Another example of where you don't know what the f*** you are talking about. The Star of the West was carrying troops and munitions. The Wikipedia entry on it used to say so, but last time I checked they had removed that little detail about it carrying troops and munitions.
Local ships had spotted the Star of the West offloading the troops and cargo from the Brooklyn. They arrived in port first and telegraphed the authorities in Charleston.
If you do a little digging, you can finally find some articles that admit the Star of the West was carrying soldiers and war material.
Once again, the early belligerent acts of the war were committed by Union forces.
The Star of the West WAS an unarmed merchant ship. The Queen Mary carried 15,000 troops during WWII, but that didn’t make it a warship. Johnny Reb fired first, and you can’t blame that Lincoln.
Buchanan was president when The Star of the West was fired upon. He wasn't bound by promises not to reinforce Sumter that Lincoln had not yet made. He was within his rights to send what he liked to the fort.
Dickens's American Notes were based on a trip he took to the US in 1842. Whatever Southern slaveowners might have said to him in an effort to win him over had little or nothing to do with how they or their children would feel 20 years later. Cotton and slaves were in a long boom in the years leading up to the war and that had a lot to do with making planters cling to slavery all the more tightly. Increasing abolitionist agitation and fears of slave uprisings had similar effects.
Dickens may have expressed the opposition to slavery expected of an Englishman after Britain abolished slavery, but he was an admirer of Thomas Carlyle, so his views about race and his sympathies may have been more complicated and tangled than would appear at first sight. He also had no love for the United States and, like many Englishmen of his day, felt some satisfaction when it came to America's troubles.