On Ken Burns' Documentary "The American Revolution"

 

On Ken Burns’ Documentary “The American Revolution”

November 21, 2025

 

I just finished watching Ken Burns’ series The American Revolution. It was, of course, brilliant, for Ken Burns is always brilliant. Burns’ documentary does a wonderful job of telling the story of the American war for independence from Britain. It’s brilliant and wonderful in large part because it tells the truth. It does not give us the whitewashed version of American history that those of my generation got in school. It takes the issue of slavery head on. It exposes the barbarity of people on both sides of the fight. It presents American good guys and bad guys. It makes George Washington mostly a hero but also speaks of his holding enslaved persons, insisting that any enslaved person who had turned to the British for their freedom be returned to their former owner, and the way he could be brutal and unjust himself. At the very end there’s a mention of someone named Morgan who, we’re told, largely financed the revolution while making himself rich at the same time. But he appears only at the very end. It seems that if he truly did finance the revolution, Burns could have paid more attention to him

One thing I learned, of which I had no prior knowledge, was the extent to which the American revolution was also a civil war. As in the Civil War that would begin decades later, brother fought against brother, neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. I had not known how many American loyalists there were. There were hordes of them, and some of them fought violently alongside the British soldiers. It seems we really could call the American Revolution our country’s first Civil War.

Burns also stress the extent to which the “Patriots” depended on help first from the French, then from the Spanish and the Dutch. Those powers, of course, weren’t fighting for American liberty, they were fighting because they saw Britain as their enemy. Still, Burns says that the American rebels would have lost the war without the aid of the French.

Burns lays bare the extent to which white Americans intended even during the revolution completely to displace Indian nations and take their land. At least some of the Indians knew that that was what white American settlers intended. So they fought for the British if only because the British were the Americans’ enemy. Of course, the Patriots won the war; and now Native Americans control only a tiny, tiny fraction of the land they had before we white Americans took it away from them.

Burns presents America and the American Revolution as both noble and evil. The Patriots nobly advanced notions of freedom and equality; but, of course, they never came close to living into those ideals. At least in the southern states, those that would eventually seek to secede from the union, white slaveowners fought every attempt to abolish slavery, not that there were that many of those attempts anywhere. Burns doesn’t mention it explicitly, but one visual he uses shows the phrase “three-fifths” in the Constitution, the provision that said that a slave counted as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of establishing the size of the population. He says the Constitution was a series of compromises, which of course it was and is. The “three-fifths” provision is one of those compromises. It was evil, and we can thank God that it is no longer in effect.

I suppose it has always been true that there is both nobility and evil in the United States of America. Racism is our original sin, and it was on full display during the Revolution. We haven’t overcome it yet. We have other sins. Patriarchy, androcentrism, and misogyny. An addiction to guns and violence. A capitalist economy that keeps millions of people poor so a few people can be obscenely rich. Xenophobia, on which Donald Trump is playing in a purely fascist way today. Sacrificing the environment to wealth. Nearly complete indifference at the federal level to the evils of lack of health care and a living wage from which so many Americans suffer.

It seems that a great many people around the world see only the nobility of American ideals and the country’s wealth when they look at us. Far too many American see only those things too. But all of that evil, at least most of which has been with us from the beginning, is still there. The right wing of American politics does what it can to stop educating schoolchildren in the truth of American history and American reality. We must see that they fail. Sure. We can and should celebrate our commitment to freedom and equality. I lived for a year in a place with no such commitment (Soviet Russia), and, I have to tell you, that place was horribly bleak and depressed. But we will never learn from our history until our people know our history, something far too few of them have any interest in doing.

So thank you, Ken Burns and you enormous group of coworkers for producing your series on the American Revolution. Perhaps it will do at least a little bit to open our people’s eyes to the truth of our history. Get them to deal with facts not with the propagandistic ideology so many of them take for the truth. May it be so.