now I'm ducking as I don my flameproof jammies.If South Carolina had not attacked Fort Sumter, there would have been no war. Lincoln may have been bound and determined to "preserve the Union", but Congress had no such determination.
Of course, if it hadn't been for South Carolina's attack on Fort Sumter, Virginia and North Carolina would not have seceded. The Confederacy would have been an economic wreck - an impoverished third-world country, rather than the slavery-spreading empire the secessionists were dreaming of.