I have never met or known anyone in my long decades who thought slavery was a good thing. In fact I’ve never personally met or knew of a racist in the large circles I ‘ran’ with. I would immediately distance myself against anyone who thought like that. (It’s one of the reasons I think Nick Fuentes may be an instigating ‘plant’. It wouldn’t surprise me). But was a war which was to burn whole cities and rural lands, killing half a million souls, really necessary to end slavery? Slavery was on its way out as Industrialization was making it economically unfeasible in the not-so-long run, even if a dwindling number of persons and states clung to it fiercely. Almost everyone else in the West phased out the wretched institution over time. Some in the United States and Brazil in this hemisphere were holdouts.

So let’s revisit both sides. Atrocities during the American Civil War included unspeakable brutal acts such as massacres, executions of prisoners, and widespread violence against civilians. We’ve probably seen all the arguments by now. Each “side” weighs the value of the arguments, books and quotes differently. In the final analysis I don’t think either side had an argument that made such an atrocious war necessary. We couldn’t find a way to wait and, in time, come up with a phaseout plan?

SH.

First Lincoln Critic, historian Thomas Di Lorenzo who spoke to Brian Lamb in 2008 about Lincoln, secession, and the Forst Sumter crisis and then the  inevitabilism argument.

C-Span

LAMB: … I want to ask you something you said. Was he a great man?

DILORENZO: He was – when you consider that he had less than one year of formal education and he became one of the top lawyers in the United States self taught, he certainly had greatness. I think he was brilliant. I think he was a genius. And I think a great a tragedy for America, however, is that he uses genius to essentially manipulate the South Carolinians into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter and plunging the whole nation into a war. And then, invading his own country after, you know, at Fort Sumter, as you know, no one was killed or hurt, but the response was a full scale invasion of the entire southern states.

And so, I think, he used his genius in a way that – in my latest book ”Lincoln Unmasked” I write about how wouldn’t it had been great had he used this genius to be more statesmen like and end slavery peacefully like the British and the Spaniards did and then do other things for America, as opposed to a four year war that killed 650,000 Americans?

LAMB: How did he trick the South Carolinians?

DILORENZO: Well, he promised he would not send war ships to Fort Sumter, certainly, when he did. And then in my book, I quote him – a letter from Lincoln to his naval commander, Commander Fox, Gustavus Fox thanking him for his assistance in getting the outcome that they desired, and the outcome that they desired was getting the South Carolinians to fire on Fort Sumter because he guessed correctly that the people of the north would rally behind the flag and support the war that he wanted to get into.

And at the same time, you had the confederates had sent peace commissioners to Washington to offer to pay the south’s portion of the national debt and to pay for federal forts like Fort Sumter. Napoleon III of France offered to broker some sort of compromise, but Lincoln refused to speak to any of them. He wouldn’t see any of them. He was determined to go to war, which he did.

LAMB: Why was he determined to go to war?

DILORENZO: Well, I think, he came up with this idea of the mystical union. He – in one of his speeches he talked about the mystic cords of memory that – of the union. But up to that time, a great deal of Americans, I would argue most Americans understood that the union was voluntary and that it would be an atrocity if any state left to march an army into that state and kill some of inhabitants just to keep it back into the union.

In [writing] my book, ”The Real Lincoln”, I ran across a big two volume set of books called ”Northern Editorials on Secession” by a man named Howard Perkins and it’s just reprinted northern newspaper editorials in 1859, 1860, 1861 about this whole issue of secession and some other topics. And he concludes that the majority of the newspaper from New York to Cincinnati to Vermont, Wisconsin in the north were in favor of letting the south go peacefully because they believed in the old Jeffersonian dictum that the union was voluntary. In the declaration of independents when governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed. And when the northerners saw the south saying, we no longer consent to be governed by Washington, D.C. most of them said, OK, well let them go. Horace Greeley, the famous newspaper man, he’s often quoted as saying this, he might have thought they were mistaken or wrong headed, but let them go and maybe we can persuade them to come back into the union at some future date seemed to be the attitude of a lot of these newspaper people.

Now the inevitabilism position:

What exactly happened at Fort Sumter that made half a million dead necessary?

The Battle of Fort Sumter (April 12–13, 1861) was the opening military engagement of the American Civil War.

Here’s a clear timeline of the key events:

By early 1861, seven Southern states had seceded and formed the Confederate States of America after Abraham Lincoln’s election (seen by the South as a threat to slavery).

U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson commanded a small federal garrison in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina (a seceded state). In late December 1860, he secretly moved his ~85 men from the indefensible Fort Moultrie to the stronger (but unfinished) Fort Sumter, an island fort controlling the harbor entrance.

South Carolina demanded the fort’s surrender, viewing it as federal property on now-Confederate soil. Anderson refused.

In March 1861, newly inaugurated President Lincoln informed South Carolina he would send unarmed ships to resupply (not reinforce with troops or weapons) the starving garrison.

The Confederacy saw this as an act of aggression and an attempt to maintain federal authority over a seceded state. Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered General P.G.T. Beauregard (commanding forces in Charleston) to demand immediate evacuation.

On April 11, Anderson refused again, saying he would run out of supplies soon but would not surrender on demand.

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, Confederate batteries ringing the harbor (about 43 guns and mortars) opened fire. The bombardment lasted ~34 hours, with thousands of shells fired (including heated “hot shot” that set parts of the fort ablaze).

The Union garrison returned fire but was heavily outgunned and low on ammunition. No one was killed during the actual bombardment on either side.

On April 13, Anderson surrendered. His men evacuated honorably on April 14 with a 100-gun salute to the U.S. flag (during which an accidental explosion killed 1 Union soldier and mortally wounded another—the battle’s only fatalities).

🎵 The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (link repaired)

Confederates occupied the damaged fort.

Why this made a large-scale war (and ~620,000–750,000 deaths) “necessary” in the eyes of both sides:
Fort Sumter itself was militarily unimportant and bloodless, but it was a powerful symbol:

For the Confederacy: Firing first asserted their claim to full sovereignty and independence. Allowing a federal fort to remain (and be resupplied) would undermine secession’s legitimacy.

For the Union/North: The attack was seen as outright rebellion and “firing on the flag.” Up to that point, many Northerners were willing to let the South go peacefully or negotiate. The bombardment unified public opinion in the North behind preserving the Union by force.

On April 15, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the “insurrection.” This prompted four more slave states (Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina) to secede rather than provide troops against the South.

The war escalated from a limited coastal crisis into a full-scale conflict because neither side would back down on the core issue: whether the United States was a perpetual union (Lincoln’s view) or a voluntary compact that states could leave (Confederate view), with slavery as the underlying trigger.

In short, Fort Sumter transformed secession from a political standoff into open war. Once shots were fired on the U.S. flag, compromise became politically impossible for Lincoln, and the South’s additional secessions made a massive conflict inevitable.

The half-million-plus deaths were the tragic result of that escalation over four brutal years.

Updated