You are forgetting that the north did everything it could to provoke the southerners into war. Lincoln was quite relieved when the South fired first, because that was always his goal.
It goes back to Buchanan. The president before Lincoln. In any case it was the South wanting to keep slaves.
“the north did everything it could to provoke the southerners into war”
That may be true, and certainly they negotiated in bad taste. But the whole “I’ve been had!” defense of the South is misguided. Whether manipulated or not, they did fire. FDR backed Japan into a corner and goaded into war, if not held the Pacific fleet as bait and withheld advanced notice of attack from commanders at Pearl Harbir. Nevertheless, Japan is responsible, as is the South.
The better argument is the one that doesn’t sophistically entangle the “first shot” with the war that followed. Firing on Sumter was not grounds for total war and forcible repatriation. If the North was justified in conquering the South, it was not because of Sumter. Whatever a war based solely on Sumter would’ve looked like, it is not the war we got.
Think of it like WWI. Convention had it that it started with the assassination of the heir to the Austrian empire’s throne. Not so. That started an Austro-Serbian war. The bigger war came through a chain of events emanatining from the little war, but it was nit sufficient cause. Without Germany invading Belgium there is no bigger war. Or maybe a bigger war would’ve broken out anyway, but the war we got was started by Germany, not Gavrilo Principe.
Take WWII (please). Historians either date it to 1936 because that’s the beginning of Japanese expansionism or more commonly the Nazi invasion of Poland. However, that only covers the Sino-Japanese and Anglo-French-German wars. The bigger Pacific and European wars start only when Japan attacks the British and US empires and Germany declares war on Russia and the US. For simplicity’s sake we pretend they follow of course from the “first shots,” but no. Subsequent steps are not inevitable. They have to br chosen.
Whoops, I meant bad faith, not bad taste.