Well of course you do. This idea that slavery is the ultimate evil has been hammered into you all your life, just as it has been hammered into all of us. We are taught to believe that the saintly and powerful DC government only did what they did because of the milk of human kindness and there was never any greed or power involved in the decision to invade other people and kill them.
But the Founders did not believe that the principle of eradicating slavery trumps the principle of self determination.
And we know this how? We know this because every single state that declared independence from the United Kingdom was a slave state. We know this because they did not first free their own slaves before they demanded they be free of Britain.
Even if South Carolina had been an independent country right from the start, the north would have had the right to invade and liberate slaves by force.
They wouldn't even liberate the slaves in Delaware, so stop making excuses for people that didn't even believe what you are claiming.
There were still slaves in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The North really wasn't interested in slaves. They just used them as an ex post facto excuse to justify what they had done.
Self determination begins with the individual, not with a state or nation.
Not in the history of this nation. The 13 slave states got independence first. Eventually, some of them later let go of slavery. (Mainly because it was no longer profitable. They never would have gotten rid of it if it was still making them lots of money.)
Oh, I'm quite sure that at least some of them very clearly understood slavery to be a violation of the principle of self-determination. But they were prisoners of what was possible in their time. There wasn't anything close to the general anti-slavery movement in the 1770s that existed in the 1850s. They never had to make a choice between national self-determination and individual self-determination because there was no plausible means to eliminate or even limit slavery period.
But that doesn't matter in the end anyway because so what if the Founders didn't place that high a priority on limiting/eliminating slavery? Their moral choice doesn't limit the right of later generations, or of us, to make a different choice.