You may have missed it, but I had mentioned previously that Lieutenant David Porter informed the President that anything going through official channels would be conveyed to the Confederates as fast as they could flash the message down the telegraph wires.
The military and presumably a lot of government departments were riddled with spies and sympathizers. Everything the Union was doing (except Lincolns critical secret orders) was being conveyed to Beauregard.
The Ships showing up at the designated rendezvous point merely confirmed what the previously leaked orders said.
If that was the case, then they would have gotten enough information to put the Scott order in its proper context.
When one is potentially on the receiving end of a hostile force, it is prudent to accept the worst case scenario as the one that will occur.
Did you really miss the "and myself" in Beauregard's message?
I missed that it was Beauregard's message. I got the sender and receiver reversed. Now that I think about it, Walker was likely in Montgomery at this time. So yes, You are correct, it was Beauregard there with Governor Pickens, and the Agent was Capt. Theo. Talbot.
Davis into starting one, consider that the question for Lincoln and the union was whether they were going to give in on everything -- to just lie down and let the Confederates roll over them -- or take a firm stand.
Of what use was the fort to them other than to threaten the entrance to Charleston and keep a thumb in the eye of the Confederacy? There was no real military value to the fort in the defense of anything but Charleston, and insisting on possessing it for no real purpose served only to create a conflict where no other reason for such existed.
Whether Lincoln left it at that, or somehow "knew" they weren't going to let the ships isn't something we can know for certain, though that won't stop people from forming opinions.
They beseiged the place since January. On what line of thinking would you have us believe they were going to relinquish their efforts to evacuate the fort in April? One would think three months of surrounding it with cannons would convince even the hardest head that they meant to see what they regarded as a foreign presence expelled.
Any rational man would take it as a given that they would not allow people to resupply the fort without a fight. Lincolns own cabinet made this point clearly when they were asked about the Fox plan. All but one said it would cause a war, and all but one said they would rather see the fort given up than trigger a massive and horribly bloody civil war.
1880: Hey, we're all Americans!
1860: F@#% you America! Yankee go home!
Stuff like that is hard to process.
You live and work with people for years and it's hard to accept that they're ready to kill you all of a sudden.
As for the other side, you have to have something wrong with you to start shooting up the forts or ships of what used to be your country.
And as I said, the point for the federal government was to do something or to do nothing and they weren't going to just sit back and do nothing.
Also, you could make the same argument against Kennedy in 1962. Stop Cuban and Soviet ships and you could expect them to fire back. But they didn't.
Kennedy gambled that Khrushchev and Castro would stay calm, and he won that bet. Lincoln made the same bet and Davis's response was disappointing.