If we must relate the events of today to past events for the sake of a clearer understanding then we should be centered on the British subjects who had residence in the British colonies of the north American continent and their ultimate secession from the British crown.
Feel free to amuse yourself with the obfuscations generated by mental masturbation... LOL If everyone on your side is too dense to see what this is about then so much the better for us I guess. heh.. I never expected to have the "element of surprise" but when your adversary is too preoccupied with an intellectual circle jerk to accurately gauge REALITY I guess anything is possible...
lol.. your right... Prior ownership... civil war settled everything... yadda yadda...state of franklin... Postmasters pay....yadda yadda... Jesus, this may actually be EASIER than I thought it would be.
Frankly, I think you could set aside your German, Swedish, Dutch and French speakers from the category of "loyal subjects" with few exceptions.
They might have paid lip service to the Brits, but that's not a sign of loyalty.
The main source of resistance to the Brits in the Mohawk valley, as a good example, was centered in what was, in the main, a multi-ethnic Lutheran Church ("The Old Yellow Church").. The vision there was far different than that found in the transplanted English villages along the coast.
Then there were the Scots ~ most of them were descendants of fellows who'd been brought to America as POWs from the war of conquest mounted against Scotland by the Brits.
Want some Scottish names from the Revolution? Oh, my goodness!
No, to evaluate what we are really talking about when it comes to secession from the American Union we need to start with conditions at the time of the Treaty of Paris and not before.
Here you had 13 new nations ~ with land claims all the way to the West Coast (among other things). In a short period of time they formed "A new nation" ~ with, again, land claims to the Pacific (which, whether exercised or not actually existed, and were not disputed by the Brits in the treaty conferences leading up to the Treaty of Paris ~ so we don't need to get into a question of whether Georgia's claim to California was greater than Mexico's ~ which came later.) At the time of the treaty signing there were the colonies, and their land claims.
Within the framework of the Articles of Confederation lines were drawn and political institutions established, and vice versa.
That's where we start ~ not with the pre-existing foreign sympathies of the greater part of the American population in 1776.
Americans logically begin their legal history as The United States! A new nation with vast land resources made a conscious decision to sell it to the people to extend civilization into the wilderness.