one blocking the entrance to one of their single most important ports.
They could have existed and built a nation leaving a token federal post intact until a more general settlement had been reached.
As I asked earlier, what settlement would that have been? Had they simply left Sumter as it was prior to April, they would have effectively been sitting there watching while Lincoln sailed war fleets into the harbor and stocked the thing full of men and weapons. Cause that is exactly what Lincoln was trying to do when the confederates opened fire.
Given all that it took to defeat the Confederacy, it would be a mistake to think that Sumter and its small garrison posed a real threat to the Confederacy.
What makes you think that Lincoln would not have attempted a march on Richmond anyway had sumter been left alone and ignored? He certainly indicated that was what he wanted to do.
Either Davis wanted a war to consolidate his power and pull the upper South into his orbit, or the Confederates were simply betrayed by their own overheated rhetoric, or both.
False dilemma. You neglect a contributing factor possibility, namely that Lincoln literally provoked the confederates into firing.
When the war started it was widely thought in Europe that there was no way the north could subdue the south. The territory was enormous, etc. And that was probably true. But the CSA leadership never developed a grand strategy, and its military leaders bumgled away any chance of military victory.
Now, people will now begin pounding their key boards. Who should we hold up as successful CSA generals? Pemberton? Bragg? Joe Johnston? John Bell Hood? Okay, how about Lee? He usually gets a good press. But what Lee did was dissapate his force in offensive operations, where prudence could have kept him going much longer. Oddly, he eschewed George Washington's policy of maintaining his army intact and picking his actions for a policy that guaranteed heavy casualties he could ill afford. Look at Antietam. Except for McClellan''s blundering, he would have been crushed, and he still took heavy casualties. In the Seven Days Battles, he took more casualties every day than McClellan did. Onlly Little Mac's timidity made him look good. And Gettysburg...well or course he wrecked his army at Gettysburg.
Lee's reputation mostly hangs on one battle--Chancellorsville. And that was a great victory for him. But the CSA could VERY WELL have become a separate nation. The CSA leaders just blew it.
Walt
Similarly, had the rebels maintained the stand-off peacefully they could have appealed to a large and receptive public in the North and perhaps have gained legitimacy for their rebellion. Faced with a large, peaceful movement to sever the Union, there would have been little hope of quelling the rebellion with force. But the rebels were already committed to unilateral action and to scant concern for legal formalities.
What one sees in all this talk of secession is a dismissal of the ties that Union created, the common property and debts and obligations incurred by the nation and people and federal government. Three quarters of a century of providing for the common defense dismissed in a day, with the demand that whatever had been pledged to the union over that period to defend the country be disgorged to the rebels. Perhaps this would be the result of a properly organized and legitimate dissolution of the union, but it was not something that when unilaterally demanded, should simply be surrendered on demand. Had enough people really wanted a liquidation of the union, it could have been effected by the nation as a whole with concern for the rights of the concerned parties.
It's the combination of victim feeling and aggression in the secessionists that is most unappealing. The nation that Washington's troops had bled for and great statesman had made sacrifices for dismissed by the Lords of the Lash as a tyrant because the government sought, as the Founders did, to limit the spread of slavery. It's as ugly a picture as anything produced by the Rockwell school of Lincoln hatred. And it's this attitude of the secessionist leaders -- that they were victims persected by an evil Union -- that riles me most. After 1865 this view was understandable, but not in 1860.
At every turn they took the wrong step. Wrong in trying to expand slavery. Wrong in splitting their party because it was insufficiently pro-slavery. Wrong in breaking with the Union because they lost the election. Wrong in firing on Sumter and calling down upon themselves the wrath of the remaining states.
Did Lincoln try to provoke the rebel government? I don't know. A lot of things happened that can be interpreted in different ways. Also it's not clear how our knowledge today relates to what was known at the time. A peaceful mission to reinforce a fort that will eventually run short of provisions: was that a provocation or a desire to avoid greater provocation? Had Lincoln taken the small margin of being more passive and circumspect that day or that week, he would have had to relieve the fort the next week or month.
Davis and his regime had a free choice in how they reacted. They had -- in their own minds -- much to gain by starting a war, and no one forced them to fire when they did. A fort resupplied but not reinforced posed little threat to the Confederacy. If one blames Lincoln for sending food to the fort before starvation was imminent, surely Davis was more at fault for attacking before a real invasion in force was imminent. But this was typical of the secessionist movement. Their own demands always came before everything else. The greater national trauma was as nothing compared to the little rock in Charleston harbor.
Like the Cuban Missile Crisis, Sumter was a difficult situation all around. You are probably inclined to go easy on Davis and the rebels because Sumter was within the borders of South Carolina, and because you believe that a state could leave the union simply by passing an ordinance of secession. I don't think that idea is sufficiently proven, and regard revolution as a very serious act. Do what you have to do to get rid of a tyrant, but if you want your independence from a constitutional and republican union, work within the established channels to achieve your goal, and don't treat your elected government as though it were a tyrant.
If I'm harder on Davis than on Lincoln, it's also because Rockwell, Sobran, Stromberg, Adams, Hummell and others scarcely focus on the defects and illegalities of the Confederacy. They take Lincoln as a tyrant who overthrew the "Old Republic," forgetting that the attempted secession was the real end of that era, and that the vices attributed to Lincoln -- and others besides -- were shared by the Confederate leadership. Southern nationalism and secession were not the heritage of 1787 -- on balance, it's not entirely clear they were the legitimate heritage of 1776.
I am prepared to grant that many Southerners deeply felt that their "Southern Rights" were in danger (it's not at all an established fact that "state's rights" were at risk in 1860, other than the presumed right to secede). And the conflict between "Southern Rights" and "Northern Rights" -- between two sets of notions about rights and the organization of society -- was probably inevitable and irreparable. But we shouldn't be afraid to take a long, serious look at just what "Southern Rights" meant in 1860. To say that they were convinced of the justice of their cause at the time, as indeed they were, shouldn't mean ignoring the mistakes they made or the values and assumptions that underlay their claims.