[BroJoeK]

Pelham: "So you don’t count firing on The Star of the West as an act of war?"

Thanks for the question.
I call every Confederate act of war before Fort Sumter (seizures of forts, ships, arsenals, mints, etc., threats against Union officials, firings on Union ships, etc.) provocations, provocations to which President Buchanan refused to respond.

But the Confederate military assault on Fort Sumter was orders of magnitude greater, an attack, I'll repeat, equivalent in its day to the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
It was a clear, unequivocal act of war against Union troops which resulted in two deaths, and surrender of the fort -- a military loss relatively far-greater than US losses at Pearl Harbor.

After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare that since the attack a state of war has existed, and that is precisely my view also of Fort Sumter.

[Pelham]

‘But the Confederate military assault on Fort Sumter was orders of magnitude greater, an attack, I’ll repeat, equivalent in its day to the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.’

Well. At Sumter the fort suffered greatly but the sole Union casualty was a horse.

[DiogenesLamp]

Well, no. There was a stand-off, a war of nerves. That could have lasted longer. Confederates could have waited until Lincoln fired the first shot. But they didn't. Once the shooting started it was war and there was no going back.

No it wasn't, and you have to be six kinds of stupid to assert that it is even remotely comparable.

We lost 3,000 lives in Peal Harbor, and Zero at Ft. Sumter.

The Japanese did many Billions of Dollars of damage to our ships and harbor, and the Confederates did little to no damage to anything that belonged to the USA.

The Japanese attack signaled that there would be further attacks in the future. The Confederates were content to just get their land back and keep a Foreign Nation's guns from threatening their efforts to create a Free Trade port.

The Japanese attack was unprovoked, but the Sumter attack was provoked by an Act of War committed by Lincoln in sending men and arms to reinforce a fort which no longer belonged to the Union because Independence had restored it back to it's original owners.

The closer analogy to the Japanese attack was when Lincoln sent 35,000 men to invade the South. It was unprovoked, many died, and much damage was done.