[DoodleDawg]

Once you've been caught trying to sneak a whole bunch of soldiers into their harbor covertly, nobody's going to trust any other supposedly innocent ships to be innocent.

So what you are saying is that any ship Lincoln had sent, be it a full-blown ship-of-the-line or a 10 foot row boat, would have been fired upon since Davis didn't trust anyone. So if the supply ship was going to be fired upon no matter what then put the supplies in a ship that could defend itself from Confederate aggression.

[DiogenesLamp]

So what you are saying is that any ship Lincoln had sent, be it a full-blown ship-of-the-line or a 10 foot row boat, would have been fired upon since Davis didn't trust anyone.

I'm saying by the time the Rhoda Shannon came along, they really had no reason to trust anything Lincoln said or did.

When you deliberately mislead people, they tend to not trust you anymore.

So if the supply ship was going to be fired upon no matter what then put the supplies in a ship that could defend itself from Confederate aggression.

There was no such ship, or collection of ships that could have accomplished that. Porter rightly said that the Sumter expedition was doomed to failure from the beginning, and that if they had attempted to accomplish their mission, they would have all been sunk.

Now he was a Union admiral when he said it, and I'm just a guy way in the future from him, but I kinda think he knows what he was talking about.