Well, there was a meeting on December 16, 1774, (note the 240 anniversary coming up!) presided over by Samuel Adams...
"Whether or not Samuel Adams helped plan the Boston Tea Party is disputed, but he immediately worked to publicize and defend it.[65]
He argued that the Tea Party was not the act of a lawless mob, but was instead a principled protest and the only remaining option the people had to defend their constitutional rights.[66]
"By "constitution" he referred to the idea that all governments have a constitution, written or not, and that the constitution of Great Britain could be interpreted as banning the levying of taxes without representation.
For example, the Bill of Rights of 1689 established that long-term taxes could not be levied without Parliament, and other precedents said that Parliament must actually represent the people it ruled over, in order to "count"...
"Governor Thomas Hutchinson had been urging London to take a hard line with the Sons of Liberty.
If he had done what the other royal governors had done and let the ship owners and captains resolve the issue with the colonists, the Dartmouth, Eleanor and the Beaver would have left without unloading any tea...
"Robert Murray, a New York merchant, went to Lord North with three other merchants and offered to pay for the losses, but the offer was turned down..."
A few hundred, at most, out of 300,000+ Massachusetts citizens...
Now, that's the way I learned it as a boy -- rightly or wrongly, Tea Party leaders objected to "taxation without representation", and took action to defend their "constitutional rights" as Englishmen.
Of course, you may well argue, and Brits certainly did, that "as colonists, they had no such rights", but from Massachusetts colonists' perspectives, it was Brits who were trying to take their rights away, not Americans wanting to assert some unheard-of privileges.
Indeed, the unusual aggressiveness of the Brit-appointed Massachusetts governor, in enforcing a law which was ignored in other colonies, and British refusal to seek peaceful resolution strongly suggest to me that it was the Brits, not colonists who were "cruisin' for a bruisin'".
Likewise, in early 1861 it was Confederates trying to revoke their 84 year-old compact, and using military force instead of lawful procedures to impose their will on, in one case, Union troops in Fort Sumter.
Do you disagree?
I don’t disagree that Massachusetts colonists believed they were defending their rights, just as English rebels in 1642 and Confederates in 1861 did.
The problem is that defending their rights required, or they believed it did, stepping beyond the established legal and constitutional procedures.
They all believed, and arguably they were correct to do so, that they had no choice, that the existing legal and constitutional procedures no longer protected their rights.
But the minute they went beyond those procedures, they became revolutionaries intent on overthrowing the existing order and replacing it with a new and better (or so they believed) one.
You seem to be intent on demonstrating that the men of 1776 acted constitutionally and the men of 1861 did not. I don’t see it. To my mind, they were both revolutionists. Whether they were justified or not in their revolution was dependent not on whether it was constitutional, since a constitutional revolution is a contradiction in terms, but on the goals of that revolution.
The men of 1776 had as their goal increasing liberty, the goal of the men of 1861 was to prevent an extension of human liberty. To my mind, that’s why the American Revolutionaries were justified in their rebellion, and the Confederates were not.