You act as if you've uncovered some smoking gun. The Times only repeats the point made over and over again, from Lincoln's first inaugural to these threads. The union went to war to preserve the union and in response to the southern attack on Ft. Sumter. The south seceded to protect against a perceived Republican threat to their rights as slaveholders.
What was so striking to me in my earlier post that you replied to was the Times rather ludicrous insistence that there was no one in the North that advocated the various positions they listed. That was a true reverse, one-and-a-half, triple-twist spin if I ever saw one.
One of those claims above was that no one in the North proposes to interfere with the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law. If so, it was only because a large number of laws and restrictions were already in place to do just that, thwart the Federal law.
Here is a link to a summary published in 1860 of the various laws, fines, etc., used by Northern states to hinder the Fugitive Slave Law. Personal Liberty Laws
Click on the URL link shown at this University of Michigan site, then scroll down to the article on Personal Liberty Laws.
Even in the face of these restrictions, some people persisted and were able to get through all the legal red tape and recover their slaves from some Northern states. Not so in all Northern states, however. I read somewhere that the last slave returned from Massachusetts to an owner was in 1854.
There were four channels shown in the Times map: the Main Ship Channel, the North Channel, the Swash Channel, and the Overall Channel. The Main Channel looks fairly easy. It was wide but did make a broad left hand turn to avoid Sullivans Island.
Tne Times in their article accompanying the map says:
... small boats. tugs, and steamers of light draft can enter the harbor through the North Channel, the Swash Channel, or Overall Channel, and thus escape the batteries on Morris Island altogether. The only fire they will encounter will be from the land batteries on Cummings' Point, and from Fort Moultrie.
The Times had a rather arrogant assessment of how the battle for Fort Sumter would go. They also persisted for months in misspelling the word 'Sumter'. This was in the face of all the articles about the fort in other newspapers that managed to spell the name correctly. But they were the Times and probably thought the nation would change their spelling of the fort to be consistent with the Times.
Here is what the Times said on April 12th:
Sumpter [sic] on the one side and the Fleet off the North Channel on the other, will effectively cover any relieving expedition, whether of open boats, tugs, or small vessels, from any maritime attack, and confine all resisting operations to the land batteries. Experience has shown -- as in the case of Gen. WILKINSON’S passage down the St. Lawrence during the last war [the Mexican War doesn’t count as a war in the Times view?], with five hundred boats, suffering but a trifling loss, in the face of strong shore batteries – that batteries cannot effectually prevent the passage of an armament. Still less can be done when the batteries themselves will be exposed to such a terrific fire as Major ANDERSON can for some hours at least, pour with his whole force on Moultrie and the battery near Cummings' Point, the only two places from which boats or light draft vessels can be fired upon to any purpose.
But ANDERSON’S fire will not be the only one to which Moultrie may be exposed, as the smaller vessels can take with impunity positions from which shell may be thrown with great effect. No matter how brave or skillful the Southern troops may be, they will be under a fire which will render the entire stoppage of relief to Fort Sumpter [sic] nearly impossible.
A storm prevented Northern ships from crossing over the Charleston bar and dispersed the Northern tugs that were to take in supplies.
Then the Times says the following:
… Why the Southern Commander, be he JEFFERSON DAVIS or Gen. BEAUREGARD, has delayed pouring on Sumpter [sic] his full force, and crushing it beneath an iron hail, if he could; why he has waited until, instead of concentrating his fire in security on one small point, he now has to defend a long straggling line [ten miles of shoreline], from a powerful fleet, it is impossible to tell. The reason may have been political; it may have been that there was not the vaunted readiness; it may have been incompetency; and it is not impossible that when the yawning abyss opened before them with all its horror, they may have lacked the insane courage required for the final leap.
The question shows a lack of understanding of Southern intentions. IMO, if the South had wanted war, they would have struck long before the North was ready just as the Times said and not waited until the Northern fleet was already on the way. The South had commissioners in Washington trying to negotiate peace until the last moment. They were lied to by the Lincoln administration about the evacuation of Sumter and not offically received by Lincoln.