If that firing is undertaken to achieve an end, then yes. With the Harriet Lane, for example, the shot was fired to exercise force denying the Nashville's entry to the harbor at the time. In the case of The Lincoln, coercion was initiated on a scale unparalleled by any action of the confederates. He assembled a massive army and navy then used those forces to invade, conquer, and coerce obedience from 11 entire states.
Yes. As President Lincoln said, the nation's resources "are unexhausted, and are as we think, inexhaustible."
That puts me in mind of what Bruce Catton says:
"Secession itself had involved a flight from reality rather than an approach to it....Essentially, this was the reliance of a group that knew little of the modern world but which did not know nearly enough and could never understand that it did not know enough. It ran exactly parallel to Mr. Davis's magnificent statement that the duration of the war could be left up to the enemy--the war would go on until the enemy gave up, and it did not matter how far off that day might be.
The trouble was it did matter. It mattered enormously."
--The Coming Fury, p. 438-439, by Bruce Catton
Or this:
"Alone in the south, Baltimore had the capital, expertise, and tooling to remake the southern rails as fast as they wore out (or were blown up). So too, alone in the South, Baltimore had the resources to create ironclad vessels up to Yankee standards. Instead, this pivotal slave-holding city boosted the Union's powerful advantage....In contrast, under the crushing Civil War tasks of moving gigantic quantities of food, troops and military equipment, Confederate railroads succumbed faster than Confederate troops. By midwar, an aid to the Confederacy's western commander lamented that, "locomotives had not been repaired for six months, and many of them lay disabled." The colonel knew "not one place in the South where a driving-wheel can be made, and not one where a whole locomotive can be constructed."
--The South vs. The South, p. 63-64 by William W. Freehling
Walt