Nobody at that time thought it would turn into the horror that it became. Many thought it would be over quickly. Someone said all the bloodshed could be wiped up with a handkerchief.
to protect tariffs the government collected and insurance and shipping that might have gone elsewhere.
You forgot the 230 million that was funneling through New York with both them and Washington DC getting the bulk of it. You forgot the threat caused by loss of the Southern markets to European competition. You forgot the loss of the Midwestern Markets due to Southern companies moving European products up the Mississippi Watershed, and you forgot the threat caused by the capitalization of competing industries in the South. You forgot a lot of other economic threats to this same power block in the North.
Once the decision was made, Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln alone personally orchestrated events to fool the South into firing first.
Who detached the Powhatan with secret orders to prevent the War fleet from carrying out it's attack on Charleston?
You say you can't learn much from "what if" history, but here's a "what if" that I think we can all learn about. If the Powhatan had arrived as all the publicly known written orders said it would do, that group of warships would have been put into the position of attacking the shore batteries. David Dixon Porter himself has said that if they had followed through with their mission as their orders had said, they would have been sunk.
We know that Lincoln's government knew what array of forces they faced, because Anderson had sent maps and drawings as well as detailed reports about what those forces were.
Any sane man would have immediately recognized that sending five warships into that array of cannons was a suicide mission. Had they been able to follow the orders they were given, it would have been five sunk warships, and who knows how many dead soldiers/sailors.
Was Lincoln an idiot, or did he never intend for those ships to exchange gunfire with the shore batteries?
You tell me. It seems too much to beg of luck that he "accidentally" detached the command ship, and were it not for this accident, a lot of people would have been killed.
But yeah, most of what you have written is the cartoon version, but it is somewhat in the right direction.
Lincoln, representing powerful economic interests in the North, sought to trigger what he believed would be a quick little war, that would end the nonsense of the South governing themselves, and quickly restore them back to their proper place as the cash cows for well connected Northern power brokers, and funders of Washington DC "mercantilism". (Really corporate subsidies from the taxpayers to influential people.)
And he made a tremendous mistake in his clever little plan. He didn't realize the degree of resistance which would arise and turn his quick little war into a horrible bloody disaster.