My great-grandfather was supposedly a cavalry officer in the South, although he left there after the end of the war and went back to England (he refused to surrender). He wouldn’t have given a rip about slavery; he was actually British but was living in Savannah at the beginning of the war and signed up to defend his then home. The understanding of my family has always been that my great-grandfather felt Lincoln abused his power and that was the real reason for the start of the war and Lincoln was responsible for what happened thereafter. He couldn’t stand Lincoln, and someone talking about Lincoln, even many years later, was enough to set him off.
They were also gospel literate enough to know that they would need a special blessing if they were to carry it off. Jesus already warned about kings going to war needing to have a realistic accounting of their forces.
It was not until the South was purged of not only slavery but of Jim Crow that it began to go truly right, in our modern era.
“The understanding of my family has always been that my great-grandfather felt Lincoln abused his power and that was the real reason for the start of the war and Lincoln was responsible for what happened thereafter.”
Your great-grandfather deluded himself and deceived his family. Certain factions of the British Government and the Royal family spent decades of effort in various attempts to subvert the U.S. Government in the wake of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, foment civil wars designed to disunite the United States, and make the U.S. territories vulnerable to eventual reacquisition or place them under the protection and control of the British Empire. The motivation was to seek power and/or money from such efforts. In particular, these British factions sought to secure control of U.S. cotton production for the benefit of the Imperial British textile industries. Doing so required these British interests to control the international slave trade and maintain slavery in the United States used for the production of the cotton being used in the British textile mills. This is one of the major reasons why the British Government turned a blind eye of deniability when it came time for British Royal Navy officers, British built warships or commerce raiders, British Army officers, and British commercial interests to serve with the Confederate navy, Army, blockade runners, and commerce before and during the American Civil War. Up until sometime in the recent late 20th Century the British Royal Family was reputed to control a major interest of the best cotton plantations of the United States through a variety of intermediary companies they controlled. When other foreign governments in South Korea and elsewhere attempted to buy controlling interests in these U.S. cotton plantations for their own textile industries, they discovered the properties were not for sale because the British Royal family’s intermediaries still controlled these properties and their cotton production.
These same British and American factions finally succeeded in fomenting the civil war in the United States long before Lincoln became a candidate for the Office of the President of the United States. They were behind the financing and promotion of the Missouri Ruffians in the Kansas Wars of the 1850s, as well as a number of earlier filibuster expeditions in North America, Central America, and South America.
When Lincoln became a candidate for President of the United States in 1860, the American and British secessionists were already actively engaged in various insurgencies on behalf of secession. These same American and British secessionists succeeded in rigging the elections in the Southern states to deny the Lincoln and the Republicans the right to appear on the voting ballots in many of the Southern states. When Lincoln won the presidential election despite being denied the right for Southerners to vote for him, the secessionists engaged in a major conspiracy to murder and assassinate the new President-Elect while he was enroute to the inauguration in Washington, D.C. So, the secessionists were waging an insurrection and war before Lincoln was a candidate, before Lincoln was elected, before Lincoln was inaugurated, and before Lincoln was compelled by their lethal insurrection in Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Arkansas, South Carolina, and elsewhere to execute the Constitutional duty to suppress insurrections and restore “Domestic Tranquility.”
What it comes down to is that it made no material difference what Lincoln did or did not do, whether or not someone other than Lincoln had been elected as president, because the domestic and foreign insurrectionists were determined to foment and instigate a war of secession no matter what anyone else wanted or did. The fact that Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph or Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico was installed as emperor in 1864 while the United States was embroiled in its own civil war was no mere coincidence. It was simply another facet of the European efforts to gain political and/or economic control of the North American, Central American, and South American territories by subverting the governments in those regions, especially the United States.
Bottomline, Lincoln did not start the Civil War, because the Civil War was started long before Lincoln was a presidential candidate and was started by the same people who later attempted to assassinate Lincoln even before he could be inaugurated as President of the United States.