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Bush didn't blatantly break the law and wipe his ass with the Constitution like Lincoln did.

Lincoln could have settled the whole thing before the war if he would have eased the heavy tariffs place on importation of goods. He certainly was willing to throw the slaves under the bus, but he was relentless with his robbery of the South and the forced tariffs.

 

Secession started before Lincoln took office bud.

 

But it was in anticipation of him being elected.

 

James Bucannon was sympathetic toward the South. Lincoln was not and it was well known.

 

Nothing he could do prior to actually assuming the office. And seeing as each and every compromise plan/proposal before secession went down in flames, there's no reason imo to think he could put that clusterfuck back in the bottle. The planter class was wholly and completely unwilling to relinquish power, real or imagined.
I also think it's also important to frame secession against the backdrop of Bleeding Kansas. In a very real sense, the civil war started there imo.

 

He wasnt the decider of anything until at least taking office. And by then events had escalated to the point states had already left.

 

For any of my fellow civil war enthusiasts, I highly recommend the book "Impending Crisis" by Potter. Imo the best work ever done explaining how the war came to be.

 

Lincoln could have changed his tone prior to his being elected. He was hell bent on keeping the high tariffs in place. He was more than willing to bend on the issue of slavery, but he would not back away from the tariffs.

He also would not bend on letting the new territories decide for themselves if they would be free or slave states. He had already promised the business leaders who not only backed him, but were largely part of the Republican Party that he would stop the spread of slavery westward to preserve their business interests.

 

What route? Go where? The country was already embroiled in bloody conflict before he became the president. As I said, it's extremely important to understand the state of the nation at the time. Bleeding Kansas is fundamentally important to understanding how the war came to be. It's also important to realize that nobody knew what was going to happen; we have the benefit of hindsight. But just claiming things would be different if they had been different is functionally useless.

 

Which tone? The one that got him scorched by the radical left or the tone that got him scorched by the reactionary right? Lincoln's tone didn't cause secession, Capbud.

 

All you had to do was pay attention to his campaign platform and what he said during his debates with Douglass to know where he stood and what his intentions were. The South saw the writing on the wall.

It was his fault that they seceded. They certainly didn't do it during Bucannan's term. They did it when they saw what was coming and they felt like they no longer had a voice in the Union.

The violence in Kansas and Missouri was going to continue regardless. The fighting there didn't cause secession, it was the fact that a president who was not at all sympathetic to the South, but was a staunch unionist who only favored the spread of Northern interests. Whether it be taxing the shit out of the South or making sure only Northern business opportunities moved westward, was taking office.

The Southern planters and politicians were being proactive.

BTW, Lincoln was elected in November of 1860. South Carolina announced its plan to secede in December of 1860, so he was the president when the South seceded.

He could have avoided it, but he chose Northern business interests over lowering tariffs and forced the South to bow down to his tyrannical rule.

 

What, exactly, does the Declaration of Immediate Causes from South Carolina say about tariffs? How many times do they use the word "tariff"? I know the answer to this without looking it up btw.
And no, Cap, he was literally not in office when secession began. You are blaming him for something he had no legislative/legal power to effect. Literally. Unless you are claiming that the south seceded because of political speeches made on the campaign trail by a single guy, which would seem to fly in the face of the aforementioned decades of violent political and social turmoil, filled with high stakes, contentious deal making. It took years and years and years of problems to arrive at the war. Scapegoating Lincoln is going to distort really getting at the meat of the conflict's causes in much the same way as scapegoating Jeff Davis (for example) distorts why the south was defeated.

 

Well, his attitude for stopping the spread of Southern interests westward was a huge factor. Also, I use tariffs because Lincoln promised the South and went as far as attempting to amend the Constitution to make slavery legal forever to prevent them from seceding. Yet, he would not let up on tariffs nor would he bend on letting new territories decide for themselves if they wanted to be free or slave states. He only had Northern business interests in mind and that was it.

And the South didn't lose because of Davis. They lost because they simply ran out of resources.

The Confederate leadership new all along they couldn't win the war on the battlefield. They just hoped to make it bad enough that the Northern people would force the Union leadership to compromise.

 

So where in the Declaration of Immediate Causes did SC bring up tariffs? Given a tariff-centric interpretation of events leading to the war, it surely played a much more prominent role in that document than, say, the runaway slave issue.
And I definitely agree that Davis got scapegoated hard after the fact, but it's worth noting that he was vilified just as harshly (if not moreso) in the south than in the north. Apologist literature blamed Davis for ages after the conflict, and much of it was written by southern scholars. My point there is that it's entirely possible to miss the forest for the trees, so to speak.
I disagree that the southern leadership didn't think they could win the war, at least at the beginning. But I also believe nobody on either side envisioned a war of the scope that unfolded.

 

I'm saying that hanging the war around Lincoln's neck is bad analysis of a decades long and highly complicated series of events.