If the confederates had not fired on Fort Sumter?

[Northern_Piper]

@DSeid

But what could have a better president done differently? What are likely alt histories if there had been a more qualified person at the helm? Would Fremont had been able to do things much differently?

Recent thread on topic:

What could President Buchanan have done differently?

In one of the other threads, there’s a discussion of where Trump will end up ranking amongst the presidents. Buchanan normally seems at the bottom of the heap, for letting the US drift towards the Civil war. That ranking seems to me to assume that Buchanan could have done things differently to prevent the Civil War. But what, realistically, could he have done in his four years that might have averted the war? Or was it almost inevitable, given all the tensions that had been building up for for…