Was Anderson under obligation to announce all his plans? Sumter was under his command. He did his duty. His orders were to hold both forts, but when it became apparent that he could either hold Sumter or nothing, he moved to Sumter. Don't make it sound like some dastardly scheme. "Oh, the poor confederacy, so skillfully manuevered into firing on Ft. Sumter. Woe is me"
and the Union garrison's aiming of the UNION guns on the city of Charleston. And you forgot Major Anderson's threat to the people to use the guns to close down the harbor.
Who threatened who first? How many guns were trained on Sumter?
And you forget the direct warnings of both the Governor of South Carolina and the Confederate government that if any UNION military attempt was made to enter Charleston harbor, it would be taken as an act of war, and that self-defense would be initiated.
A pretty stupid position to take, in retrospect. Especially since it meant the south had to start shooting first.
That is from the log of Gustavus V. Fox who was leading the incursion and was in a position to see that the 'Nashville' had not "gone on her way". So, you can drop that contention from your bag of disinformation.
We've done this dance before. As the quote says, the ships off the bar "awaited the result of the bombardment". No captain of any merchant ship was going to sail into a harbor that was undergoing a bombardment. Why would they risk getting caught in a crossfire? You can't claim with any sort of a straight face that this constitutes evidence of a blockade. If anything, the south was blockading the harbor at that point.
We arrived off Charleston the 12th instant, at 3 a.m., and found only the Harriet Lane. Weather during the whole time a gale. At 7 a.m. the Pawnee arrived, and, according to his orders, Captain Rowan anchored twelve miles east of the light, to await the arrival of the Powhatan....
Typical use of ellipses by you to omit cogent facts. Here's the entirety of that paragraph:
"We arrived off Charleston the 12th instant, at 3 a.m., and found only the Harriet Lane. Weather during the whole trine a gale. At 7. a.m. the Pawnee arrived, and, according to his orders, Captain Rowan anchored twelve miles east of the light, to await the arrival of the Powhatan. I stood in with the Baltic to execute my orders by offering, in the first place, to carry provisions to Fort Sumter. Nearing the bar it was observed that war had commenced, and, therefore, the peaceful offer of provisions was void. "
Anything after that, including the seizure of the ice schooner (which was intended only as a means of running supplies into Sumter under the bombardment, not as way of denying southern planters ice for their juleps), came after "war had commenced."
“At once shut down every Southern port, destroy its commerce, and bring utter ruin on the Confederate States.”
Ah, so newspaper editorials are now to be considered evidence? Because I can post southern editorials talking about secession being necessary to preserve the institution of slavery all day long.
"We would therefore have at once to resort to income, poll, and every other sort of taxation, to keep up our present expensive machinery--not to speak of the conduct of an offensive war."
A statement that turns out to be utterly false. Tariff revenue in 1862 was the same as in 1859. In 1863 it was over $69 million and in 1864 it was $102 million, almost double what it had been in 1860. All that quote proves is that economic doomsayers have been with us forever. How many similar threads can I find on FR today?
Finally, the last in your long list of BS commentary.
No, not BS. Volunteers weren't enlisting to preserve tariff income or economically oppress the south. This is what they were responding to:
