Incorrect. Charleston was a city of the United States. As a unit of the Revenue Service the Harriet Lane was within it's authority to determine the identity of ships entering or leaving the harbor, especially in the face of the budding southern rebellion. Your claim that it was one of the actions which pushed Beauregard into firing is ridiculous. By that time the orders to fire on Sumter had arrived from the Davis regime and less than 12 hours after the Lane stopped the Nashville the southern batteries opened fire.
Thanks for calling GOPcap on this.
The neo-rebs will put forward Robert E. Lee and the other traitors as the greatest of Christian gentlemen and then tell the biggest lies themselves.
Walt
...according to yankees sitting in offices several hundred miles away. Charleston itself did not see it that way.
That being said and regardless of which interpretation you or I favor, the Harriet Lane incident raises a more fundamental question.
In our previous conversations about the Sumter incident, I distinctly remember arguing that the sole yankee interest in being there was to impede free access to that port against the wishes of the people of that port. I further noted that this motive was less than moral, friendly, or just. Further that this motive was known weighed heavily in the decision and need of the confederates to move on Sumter.
If I recall, and correct me if I am in error, you downplayed and dismissed this interpretation when I offered it, suggesting the motives were something else. What the Harriet Lane incident demonstrates though is the yankee use of force to impede access to the confederate port before the war even started. It shows that impeding access was precisely their motive of being there and retaining a presence there.
Your claim that it was one of the actions which pushed Beauregard into firing is ridiculous.
Not in the least. Beauregard, who was already on the brink of acting due to the anticipated yankee fleet arrival, recieved a report of the incident shortly after it happened. Accounts of his actions at the time indicate that it pushed his resolve to proceed and fire on the fort in the morning.
The incident also indicates a second issue at hand - the firing of the first shot. Though Lincoln played Sumter to have fulfilled this role and accordingly blamed the confederates for starting the war as you often do, the first shot was actually fired by the yankees a day earlier in their first resort to force to impede access to the harbor.