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Sherman Logan: "Sorry, getting tired of the discussion.
I respect your POV, which is at least a new take, but disagree."

But you can't disagree with the facts...
FRiends, everybody here knows of Samuel Adams & James Otis, right?, Adams: famous maltster, second cousin to President John Adams, with Otis "Sons of Liberty", early leaders of what became the American Revolution movement:

Do you also know of Robert Barnwell Rhett and others, like Louis Wigfall, William Yancey, William Porcher Miles, James DeBow & Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus -- they were the Southern Fire-Eaters who hatched the plot in 1858 to split the majority-Democrat party into two minority parties, South & North, the split which engineered election of minority Republican President Abraham Lincoln.

My point here: there's a difference between colonial patriots like Saumuel Adams in, say, 1764 and Southern Fire-Eater secessionists in, say 1850.

Patriots in the 1770s began as loyalists, simply insisting on "constitutional rights" as Englishmen, especially including "no taxation without representation":

"In the course of the 1760s and 1770s, William Pitt the Elder, Sir William Pulteney, and George Grenville, amongst other prominent Britons and colonial Americans, such as Joseph Galloway, James Otis, Jr., Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, the London Quaker Thomas Crowley, Royal Governors such as Thomas Pownall M.P., William Franklin, Sir Francis Bernard, and the Attorney-General of Quebec, Francis Maseres, debated and circulated plans for the creation of colonial seats in London, imperial union with Great Britain, or a federally representative British Parliament with powers of taxation that was to consist of American, West Indian, Irish and British Members of Parliament.[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]"

These men only became revolutionaries when all such proposals were utterly rejected, and the opposite imposed: illegitimate, dictatorial military government, certainly from colonists' perspectives.

By sharp contrast, Southern Fire-Eaters began in the 1850s working for dis-union, hatching a plot in 1858 to split their own majority Democrat party in half (north & south), engineering the 1860 election of minority Republican Abraham Lincoln.
In 1860 Fire-Eaters already had stronger representation in Congress than their white populations supported, had as President a Northern Dough-faced Democrat, James Buchanan, who strongly supported the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott ruling.

In short, in 1860 Fire-Eaters already had everything the 1770s Sons of Liberty said they wanted.
Had the 1770s Sons of Liberty achieved representation as enjoyed by 1860s Fire Eaters, there is no way that such colonial elder statesmen as Benjamin Franklin would convert to support Revolution.

Only 1770s Brits resort to increasing military dictatorship converted men like Franklin to the Revolutionary cause.

But no such equivalent existed in November 1860, when Fire-Eaters first began to organize for secession, Confederacy and war against the United States.

So, how can you disagree with the facts?

So, how can you disagree with the facts?

No one is disagreeing with facts, we are disagreeing with the conclusions you are trying to build at the expense of facts.

Saying that the southern "fire eaters" (a deliberate denigration) had everything the Sons of Liberty wanted is to entirely miss the point. "Want" is in the eye of the beholder, and you are trying to judge people based on your modern preferences rather than from their perspective.

I have a simple position. If a body of people don't want to be part of an existing government, then they ought to have a right to leave it and form a government which suits them. I don't arrogantly attempt to define for them what reasons are proper and which are not, I simply say the whole system ought to be built on voluntary rather than coercive reasons.

If you have to invoke compulsion, then you are doing it wrong. Once again, the Declaration of Independence lays out this concept clearly.

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

All of your efforts to denigrate their reasons for wanting a new government are just noise to me. I don't care what their reasons are. A person does not have to justify their reasons as to why they no longer wish to associate with other people.

We are currently going through a period where this existing government is once again trying to force people to associate with other people with whom they do not wish to associate. "Gay Marriage" and all the lawsuits which have been created to force normal people into accepting it is a perfect example of the same concept on a smaller scale.

You need to do some soul searching and ask yourself if you want to live with a system that decides *FOR* you that your reasons for wanting to disassociate are "good enough" to suit them. They are going to tell you "No. You have to associate with Homosexuals and Muslims because we don't recognize your reasons for refusing to do so as good enough."

And that is where you are philosophically at the moment. You are siding with the coercive forces of history, rather than those who believe in voluntary association.

Again, you need to rethink your current positions and assumptions.

Don’t disagree with the facts, just your interpretation of their meaning.

I think you give the Founders too much credit for honesty and demonize the Fire-Eaters a bit too much.

None of the Founders every seriously expected to be give representation in Parliament. Their slogan of “no taxation without representation” therefore in practice meant simply “no taxation.” An understandable desire, but not fully honest.

Had they been granted 50 seats in Parliament, something unimaginable at the time (indeed no colony ever did get such) their reps would have been vastly outvoted on all colonial issues. Taxes, probably much higher ones, would have been opposed over colonial opposition.

At that point they would have been in essentially the same position as the South in the 1850s. Or, more accurately, the position the South saw, correctly, they would soon be in. Represented but consistently outvoted. With no real hope of changing that equation.

Now I am NOT a fan of the Fire-Eaters. But they accurately foresaw that the South could not indefinitely maintain its way of life in a country increasingly dominated by people fundamentally opposed to that way of life.

Thus the Founders objected simply and somewhat disengenuously to (quite low) taxation, while the FEs saw, correctly, an existential challenge to their whole way of life. If anything, the FEs had a more justifiable reason for rebellion and secession than the Founders.

That is, they did IF you accept, which I don’t, that their way of life deserved to be perpetuated.