Did Lincoln Start The Civil War?

There are many today who believe that President Lincoln agitated and intentionally started the Civil War. How do the facts stand up to those feelings?

When did the Civil War actually begin? When did Americans start killing other Americans? Was it when the South Carolina militia attacked Fort Sumter in 1861? Could an argument be made that it actually began when the first Africans were unloaded from slave trading ships in Virginia? Maybe we could say it started with the Founding Fathers who made so many awkward compromises on the slavery issue to bring the southern states into the process of ratifying the Constitution? Or was it when Nat Turner and his fellow slaves took up arms and killed their masters in a failed quest for freedom? Maybe it was in Alton, Illinois, where a mob murdered Elijah Lovejoy in 1837 due to his abolitionist activities. However, if Civil War is constituted by groups of people taking up arms against one another, we could say that the Civil War really started in the territory of Kansas in 1854, years before the attack on Fort Sumter.

Just three short years after Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850, the two parties, the Whigs and Democrats, after accepting the Compromise were able to lower the tensions. However, there was still a ticking time bomb about to go off in Kansas.

Senator Stephen Douglas, who was playing politics in an attempt to win favor in both the North and South to help him win the White House, and to win a big financial bonanza for his state of Illinois, made a play more weighed by ambition than philosophy or idealism. To get a railroad route approved to go through Illinois instead of a Southern route, he came up with the proposal for the Kansas-Nebraska Act to get Southern support. This act would allow each state in the western territory to choose if they would be a free or slave state. This shattered the 1820 Missouri Compromise, and caused the tensions over the future of slavery to boil to the top.

The law split the Democrat Party along North-South lines, it destroyed the Whig Party, and created the new Republican Party. One of the Whigs who became a Republican was an Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who acknowledged the legal right to keep slaves in existing slave states, while supporting the idea of gradual emancipation. Lincoln was not at all ambivalent when it came to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he condemned and calling Douglas a dangerous enemy of democracy.

The Act caused an immediate reaction, where those on both sides started sending men, money, and guns into the territory to influence the vote on slavery. The Emigrant Aid Society in Massachusetts, an abolitionist group founded by industrialists, sent antislavery settlers to relocate in Kansas. They sent boxes of Sharp's breech loading rifles, known as Beecher's Bibles since they were sent by Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church in Brooklyn to arm the settlers. By the way, you can see Reverend Beecher's pulpit from when he was pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis where he was before moving to New York.

The proslavery groups were just as active, several thousand slave owners,known as Border Ruffians, came in from Missouri, to influence the voting. They were stoked by those like Senator David Achison from Missouri, and passionate promoter of slavery, who took leave from the Senate to lead the Border Ruffians. Achison threatened "There are eleven hundred men coming over from Platte County to vote, if that ain't enough we can send five thousand - enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory."

Achison's Missouri men succeeded in electing a proslavery legislature in March 1855. The antislavery supporters claimed the election was fraudulent, and called for a constitutional convention banning slavery, and banning blacks from the Kansas Territory. By October there were separate elections naming a proslavery and an antislavery representative in Congress for Kansas.

During the winter the controversy went back and forth between Free-Soilers and slaveholders. Finally the time bomb blew into a bloody civil war. Violent battles became commonplace, lynchings, murder, and burning properties replaced democratic debate. The federal authorities, and President Franklin Pierce, were helpless to stop the bloodshed.

Lawrence, Kansas was heavily populated by Free-soilers, who gave sanctuary to abolitionists, fugitive slaves, and newspaper editors who had been indicted for treason by the proslavery territorial government. On May 21st, 1856, armed with five cannons, and eight hundred man army of Border Ruffians attacked Lawrence, killing one man, destroying the newspaper's offices, and burning the hotel and the Free-Soil governor's home.

That was the beginning of all out guerrilla warfare. Four days later, the fanatical abolitionist John Brown and four of his sons drug five proslavery settlers, who had nothing to do with the Lawrence attack, from their homes and shot and hacked them to death with broad swords, right in front of their families. Brown and his sons evaded capture, they were never indicted or punished for the massacre. Four years later, Brown would attack Harper's Ferry, that gave him a name that lived in infamy. His actions in Kansas provoked more fighting, eventually more than two hundred people died in these border wars.

As we progress through the lead up to and the actual Civil War, it should become very obvious to anyone who would set aside emotional baggage and look at history objectively will see the truth.