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The south went to war against it’s neighbors in order to defend and perpetuate the Peculiar Institution of slavery.

First of all, the South seceded. The North rejected secession. The South offered to buy federal properties physically located in the South. The North rejected that idea, as they rejected the idea of the South seceding.

As far as shots being fired, the North occupied Ft Sumter, clearly located in Confederate territory. The South (under Beauregard) demanded that they either surrender or withdraw (yes, they could have just left and gone their way). The garrison commander was given orders to stay and fight.

Now, whether you believe that Beauregard's eventual bombardment of Fort Sumter was legitimate or not rests on whether you believe it was legitimate for those states to secede from the United States (regardless of what you believe is the reason for that secession). If they licitly seceded, then you have an outpost occupied by a foreign army without permission. If they illicitly seceded, then you have a bunch of terrorists attacking a military installation. One way or the other.

As for the war being about slavery, please consider thse two points:

Per Abraham Lincoln (see above): My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.
If the issue was truly about slavery, then why were there five slave states in the union? (DE, MD, WV, KY, MO)

I really don't think most people gave a rat's behind about whether there was slavery in the South or not. There were two real issues, as far as I can tell (and one collateral point):

An issue of tariffs -- the South wanted lower tariffs, which would benefit the cotton market overseas and allow them to import industrial product from Europe cheaper than what they could get it from the North, while the North wanted higher tariffs in order to protect their burgeoning industrial base.
A threat to the balance of power: with the Western expansion, the question lay whether new states in the West would be brought in as slave states or free states. If they were brought in as free states, that would alter the balance which, in turn, would negatively impact the South (see point #1, above)

The collateral point is that Homesteading was being rumbled about, where the federal government would give away land to people willing to settle on it. This could have likewise played into (though the Homestead Act wasn't passed until the war started...since there was no longer any Southern Congressmen to oppose it).

Further proof: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed by a broad vote -- 12 to 3 in the Senate and 76 to 31 in the House. There were plenty of Northern members of Congress who voted for that act. Yes, a smaller percentage than who voted for its predecessor (the Act of 1793), but still, nothing to sneeze at.

There were abolitionists, I am not trying to say otherwise, but the political influence that they exerted was not really all that great.

I don't claim to be some expert in US History, but perhaps you can tell me how many bills were introduced in Congress to nationally abolish slavery or to amend Article 1 Section 2 Clause 3 prior to the Reconstruction Amendments?

Slavery was involved, no doubt. But this was not a case of crusading northerners selflessly fighting and dying in order to free people from bondage. It was a matter of if the United States was going to allow states who had joined the union to secede or not. No more, no less.