Rebellion Vs Freedom fighting

Whilst this is a bit of tv movie, never great but certainly absorbing, I was researching this Turner guy on the net and I was shocked to see that Nats War of Independence is still called a "rebellion", "uprising" in history books. Surely wrong, this is clearly at worst an act of freedom fighting, and at best a War for Independence.

I can understand why contemporaries of Nat would refer to his actions with disdain and term it negative, but why on earth is it still referred to in negative terms?

To put this in context, Turner obviously did some wrong things in his time, but these pale into insignificance with the crimes of say, George Washington who ran a massive slave farm. Yet Washington gets a free pass for being some wise father fighting for good.