Logic isn’t on your side, jmac. Code Toad has you caught in a trap and you haven’t figured a way out of it. Bloviating isn’t a winning argument no matter how much it appeals to you.
The rebels of 1776 were a secession movement against the legitimate government.
The Royal Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunsmore, issued America’s first Emancipation Proclamation in 1775. He offered freedom to any and all slaves who left their masters and joined the royal forces that defended the Union- the United Kingdom.
So yes, the secessionists of 1776 were looking to create their own slave-holding empire in defiance of the established and abolitionist government.
“Legitimate government’’? “Secessionists’’?The American colonists were subjects of the Crown who also had elected their forms of self- governing , autonomous systems . They desired to break free of King George and the Crown and create a new government in a new country. And indeed in north and south,slavery was still an institution, it certainly was in Virgina in 1861 . It was America’s ‘’original sin’’. It wasn’t after 1865. Logic sure seems far from the shores of your mind.