It appears evident that there was plenty of information available to the southerners that there was no intent of arriving at anything else other than a forced resolution to the Fort Sumter Crisis on the part of the Lincoln adminstration. The South could come back into the Union peacefully or they could come kicking and screaming, but they were going to rejoin the Union one way or the other in Lincoln's thinking and on Lincoln's terms. There would be no Independence for the Southern States under Lincoln.

It would seem that all of these "relief efforts" from the "Star of the West" to the last, were not humanitarian in nature, as some will claim. But were designed to gain a military advantage over the Confederates at Charleston. That would pretty well seem to disprove the old argument, that if the South just hadn't fired on Fort Sumter, they would have been able to have worked something out, or been in a better position in world opinion.

I just wonder how forebarent the southern people were supposed to be? It also strenghtens my opinion as to why almost the entire Union Army high command (colonels and above) like Samuel Cooper and Robert E Lee, resigned their commissions and went south.