Unless you are now claiming that the north owned the entire Atlantic Ocean and all the inlets on it, Fort Sumter sat several hundred miles away from the nearest union territory. It was surrounded by the confederate state of South Carolina. Thus, holding to the analogy, your dog house is in the middle of my yard at a place that you cannot reach without travelling halfway across the facade of my house and then entering my yard.
Again, my dog is on my property and always has been.
And being a threat to my own free enjoyment of my property, which surrounds it entirely on all sides, it is my right to seek its removal. I will happily do so in peace as my first means of doing so and even offer to pay you for the dog house that is sitting in the middle of my yard, but if you refuse all sensible attempts at negotiation and continue to maintain that dog there in hostility to me, I will eventually have to remove it myself.
And I'm nowhere near your property when you fire the first shot.
Not at all, and in fact the opposite is true. You are standing in the middle of my yard a few feet away from the dog house holding the still-smoking shotgun that you just used as a warning shot in the sky to deter my friend from entering my yard with my permission. In your hand is a leash with another dog you seek to add to the dog house to act in hostility with me, and strapped to your belt is a holster containing another weapon for use in the event that you are denied access.
(We can drop this anology any time you want.)
Seeing as you picked it and it has complicated significantly against you since you first introduced it, I think I'll keep it for now.
Nonsense. In his book "Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War" David Detzer details two attacks by confederate forces prior to that. The first, of course, was the firing on the Star of the West. The second occured on April 4th. The schooner Rhoda A. Shannon was outward bound from Boston to Savannah with a load of ice when she ran into heavy weather off of Hatteras.
Neither incident occurred in the immediate proximity of the war. Thus each may be considered among the multitude of skirmishes and minor actions that occurred around the nation during the secession era. By contrast, the Lane was there specifically to take part in the military relief expedition to Sumter that instigated the bombardment in the first place.
Gitmo lies across the entrance to the Cuban port of Guantanamo. I can remember being tied up to the dock at the Naval Base and watching Russian freighters sailing up the channel into Guantanamo Bay. The base could block off access to this port very easily but that has never been contemplated. Just like President Lincoln never contemplated using Sumter to close Charleston.
To the contrary. He did contemplate using Sumter to inhibit access to Charleston by way of forcing tariff collections there and controlling access by ship. In fact his first ship to arrive on the scene, the Harriet Lane, attempted to inhibit free access by firing on a civilian ship. It would be akin to the U.S. Navy dispatching a support ship to gitmo and, upon its arrival there, using it to control access to the port when the russian freighters you speak of enter.
Sumter sat on the nearest Union territory. It was in the harbor of a city of the United States, rebellion no withstanding, and there was no reason at all for the garrison to leave.
Neither incident occurred in the immediate proximity of the war.
Oh, please. The confederate forces fired on ships flying the flag of the United States on two occasions and that doesn't count? That arguement is weak even by your standards. The Nashville was flying no flag when the Lane stopped it. The Star of the West and the Rhoda A. Shannon were both clearly identifying themselves as U.S. ships when they were fired on by the confederate forces. The south was trying to provoke a response and in neither case did the U.S. forces take the bait. Davis didn't get his war until the third attempt.
He did contemplate using Sumter to inhibit access to Charleston by way of forcing tariff collections there and controlling access by ship.
Yet not a single ship was stopped by the forces in Sumter. They weren't borded or hindered from entering or leaving. No tariff revenue was collected. And from all that you can cook up some scheme about President Lincoln's intentions.
South Carolina has never been out of the Union for even ten seconds.
South Carolina has ceded all rights to Fort Sumter to the feds. The feds wouldn't agree to even build the fort until title was conveyed.
You know that.
Walt