[Retain Mike]

The passage “levying war against them” certainly gave Lincoln the language he needed. It would have been such a perplexing situation if Jefferson Davis had been able to forbit North Carolina from firing on Fort Sumter.

[jeffersondem]

“It would have been such a perplexing situation if Jefferson Davis had been able to forbit North Carolina from firing on Fort Sumter.”

If North Carolina hadn't fired, South Carolina would have.

[Rockingham]

Without South Carolina firing on Ft. Sumter or some other major bloodshed, the Confederacy would have collapsed as an attempt at forming a new nation because it would have failed to gain enough states to have any chance at a coherent military effort. As it was, Virginia and three other states (Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina) seceded because the attack on Ft. Sumter showed that the Confederacy was more than talk.

My reading of the admittedly imperfect and incomplete historical evidence is that Jefferson Davis spurred South Carolina to attack Ft. Sumter. Why then did Lincoln not surrender the garrison so as to avoid any basis for the attack? Lincoln knew that some other pretext could and would likely be found by Davis and the Confederacy or by abolitionist hotheads from the North.

Having the Confederacy begin the war as it chose to meant that Lincoln and the federal government held the moral and constitutional high ground and could retain for the Union the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri (and after 1863, the new state of West Virginia). This deprived the Confederacy of the critical mass to succeed while assuring eventual Union victory. As Lincoln commented, "I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky."

The better choice for the eventual Confederate states would have been to jointly declare that they would use all means available to avoid any effort by the federal government to undo slavery. In effect, the slave states would have threatened secession and civil war without actually seceding and starting a civil war. Keeping their representation in Congress, such an alliance of slave states would have crippled the Lincoln administration and any effort at abolition.

Meanwhile, the slave states could have begun more closely cooperating politically and improving their capacity to make war. As I have suggested, with some political compromise and moral humility, even with an ongoing threat of secession, the country could have avoided the Civil War while assuring that slavery would have been peacefully reformed and then abandoned voluntarily by the end of the 19th Century for compelling economic reasons. With the immense financial and human cost of the Civil War avoided, the country would be better off and the lot of the emancipated slaves and their descendants much better still.