Lets get to refuting this terribly supported article by cherry picking a little.
In order for any emancipation scheme to peacefully have worked it would
either have required the people and leadership of the Southern states
to concede that slavery was wrong and needed to be done away with
(which they most emphatically did not, quite the reverse, by 1861 it
was not a radical opinion in the South to claim that slavery was a
"positive good") or at least for them to accept the ability of the
federal government to regulate the issue, even against their wishes
(which they were even more emphatically against).
False. If the South had been allowed to secede slavery would still have been abolished. This thinking suffers from a common historical pitfall: that since the Federal Government brought about the end of (private) slavery the Federal Government is required for slavery to end. The Civil War was a sufficient condition to end slavery, but it was not necessary condition.
Ironically, the Union enabled slavery. If the South had never joined slavery would not have existed by the 1860s.
Lincoln was not even inaugurated into the presidency before the entire
lower south "seceded" and Jefferson Davis was in "office" as President
of the so-called "Confederate States of America." The spark with which
the war began was not Lincoln marching an army into the South to
restore order as certain of his predecessors would have most certainly
done, but was the bombardment of a federal fort by the rebels. To have
not responded at that moment with the use of force would have been to
concede that the government did not have the right to govern and
protect its own property, what sort of government would that have been?
It would have been no government at all, and therein lies what Mr. Paul
was most likely going for.
Another historical pitfall: because the war began at Fort Sumter, Fort Sumter caused the civil war. The fort is only federal property unless you presume that secession was illegal. The war began when the Union refused to acknowledge the secession.
Otherwise, this statement is a blatant contradiction, how could Lincoln
wage war to enhance and simultaneously get rid of the original intent
of the republic?
Obviously this author doesn't make the distinction between government by force and government by consent.