I've directed you twice before, thrice now, to Article I Section 9, to the clause forbidding requiring ships to clear duties in any one state, over another.
A major fallacy in your arguement is that duties were not involved and the blockade was not limited to items going from one state to another. The blockade was not an intrument for collecting tariffs, it was an action for preventing materials from reach law-breakers. You constitutional clause does not apply, regardless of how many times you quote it.
Privateering is short of war, by the way.
THis is interesting. You're saying that privateering is short of war but blockade isn't. Can you elaborate on this?
As for John Imboden and the people in the Exchange Hotel, then it's clear they planned to execute something illegal under U.S. law, and the leader of the expedition, btw, was Thomas Jackson.
They planned an act of rebellion, and carried it out, too.
I'd like to be, but you overlook the fact that a state preparing to exercise its right of secession isn't "rebellious"; rather, it's being true to its People.
Term it any way you want, but in the end it was a rebellion. And the dogs of war were loosed by Davis at Charleston, not by Lincoln through blockade or any other action.
Preident Lincoln's message to Pickens put the ball squarely in the secessionist court. Jefferson Davis made a lot of maladroit decisions, but firing on Old Glory at Fort Sumter was maybe the worst.
Walt