“You can accept the hundred dollars I’ll give you for your house, or I’ll start shooting. Hell, I feel generous. Make it $125.”
you don’t know what the value was or what would have been paid for the fort. The south had decided to rebel against the union. The fort was on southern land that did not belong to the union.
Are you claiming that property rights were negated by secession?
Not the point. You seem to believe that rejection of an offer to buy someone's property gives you the right to start shooting at them
After a good night's sleep, this is as good of a place as any to jump back into it...
The fort was indeed on southern land. The fact your overlooking is that it was THE SOUTH that belonged and still belongs to the UNION. Thomas Jefferson got the entire country whipped up on Manifest Destiny, and a county that spreads from sea to shinning sea. We had just finished kicking Mexico's butt back across the Rio Grande and were not about to put up with 1/3 of the states wanting out.
That sounds a lot like the kind of abuse of "eminent domain" that so many people are up in arms about now. The "sovereign state" thinking it's entitled to take whatever it wants.
A lot of people take the Confederate Battle Flag as a symbol of a rebellious attitude towards authority. They forget that these Confederates had their own federal government, intrusive legislators, domineering bureaucrats, and all the rest.
Some of them had been Whigs and nationalists who transfered their allegiance to a new government. The fiery state's rights Democrats weren't libertarians in our modern sense either. They had deep commitments to the slave system and they often found it hard to cooperate with the Richmond or with each other.
The leaders of the Confederacy weren't hard-pressed little guys getting together in their garages or dens. A lot of them were wealthy slave-owners. Not a few of them had imperial designs. Some of them were outright crazy.
I guess the idea is that we'd all be free if it weren't for Washington. I thought that way once too, but 1) state and local governments can be quite oppressive on their own, as would an alternative federal government, and 2) there was a potential for even more chaos and misery than we see today: race and class and geographical divisions might well have been even more bitter in an independent South than they are now.