[GOPcapitalist]

Yes it was, Walt. Buchanan's approach to Sumter, save the disastrous Star of the West expedition, was passive. Lincoln arrived on the scene and escalated it a hundred-fold by provoking a battle there and refusing any form of negotiations whatsoever, even when conducted through intermediaries. It was just as John Forsyth, the mayor of Mobile, AL who attempted to organize negotiations with Lincoln, later wrote to Jefferson Davis:

"There is little that I can add to letters and telegrams previously dispatched. We never had a chance to make Lincoln an offer of any kind. You can't negotiate with a man who says you don't exist."

The central barrier to a peaceful solution in 1861 was Abraham Lincoln himself. That much is an indisputable historical fact.

[WhiskeyPapa]

Yes it was, Walt. Buchanan's approach to Sumter...

was identical to President Lincoln's; send a ship with men and supplies.

Walt

[WhiskeyPapa]

The central barrier to a peaceful solution in 1861 was Abraham Lincoln himself. That much is an indisputable historical fact.

Nonsense. It was the slave power's intransigence that brought the war. Their slavery was -guaranteed- by President Lincoln. It just wouldn't be allowed to expand.

"Abolitionists, in America, mean those who do not keep within the Constitution; the Republican party neither aim nor profess to aim at this object. ... If they have not taken arms against slavery, they have against its extension. And they know ... that this amounts to the same thing. The day when slavery can no longer extend itself, is the day of its doom. The slave owners know this, and it is the cause of their fury."

-- John Stuart Mill

Walt