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.
