There were some elements of grand conspiracy but it was mostly incompetent rhetoric, failed ambition, and the chief failure of democracy that caused the civil war. The cause of the war isn't necessarily what it is about though. there is a reason you don't see many if any people raising the flag of the confederate government but the flag of confederate army is what is raised. had the confederacy survived the war it's next conflict likely would have been the southern publics inclination to elect the military men from the war and essentially overthrow the cartel at the center of the confederate government. The full story of the war takes far too much historical context for a single comment, the shortest explanation is that what the government and ruling class of the confederacy wanted out of the war was different than what the majority of southerners wanted out of it and the modern day analogue is the difference between the elites at the top of a political party and the common man who supports that party. Lincoln's campaign rhetoric is essentially the first stone laid in the wars foundation, the cornerstone of the war really, slavery is bad and that's a perfectly righteous and fair position to hold but it's also an ancient institution forcing people to give it up at the drop of a hat was never feasible and even the founders understood that and that is why they made the great compromise despite their dislike for slavery, just as the north had gradually ended slavery on it's own so to should have the south, it was quite doable from a political perspective and if Lincoln had made his goal making slavery harder, less profitable, less socially acceptable, he could have avoided war altogether but he used the tyranny of the majority to achieve this. proper rhetoric would have allowed a gradual decline in the practice without bloodshed it was Lincoln's hubris that made the conflict but his hurbis couldn't have been empowered without the core flaw of a democracy, and that is the tyranny of the many. Then as now, many in the north had no idea what a nigger is because of their privilege of geographic and social distance from negroes and the fact that harsh winters created a selective force against black slaves and slaves in general so they imagined noble savages suffering under a whip unjustly, the truth is that niggers we see online are the same niggers as those slaves, those slaves needed slave drivers in every field because the negroe has always made a poor fit for labor and order. The north didn't know the thing with which they trifled, nor did they care, their misguided moral absolutism unleashed a hell on us that should never have come but yet lingers, a million whites dead at black hands, hundreds of trillions in debt, our future stolen, our past erased, this is the legacy of the civil war. At the peak of slavery less than 2% of households in the south held slaves, the upper crust of they that did were the core of the rhetoric for secession and funders to the confederacy and her ambitions of conquering the gulf of mexico and achieving a nation from one sea to the other in this fashion. They inspired the common man to fight by pointing out that the cultural differences led the north to choose to collapse the south's economy and if their majority of votes could do that they could make the south do anything and that a democracy where you only ever have policy dictated to you by other people hundreds of miles away in totally different conditions is a sham, the common man could see the foolishness and hubris in Lincoln's rhetoric and the foolishness of the north who voted for him and saw clearly they shouldn't submit to them lest the drive the whole of them to ruin. Slavery was common practice, people saw slaves regularly it was known they are property just as cattle are and the theft of a slave was a crime, it's not a hard sell by any means to extrapolate that the north was committing a mass action of theft with no recourse for the south but secession. Fort Sumter, was not finished when the battle started, in fact the battle itself paused the construction, the north were building a fort in South Carolina, a confederate state, they wouldn't surrender the site, they were occupying confederate land, it was a provocation that couldn't be tolerated, the confederacy took back it's own land from an occupying foreign force and the union declared war. The confederacy was naive, Fort Sumter was a sacrificial pawn played to bait out the confederacy, the north were naive that their deceitful and cowardly aggression wouldn't be perceived by the public, this is why states and patriots above the mason dixon line fought for the south, further the north was naive thinking that raw numbers assured their victory, the south nearly won the war and lost it by giving vital commands to fools linked to confederate aristocracy at the end of the war so they could garner some war glory as they believed victory was decided, lincoln had penned his surrender just two months before the war ended and expected to send it within two weeks of that time but continuous defeats as a result of excessive losses in a couple of fights lost the south it's momentum and enabled the north to rally. Pickett's charge stands out as possibly the greatest military folly to occur in the new world. The civil war was the moment when the bastards in power realized the american people were fools who could be convinced to fight any war and doing so wasn't so hard so long as you put on a show and intimidated the naysayers.