Will you not give me a break? I have looked up this information before. It takes awhile to do it. I commit some of it to memory because it helps me paint a picture in my mind of what is going on. Sometimes I get details wrong. Sometimes I find information that contradicts what I had previously found.
We know the "Thomas Freeborn" was armed whenever that picture was taken, and I don't recall if I had found it to be taken in 1863. This isn't the only conversation i'm having.
If I have gotten it wrong on the tugs, does it really matter? The primary warships were most definitely armed, and that describes the nature of that "Resupply" mission.
Here is the information I can find on the "Uncle Ben." It was later armed, so I assume it wasn't previously armed.
This article says the "Thomas Freeborn" was a "sidewheel gunboat."
And here is the final Tugboat, USS Yankee. Wikipedia says it was armed with two 32 pounders.
Every school child knows that A USS is probably armed. Why do you make an issue of it. They were war ships.
Yes they were. What were they going to do? When you pull out a gun on someone, what are you going to do with it?
She was not armed for the Sumter expedition.
That isn't clear from all I have been able to find, but it does make sense. A commercial tugboat shouldn't need cannons, but we know for a fact it had cannons by May of 1861.
In May of 1861 Thomas Freedom was no longer a commercial tugboat. She was a ship of the U.S. Navy. That was when she was armed.
At the time of the Sumter expedition tug Yankee was a civilian owned ship and not armed. like the Thomas Freedom she was purchased by the Navy after the Sumter expedition, then armed.