>>OIFVeteran wrote: “You are conflating the natural right of revolution with secession.”
The Declaration of Independence was a declaration of secession, which means it was a notice of withdrawal from the British Empire. A revolution is the act of overthrowing or usurping power from the current government. Castro was a revolutionary, as was Lincoln; the Founding Fathers and the Confederates were secessionists.
You can still call the war of 1776 a revolutionary war, if you like; but it was a war of secession, not revolution.
Mr. Kalamata
The founding fathers disagree with you.
“As to the history of the revolution, my ideas may be peculiar perhaps singular. What do we mean by the revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.”
— John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, August 24, 1815
“Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, and measure in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of a revolution the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.” - John Adams Letter to William Cushing, June 9, 1776
“The times that tried men’s souls are over-and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.” - Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 13, 1783
“Had no important step been taken by the leaders of the Revolution for which a precedent could not be discovered, no government established of which an exact model did not present itself, the people of the United States might, at this moment have been numbered among the melancholy victims of misguided councils, must at best have been laboring under the weight of some of those forms which have crushed the liberties of the rest of mankind. Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society.” - James Madison, Federalist No. 14, November 20, 1787