Major Robert Anderson, Inside Fort Sumter, Credits Lincoln With Starting the Civil War

I don't know why Yankees (like Donald Douglas) insist on arguing every little point.  It is so important to them to believe that Lincoln was not the war-monger he was, but a gentle lamb on which the Civil War was forced, all the while he was dreaming of peace and daffodils and racial harmony.

Actually, who fired the first shot is not important.  What is important is who made that first shot necessary -- and that was Abraham Lincoln.  Determined to hold all forts in Southern territory, he made the war inevitable.

However, Lincoln did indeed diabolically plot to force the South to fire the first shot.  He knew it would have tremendous propaganda value -- indeed, the propaganda is still working, 150 years later.  Ask Donald Douglas.

Here are some more actual, historical facts that prove it.

On April 7, 1861 Confederate authorities intercepted mail from Union  Major Robert Anderson, who was commanding Union troops in Fort Sumter.  In that letter, Anderson expressed shock to hear that an expedition to the fort was now en route.  (Any attempt to resupply the fort was an act of war and would commence hostilities.)  Anderson wrote:  "We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in this war which I see is to be thus commenced."

Bombardment of Fort Sumter began five days later, on April 12, 1861.

In that statement, Major Anderson acknowledged the truth, that Lincoln had determined to begin hostilities in the Civil War. Lincoln was the aggressor and the author of the carnage that followed. And, on Lincoln's soul, is the blood of perhaps as many as 850,000 men, women and children.  I'd hate to go to God with that record.  What a hero!

Source:  The Union is Dissolved!: Charleston and Fort Sumter in the Civil War, By Douglas W. Bostick