Citizens of the Moon are not citizens of the United States, either. And the Moon is as sovereign and the confederate states was.
Funny, you would readily concede that a person can travel to Cuba, settle on a farm there, and repudiate his allegiance to the United States, but you wouldn't allow the same freedom to a State of the Union whose People saw their future in the Union to be either going nowhere, or bleak to dismal.
Because Cuba is a sovereign nation, recognized as such by the United States and most, if not all of the world's nations. The confederate states was not a sovereign nation, was not recognized as such by the United States or the world's nations. See the difference?
The only people who fit that description in Virginia were the West Virginians who conspired with Lincoln and his ministers first to wage war on, and then to sunder a State. After secession, the only "established government" in Virginia was Virginia's, until she joined the Confederacy.
Really? If the confederacy was a sovereign nation, as you claim, then what part of the confederate constitution did the people of western Virginia violate? What made them traitors?
We discussed in another thread whether sovereignty is dependent on recognition, and the fact that the United States waged war for something like two or three years after the Declaration before attracting anything like diplomatic recognition and, what was more valuable, French help.
The Confederacy was in the same status diplomatically, but with this crucial difference: the Confederate States had their grants of sovereignty from George III and, in the case of the States admitted later, the United States (Texas, as usual, was different: she won her sovereignty at San Jacinto, and her international recognition afterward). All the States admitted to the Union after 1791 got sovereignty from the United States (except for Texas and maybe Hawaii), but by the writ of Article IV it was the same sovereignty that the original thirteen had won on the battlefield at Yorktown and on the table in Paris.
It was this original sovereignty, its powers resumed, that the Southern States took with them as their patrimony, out of the Union.
If the confederacy was a sovereign nation, as you claim, then what part of the confederate constitution did the people of western Virginia violate? What made them traitors?
They were traitors, those of them who bore arms in Union service, against their native State of Virginia. Their relationship to the Confederacy during the war would have been the same that they'd had to the Union before secession.