The American Revolution I Didn't Know

Thoughts on a 12-hour teachable "moment" from Ken Burns

Pulling down the statue of King George III, New York City. Painting by Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, ca. 1852-1853. Credit: The New York Historical

We all heard in school about the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence, the grit that created our nation. But The American Revolution, the latest and hopefully not last PBS production from Ken Burns, is provocative in unexpected ways.

It’s a fact of U.S. life over the past decade that our founding documents have been center stage, for alarming and contradictory reasons: They are all too relevant to our times, and have proven wholly inadequate to the task of preventing, containing or punishing abuses of power and the law.

The Declaration’s bill of particulars against Parliament and King George III — standing armies among us in peacetime, judges dependent on the will of the king, trial by jury often withheld, complaints about taxes, tariffs and trade — sounds like today’s headlines. And as I told an AP alumni publication about being USA Today commentary editor during Donald Trump’s first term, “I’ve never been so familiar with the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the criminal code and the unique angst of fact-checking in the Trump era.”

I’m now back to writing and no longer at the paper, but both the angst and those founding documents still loom large for me and, I’m guessing, for countless authors, lawyers, journalists, historians, politicians, and other attentive citizens. And yet, even Ken Burns says there wasn’t a day in the making of The American Revolution “when we weren’t stunned by something we’d learned.”

For all the drama of those foundational documents and Common Sense, the 1776 Thomas Paine pamphlet that rallied Americans to their own cause, the reality was far more than strong sentiments on paper. Or parchment. And somehow, without benefit of video or film or onscreen interviews with military veterans, using actors to voice what was said or written 250 years ago, and re-enactment “troops” marching in appropriate uniforms, shown from the shoulders down, this documentary manages to convey the pain, brutality, and chaos of the struggle.

It was literally brother against brother, the civil war before the Civil War. Some Americans were rebels, some were loyalists, some were neutral and just wanted it to end. Native Americans fought on both sides. Both free and enslaved Negroes also fought, some with the British, some with the Patriots.

Everything is at close range. The bayonets, the bleeding, the dying. And everything takes forever to happen — in part because this was a far-flung global war, a world war before World War I. As Burns put it to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air: “This is a very down and dirty war, and also a war at that huge macro level of geopolitics that is taking place in the courts of Europe.”

Fighting for liberty and Indian land

Gen. John Burgoyne’s loss at Saratoga was a hinge in history, the battle Benjamin Franklin used to coax the French into taking up the American cause. Yet Franklin, in Paris, didn’t hear about the Continental Army triumph at Saratoga until three months after it happened — and then it took months for the Americans to learn that France would be coming to their aid.

We may have trouble staying focused amid the constant rush of information coming at us, or telling what’s true and what’s spin, propaganda or straight-up lies. But it is hard not to imagine how better communications (and better maps) might have shortened the war and reduced the death toll.

Polling might have been helpful, as well. We complain about polls all the time and in some years, in some contests, they can be inaccurate. Still, one recurring theme of the revolution seems to be leaders with no real idea of how much support they have. The British in particular overestimated the loyalty of Americans, and underestimated the determination of the troops fighting for their own families, land, and liberty. Oh, and also for the right to expand onto Indian land — which the British won’t let them do because, Burns told NPR, “they can’t afford to defend us.”

Sorry, America, but this undertaking was not always noble or lofty, as The American Revolution makes perfectly clear. Yes, the colonists resented being taxed by a Parliament that dictated terms to them, and gave them no say in how their money would be spent. But at the outset, they seemed particularly triggered by the threat of losing the smugglers pipeline that supplied them with duty-free tea and other goods.

That was a shock, as was the knowledge that two of Gen. George Washington’s first ideas were to capture Montreal and Quebec. Invading Canada, annexing it, making it the 14th colony, or the 51st state — we’ve been there before. And yet, Canada is still part of the British Commonwealth.

Why? The Americans were outnumbered, outsmarted, exhausted, freezing and hungry when they moved on Quebec at the end of 1775. They retreated and waited, resolved to try again, but then another enemy struck: smallpox.

The politics of smallpox and slavery

“Our Misfortunes in Canada, are enough to melt an Heart of Stone,” John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. “The Small Pox is ten times more terrible than Britons, Canadians and Indians together. This was the Cause of our precipitate Retreat from Quebec, this the Cause of our Disgraces at the Cedars.—I dont mean that this was all. There has been Want, approaching to Famine, as well as Pestilence. And these Discouragements seem to have so disheartened our Officers, that none of them seem to Act with Prudence and Firmness.”

A smallpox vaccination of sorts had existed for about 50 years by then — inoculation with a weak form of the disease that put soldiers out of action for a few days but prevented them from dying from it later. The toll on his troops was so severe that Washington made inoculation mandatory, starting a tradition that was in force right up to and including the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. The Pentagon rescinded the COVID mandate in 2023, amid political backlash, and Trump in 2025 ordered reinstatement and redress for troops discharged for refusing it.

The most jarring element of the many new (to me) ideas in this 12-hour teachable “moment” was the metaphor the founding fathers used about the consequences of sticking with Britain. The choice before them, they would argue, was liberty or slavery. Free American citizens, or slaves to Britain and its king. “The once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with blood or inhabited by slaves,” Washington wrote in a 1775 letter to George Fairfax.

So many founders, including Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves. How could they equate British rule to enslavement? Were they clueless or hypocritical?

Burns goes for hypocrisy, with a positive spin: “The hypocrisy is evident. But that hypocrisy is the place in which we are, strangely enough, able to grow.”

The broad ideals laid out as guideposts and goals for the new nation, though meant at the time to apply to white male property-owners, were vague and aspirational. They jump-started widespread 18th century discussion of rights for women and Native Americans, of slavery’s evils and freedom for enslaved black people. “Basically, by the time the Revolution had started, our Civil War was going to happen,” Burns said.

Suffrage for women would also happen. Rights and opportunities would evolve and grow, for them and for all kinds of people and groups. That’s one inescapable takeaway from The American Revolution: No “war on woke” or DEI could ever change the essence of America. We are now what we have been all along — diverse, and the better for it.