Or they could have just let the ship reprovision the fort without anybody shooting at anybody else. You want to blame Lincoln, so you say that he had free will and nobody else did, but there may have been room for commanders on the ground to negotiate a resolution.
My point is that Anderson would have fired upon Beauregard if he attacked those ships. Is it too much to think that normal ship officers would have shared Anderson's view, and fired back on the forces attacking their people in a fort?
Beauregard attacked the fort and the fleet didn't approach and fire back, so far as I know.
The fleet was going to have to shoot in order to accomplish their mission.
Sure, if you exclude other options and if you assume that commanders never have discretion to interpret their orders as they see fit.
Had the ships actually done what they were instructed to do before they left, there would have been no pretense possible about this being a "supply" mission. It would have been recognized as a belligerent force deliberately starting a war, which is what the Confederates were led to believe it was.
If the ships had gone in shooting, you could say it was war and blame the Yankees. That probably would have been the wiser course.
Ft. Sumter was only useful as a bone of contention. It was useful as an excuse to start a war, and the starting of a war would inhibit direct Southern trade with Europe, which was the actual reason why the war was needed.
It was useful as a symbol that the Union hadn't entirely surrendered to the secessionists and that the union was intact. Assuming that a "bone of contention" only means and "excuse to start a war" is bad logic and shows a poor understanding of how things of how politics and history work.
Anderson wasn't assigned to that fort. He took it over in the middle of the night. He started the aggression. If he wanted a peaceful relationship, he should have not taken over the fort, which was a belligerent aggressive act.
You want to blame Lincoln, so you say that he had free will and nobody else did, but there may have been room for commanders on the ground to negotiate a resolution.
It was already done. Anderson had announced he would evacuate at noon on April 15th. Then the warships showed up and triggered the fighting. Anderson even blames Lincoln, but not overtly or directly.
Beauregard attacked the fort and the fleet didn't approach and fire back, so far as I know.
This is correct. They had been told to wait for Captain Mercer in the Powhatan before implementing any force against the confederates. Mercer was never coming, but they didn't know that.
Sure, if you exclude other options and if you assume that commanders never have discretion to interpret their orders as they see fit.
My recollection is that the orders said something along the lines of "if resisted, use all the force at your command to place both supplies and reinforcements into Sumter."
If the ships had gone in shooting, you could say it was war and blame the Yankees. That probably would have been the wiser course.
That is what the Confederates believed was going to happen, and they believed this because they had been sent telegraph messages from trusted sources saying that this was what those ships were going to do.
Indeed, that is what their publicly known orders said they would do. Nobody knew Lincoln was going to send secret orders to the command ship relieving Captain Mercer of command, and sending it to Florida under the command of a lieutenant. (Two ranks below a captain in the naval ranking system of that era.) It was an unheard of thing in that era.
The Confederates were well and truly hoodwinked.
It was useful as a symbol that the Union hadn't entirely surrendered to the secessionists and that the union was intact.
It is pretty apparent that had the Confederates ignored the hostile force in their midst and just went about trading with Europe while ignoring the Union, they would have likely made their secession a fait accompli.
I do recall reading a discussion among Lincoln's cabinet officials worrying that the South would do exactly this, and six months later they would still have a useless garrison once more needing to be resupplied.
Nobody in the North wanted a war, and nobody in the South wanted one either. Had one not started (due to Lincoln's intentional provocation), the South's secession would have been accepted by the Northern states.