While we're on the subject of the OR, remember this quote from your earlier post?
"In returning from the city Lieutenant Snyder called for the mail at Fort Johnson, where he also took on board a small supply of beef and cabbages, which had come from the city the day before, too late for our boat?"
Why didn't you continue with the next paragraph?
"My supplies of provisions that I laid in before the commencement of the investment were yesterday reduced to one half-barrel of cornmeal, one-seventh barrel of grits, and eleven codfish. Everything else that is necessary for the support of the Engineer force is drawn from the scanty stores of the command."
So the fort was short of food and supplies. And since Beauregard had been ordered to end the flow of food to the fort on April 2 then there is no doubt that the intent of the southern forces was to starve the fort into surrender, and that the fort was close to being at that point.
"My supplies of provisions that I laid in before the commencement of the investment were yesterday reduced to one half-barrel of cornmeal, one-seventh barrel of grits, and eleven codfish. Everything else that is necessary for the support of the Engineer force is drawn from the scanty stores of the command."
That has been well documented. What people tend to forget about were the supplies being made available to him from the city -- that's what I focused on.
Major Anderson was short sighted. He should have thought about the situation he was putting his troops and the country into when he moved his force to Fort Sumter. He was attempting to stay in a fort surrounded by his opposition. Sort of like the Alamo, I suppose. Eventually the food supplies he brought with him would run out, and he would be at the mercy of his opposition and/or force a national crisis. The opposition had been allowing him to get some food supplies from the city, but eventually they could close that source, if they so wished. They ultimately did just that -- an error on the Confederates' part, IMO, as I said above.
Here is how President Buchanan responded when informed that Major Anderson had moved into Fort Sumter [Source: Maury Klein's well documented book Days of Defiance]:
Buchanan slumped into a chair. "My God!" he cried wearily. "Are calamities ... never to come singly! I call God to witness -- you gentlemen better than anybody else know that this is not only without but against my orders. It is against my policy."
Buchanan could see the implications of Anderson's move, if Anderson could not.
If Lincoln had been successful at getting provisions into the fort, he would have to go through the same exercise the next time the food ran out. He was just postponing the crisis. (Actually one-seventh of a barrel of grits could have gotten the fort through the whole summer.)
When members of Lincoln's cabinet advised him that all of the proposed plans to supply Sumter would result in a clash of arms, they weren't wrong. Lincoln chose to do so in face of this advice.
Here was some of the advice Lincoln got [from Klein's book]:
On the 15th [March] Lincoln met again with the cabinet, Scott, Totten, Stringham, and Fox. Totten reviewed several plans for reinforcing Sumter and concluded that all of them would result in a clash of arms. Scott added that even if Fox's plan succeeded, it would do little more than buy time before the attempt would have to be made again. With five of seven cabinet members and his generals against the attempt, Lincoln was in more of a quandary than ever. ...