Cadets at the Citadel who were acting under no orders from any Governing official to do so.
The prudent planner would assume that opposition was a real possibility in any further attempt to resupply Fort Sumter.
No. The prudent planner, having had access to all the dispatches sent by Major Anderson from Ft. Sumter which detailed the massive array of armaments that had been positioned around the harbor would have concluded that any attempt to reinforce or resupply that fortress was stark raving insanity that would accomplish nothing more than killing off a lot of good men and sinking a lot of ships.
In fact, Lincoln was told by quite a number of Military experts that the plan was unworkable.
No sane person would consider the idea of forcing their way up the harbor to be a reasonable idea. Anderson, upon first learning of it, thought it was not only a horrible idea, but a deliberate violation of trust, and therefore dishonorable.
Hence war ships were part of the resupply effort.
Not at all. Warships were sent for one purpose only. To get the Confederates to attack. They could accomplish nothing else, and Lincoln knew it.
Admiral David Porter in his memoirs asserted that this was about the worst idea that anyone could have conceived. He said that had the ships attempted to carry out their orders, they would have all been sunk.
This fact was readily apparent before the mission, so it's pretty clear they were never really expected to attempt this folly that their orders required.
That's why the Powhatan monkey wrench was thrown into the whole thing. The Confederates didn't know it was all a ruse. They thought it was a serious but stupid attack.
The artillery instructor was a officer in the South Carolina militia. South Carolina owned the guns, projectiles and the powder. The fact they had no direct orders from Beauregard isn’t the point.
Again if the first resupply effort was fired on by anybody, chances are that the second one would be fired on. Davis would have ordered Beauregard to fire on Sumter if the girl scouts in canoes were ferrying provisions to Sumter. He was not going to allow the fort to continue to be occupied by U.S. Forces. Lincoln could have sent a completely unarmed ship to Charleston with nothing but hard tack, coffee, and beans, and Davis would have ordered Beauregard to reduce the fort regardless. Davis had been warned that firing on Sumter would mean war. Davis accepted that fact and gave the order.