DiogenesLamp: "And the USS Thomas Freeborn, Uncle Ben, USS Yankee, USS Baltic, USRC Harriet Lane, and the USS Powhatan. I believe that constitutes 8 ships."
DiogenesLamp puts a lot of effort into drawing our attention away from Jefferson Davis' motives for starting war, "look at these bright shiny objects here", he says, Lincoln's battle fleet sailing to assail, subdue & oppress the Confederacy.
That's what really started the war, and it's all for money, money, money, Lincoln needed more money, money, money, claims DiogenesLamp!
Of course, that's all rubbish & nonsense, regardless of how often repeated.
Had Lincoln truly wished to start war at Fort Sumter, he would have ordered his ships to go in with guns ablasin', wouldn't he?
But he didn't.
Lincoln's orders were, in effect: no first use of force, resupply only, don't reinforce if not opposed.
Lincoln did not want war, certainly did not need war ("money, money, money" notwithstanding), but Jefferson Davis absolutely, positively did need war.
Davis needed war because without it Virginia would remain in the Union and along with Virginia the entire Upper South & Border States.
Only war would satisfy Virginia's Constitution signing statement condition of:
And Davis was right -- within a week of Fort Sumter, Virginia's secession convention reversed it's previous pro-Union vote and declared for secession.
Clearly Fort Sumter was for the Confederacy the biggest gain in territory with the least expenditure of military effort in history of the world!
So in April 1861 Jefferson Davis was pure genius.
Abraham Lincoln? Well... not so much.
He in fact did, albeit with a catch. They were to be led by the Powhatan, which he deliberately detached without telling them, so as to render them incapable of fulfilling the attack portion of their orders. It left them poised menacingly in a staging position, but with no actual possibility of them engaging in the attack which their orders would have required had the Powhatan showed up.
Lincoln was not a stupid man. He had already been told that it would take far more force than this to effectively succor Sumter, and various experts predicted those ships would have been cut to pieces by the Confederate battalions arrayed against them.
The Fleet's orders would have been suicide had they actually followed them. Every ship would have been sunk, and most of the men on them killed, and Lincoln and his Generals knew this, because Anderson had sent them as much information as he could about the Confederate gun emplacements around the harbor.
Lincoln's actions in deliberately sending the Powhatan elsewhere is the only thing that saved the lives of those men on board those ships.
One can only believe he never intended for those men to be killed. They were only intended to create a provocation for which he could initiate a war.