That was a rebellion, not a revolution. The colonial elite broke away from the mother country. They sculpted the eventual legal and political structure to protect their power and privilege without having to pay taxes.
If you're looking for a revolution, better look at the French Revolution or the October Revolution.
And with that argument, you reduce every.single.revolution to a 'surgical strike by a minority faction'. The French Revolution becomes a surgical strike of a few enlightened bourgeois in Paris. The American Rebellion becomes the rebellion of a very small clique of rich colonial landowners. No revolution would be an exception.
Every single revolution happens through a vanguard party pushing it forward - that's what the Bolsheviks got right.
> it wasn't about what people wanted
It wasn't what the better-off bourgeois and their dependents in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other regions wanted. It was apparently what the people wanted, because the resulting, foreign-aided civil war was won by the power of those people. No revolution can win a civil war without popular support.