Mama Texan: "9) Again, unsourced opinion."
I'll take this one first, since it's a simpler matter.
A number of people on both sides suffered injury or death before the first real battle between opposing military forces, a battle in which the first Confederate soldier was killed directly by a Union force.
It was the Battle of Big Bethel, also called the Battle of Bethel Church or Great Bethel, on June 10, 1861, more than a month after the Confederacy declared war on the United States.
The Confederate soldier killed at Big Bethel was Pvt Henry Wyatt of Co A 11st North Carolina.
Here is a more detailed account of the events.
Yes, back on June 1, 1861, at the Battle of Fairfax Court House, "Captain John Quincy Marr of the Virginia Warrenton Rifles militia company of Fauquier County, Virginia[1] the first Southern (Confederate) officer or soldier to die in combat with Union soldiers, was killed in this small battle."
But actual circumstances of Captain Marr's death are unknown, and include the possibility of fratricide:
- "Whether he had moved up to challenge the Union riders or to scout out a better position for his company as some accounts suggest, Marr was not in the immediate presence or line of sight of any of his men on the very dark night when he fell in the dense field..[16]
Soon, no one knew where he was or what may have happened to him.[16]
His body was found in the clover field later in the morning.[17]"
Here's the bottom line: there are no reports of any Southern soldiers being killed directly by a Union force before the Confederacy's Declaration of War on May 6, 1861.
So, unlike for example, in the American Revolution of 1776, there was no actual war going on before the Confederacy started it, especially at Fort Sumter, then formally declared war, on May 6, 1861.
And by the way, I should say: this was absolutely no accident, since President Lincoln had announced in his Inagural Address on March 16, 1861, that:
"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, Is the momentous issue of civil war.The government will not assail you.
You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.
You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend" it.
I am loth to close.
We are not enemies, but friends.
We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
I'll answer your other items in sequence, when I can get back to it.