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Incorrect. Charleston was a city of the United States.

...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.

The decision for war had been made by Davis on April 10th when is sent orders to Beauregard to demand the immediate surrender of Sumter and, if refused, to shell it into submission. The Harriet Lane could have done nothing and the confederate shelling of Sumter would still have started on the 12th. Prior to the 11th, Sumter had not interfered with shipping into and out of Charleston. The garrison there had committed no hostile acts. Still the order went out to demand surrender or face shelling. So your suggestion that the south was forced into it by Northern obstruction of trade is wrong.

The order that Davis gave to fire on Sumter started the war, just as Davis had known it would do. For his own reasons he preferred war to negotiation.