How did Lincoln view the South's threat to secede?

Andersonh1

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I feel like I hijacked jgoodguy's Northern Views thread, and I didn't intend to do that, so I wanted to bring this discussion to another thread. After Lincoln had been elected but before he was inaugurated, he wrote the following letter on January 11, 1861.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln...view=detail;type=simple;view=fulltext;q1=1860

Confidential. Hon. J. T. Hale Springfield, Ill. Jan'y. 11th 1861.
My dear Sir---Yours of the 6th is received. I answer it only because I fear you would misconstrue my silence. What is our present condition? We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union. They now have the Constitution, under which we have lived over seventy years, and acts of Congress of their own framing, with no prospect of their being changed; and they can never have a more shallow pretext for breaking up the government, or extorting a compromise, than now. There is, in my judgment, but one compromise which would really settle the slavery question, and that would be a prohibition against acquiring any more territory. Yours very truly, A. LINCOLN.

It seemed to me on first reading this that Lincoln seemed to not believe that secession was anything other than a strongarm tactic by Southern states to extract concessions in exchange for remaining in the Union. He saw it as a blatant attempt to control the government. Others saw that Lincoln took this view and tried to change his mind, apparently with no success.

http://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abraham-lincoln-in-depth/abraham-lincoln-and-secession/

During this period, Mr. Lincoln was relentlessly upbeat about the Union and skeptical of secession. Journalist William H. Smith recalled: “On two…occasions during the campaign a delegation from Indiana visited Mr. Lincoln. He impressed them with the conviction that the Union must be preserved at all hazards. There was something tangible about him which made those who called on him feel that he possessed great reserve powers, and would be able to meet any contingency which might arise. His visitors always left him in more enthusiastic mood than they were when he arrived.”12 Mr. Lincoln believed there was a danger of self-fulfilling prophecies – too much attention had been given to southern complaints in the past. He also believed that southern self-interest would prevail, telling Ohio Republican Donn Piatt: “They wont give up the offices. Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.”13 But southern slaveholders were not be appeased with patronage. Historian James A. Rawley wrote: “By 1850, the Southern states shared a history of grievances against the North ranging from territorial restriction of slavery in fact and in intent; surging anti-slavery agitation; broad sanction of John Brown’s violence; an economic posture threatening southern interests; formation of a sectional party hostile to the South’s peculiar institution; and repeated Northern defiance of the Constitution in deed, as in the personal liberty laws, and in word, as in Seward’s ‘higher law’ doctrine and the Republican Party’s denunciation of the Supreme Court’s ‘new dogma’ of the Dred Scott decision.”14

Attorney Donn Piatt spent time with Mr. Lincoln in October and November 1860. He later wrote: “Mr. Lincoln did not believe, could not be made to believe, that the South meant secession and war. When I told him, subsequently to this conversation, at a dinner-table in Chicago, where the Hon. Hannibal Hamlin, General [Robert] Schenck, and others were guests, that the Southern people were in dead earnest, meant war, and I doubted whether he would be inaugurated at Washington, he laughed and said the fall of pork at Cincinnati had affected me. I became somewhat irritated, and told him that in ninety days the land would be whitened with tents. He said in reply, ‘Well, we won’t jump that ditch until we come to it,’ and then, after a pause, he added, ‘I must run the machine as I find it.’ I take no credit to myself for this power of prophecy. I only said what every one acquainted with the Southern people knew, and the wonder is that Mr. Lincoln should have been so blind to the coming storm.”15

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The president understood the dangers that any public pronouncement would entail. Shortly after the 1860 presidential election, Mr. Lincoln talked to one visitor about yielding to the worries of Southerners: “It is the trick by which the South breaks down every northern man. I would go to Washington without the support of the men who supported me and were my friends before election. I would be as powerless as a block of buckeye wood.

I found all of this quite interesting to think about. We look back on the war as something that proceeded in an obvious fashion and think that everyone should have known what was coming, but it seems that Lincoln did not treat secession as a real event, but just as an obnoxious bit of political blackmail. Would he have proceeded differently once he was sworn in if he had taken it more seriously? Does this attitude of Lincoln's shed some light on how he chose to deal with Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens? I'm interested in everyone's thoughts on this.
 
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