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Notes -
The US Civil War might have also gone very differently had the Confederacy not initiated various engagements, giving Lincoln a stronger basis to send in the troops. Had the civil war started not with the South bombarding Fort Sumter, but with the Battle of Bull Run in Virginia, Lincoln would have been in a very different political position.
In some respects, the opening of the civil war was a boundary dispute, and the South had no shortage of reasons to try and set / maximize expected gains, but those proactive efforts placed a greater political onus on them as instigating the violence that followed.
Would bombarding Fort Sumter have been different if the Confederacy had first insisted that the residents at the fort give up their unregistered weapons, pay property taxes on the fort, and allow building inspectors in to make sure it's up to code, and only bombarded the fort when they refused to do that?
If the delay of bombardment for the claims of process had allowed other events to occur first, sure.
The mid-19th century was a period where the telegraph was changing the political evolution/initiation of conflicts. 'How' a conflict started becomes more and more important the more people can know about it before and during the fact, rather than have it summarized for them afterwards.
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Not to forget that the Confederacy claimed several states that never formally seceded from the Union, seated their representatives in the Confederate Congress etc.
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