The blockade was instigated -after- the firing on Fort Sumter. Or could you please provide a source for this? If you think about it, it's a little nutty on it's face. Would Lincoln impose a blackade and THEN re-supply Sumter?
"As he hears his own lips parroting the sad cliches of 1850 does the Southerner sometimes wonder if the words are his own? Does he ever, for a moment, feel the desperation of being caught in some great time machine, like a tread mill, and doomed to eternal effort without progress? Or feel, like Sisyphus, the doom of pushing a great stone up a hill only to have the weight, like guilt, roll back over him, over and over again? When he lifts his arms to silence protest, does he ever feel, even fleetingly, that he is lifting it against some voice deep in himself?"
--Robert Penn Warren, "The legacy of the Civil War", p.56-57
Walt
You got me there, Walt. Sorry, that was sloppy history on my part.
Lincoln was not blockading Ft. Sumter before the skirmish, but he was setting up floating custom houses to collect taxes and tariffs from ships using the Charleston port. Lincoln's primary concern was collecting tax revenue. He saw the Confederacy drawing away to establish free trade with England and the rest of Europe, and it horrified him. "What then will become of my tariff?" were his words.
A free trade zone between the Confederate States and Europe would have been a disaster to the Union's tax revenue, since the South was paying nearly 90% of all tariff money received by the federal government.
It was a great game for the North. The slave trade would go through New York and Rhode Island; the slaves would be sold South to harvest the cash crops; the South would sell the cotton and tobacco to Europe in exchange for industrial goods they did not produce; the North would collect large tariffs on these exchanges. A wonderful racket. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 helped sustain it: the federal government decreed that all Northern states must return all runaway slaves to their "proper owners". I always thought some of the Northern states should have seceded in protest of this violation of their own states' rights.
Interesting quote from Robert Penn Warren -- I'll have to read that. As I recall, he was a prominent writer from the Southern Agrarian movement, right?