Diogeneslamp: ***”You don’t want to admit that Lincoln started the war when he sent those warships with their defacto orders to began an assault against the Confederates who were blocking them.”***
Except that regardless of how hard you try to spin it, sending ships to resupply you troops in their own fort, ships with orders saying “no first use of force*, that is not an act of war, ever.
By contrast, firing on troops to force their surrender, that is an act of war, always.
So you can post “Lincoln tricked Davis” all you want, but the fact is Lincoln wasn’t that smart and Davis wasn’t that stupid.
Both knew exactly what they were doing.
It does not say that. It says "if you are opposed."
Opposition can be anything, such as sinking those ships in the channel to prevent them from sending boats up it.
It can be stringing chains across the entrance. It is any form of opposition and it is not limited to the confederates firing at them.
Anything which the confederates would do to interfere with their effort to put supplies in the fort would have been "opposition" and would have triggered the use of "force" to complete the mission of reinforcing the fort.
What is actually hilarious is the fact that the mission was impossible even with no opposition whatsoever. According to Fox, the Powhatan's small boats were absolutely necessary to convey the supplies, and according to Porter, not a single one of those small boats the Powhatan carried would float.
The only way Lincoln knew exactly what he was doing was if he only intended the expedition in force to start a war, because that was the only thing it was capable of doing.