Did the Good Guys Win The American Revolution?

George Washington, we are told by Ken Burns’s latest documentary series, was a (mostly) great man and a terrible general. He was inspiring, yes, but an awful tactician. Oh, and unforgivably he was a slaveholder.

It was with considerable interest that I watched the new series, airing this week on PBS. I’ve watched all of it, because it’s all available for streaming on at least some PBS stations. I was much taken years ago with Burns’s masterpiece, “The Civil War.” As with that dispute, my ancestors fought in the American Revolution.

In fact, it was only recently that my older younger sister wrote to confirm that the research we had done had now been officially confirmed and she is now a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. So again Burns had produced a series of personal interest. (No one in my family ever played professional baseball or performed country music for a living or was Teddy Roosevelt or built the Brooklyn Bridge, so his other work while interesting was not of immediate concern.) I think that many of us who saw “The Civil War” hoped that he would do the revolution, too. Now he has. Are we satisfied?

In my case, anyway, no, though it’s not entirely his fault.

From the opening words, “Major funding for the American Revolution was provided by” after which donors, clubs, corporations, and society philanthropists were listed, I had a bad feeling. Major funding for the American Revolution was provided by France (and France would pay heavily for its generosity a little more than a decade later).

Indeed, the series brought to full flower a concerning impression left by the earlier series. Rather than call it “The American Revolution,” it might better have been called “The American Revolution As Seen By a Diverse Selection of Unremarkable Latter-Day Revisionists,” or, as my friend John aptly put it, “white liberal guilt,” which I’d expand to call “northeastern white liberal guilt.” (One thing the series gets right, perhaps more than it intended, was the fact that many New Englanders and many New Yorkers have always looked down their noses at the parts of the country that are the source of actual products, and the people who live there. That’s true now and it was in the 18^th^ century.)

As the new series has it, the Revolutionary War was also a series of civil wars involving slaves, Indian tribes, and so on. For Burns, it seems, it is always about race if there is any way that race can be shoehorned into the narrative. That is not inappropriate in a series about the Civil War. As to race and the Revolution, the great John Cullum sang all you need to know on the subject, and he told it better than the Burns series does.

The two Burns war series with which I’m familiar undertake the impossible, because those wars (and most other wars worthy of the word) are too complicated to fully explore in a few hours, especially the Revolutionary War. There is always more to it, many crucial parts that cannot be fully explained or even, sometimes, mentioned. I have a shelf of books about the American Revolution and they, together, do not give us the entire story.

What Burns does, and he does it well, is create a general framework and populate it with fascinating trivia. An example: At the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey, on June 28, 1778, both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr had horses shot out from under them. That is a tasty tidbit.

Perhaps he bent over backwards to give both sides of the story, and in the hope that his intentions are good I’ll give Burns the benefit of the doubt. But if you had nothing but the television series to go on, you might finish “The American Revolution” firm in the belief that we were the bad guys. After all, George Washington held slaves. So did Thomas Jefferson and many of the other signers of the Declaration of Independence.

We now are universal in agreement that slave holding is evil. It was not unanimously seen that way in the 18^th^ century. The subject is an important fact of the time. It is not something to which it is appropriate to apply modern standards, any more than at some time in the future it would be appropriate for you to be judged and condemned for, say, eating meat or driving an automobile or circumcising your male offspring (or for that matter referring to him as male). Nor was slavery a matter of much controversy until after the revolution — even Burns’s series notes that.

Likewise, the series includes criticism of there being class distinctions in the society of the time. There has never been a classless society. There is not one now — witness the long list of names that follow “Major funding of the American Revolution” at the beginning of the show! There is only argument as to which class carries more merit. Societies that have sought to create a classless society have found that it results only in equality of misery.

But for each of these insertions there is a some piece of information to redeem it: Benedict Arnold was clearly among the greatest heroes of the revolution, except for that one incident in the autumn of 1780 at West Point. Well, and thereafter.

The problem is that there’s too much war, too much to cover in 12 hours. A series with several discrete parts, each covering one of the complicated aspects of the war, with a summary episode or two at the end, would have been clearer and made more sense.

I would like to have seen a comparison between the American Revolution and the Vietnam War. It is not far-fetched: The revolution was all that America had to think about, but it was not all that England had to think about. In London, opposition to the war grew. England had an empire to run and the American colonies were significant only in that American independence might give other parts of the empire ideas. Other countries were happy to aid the continental cause, because they had some beef with England. People know their own country better than do those from some other country, and are more willing to risk their lives for it than those who at war’s end, if they are still alive, will return to some distant land. All similarities with the Vietnam conflict. It would have been good to see more of that.

The Indian wars associated with the revolution were touched upon, but not utterly explained. The subject lacked the time. It’s a good story, but not as good when it must be glossed over. We’re left with “Indians good, white man (especially George Rogers Clark) bad.” There’s more to it than that. Would love to have seen small series on those subjects and others, rather than cramming them together in too-little time. (Actually, by comparison, the Civil War was less complicated.)

If you want to concentrate on slavery, that kind of format would have offered the opportunity to do so without it seeming obsessive, as it does in the current production.

There are parts that pleased me. The Cowpens, my favorite battle of the war and one of my favorites of any war, was adequately explained (I think; I’m prejudiced in its favor and an entire episode devoted to it, rather than five minutes, would have been just fine with me). I think it is possible that the viewer will finish the series with the correct sense that the Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene was the best and most astute Continental battlefield general, and that Daniel Morgan and his backwoods riflemen were the most effective soldiers in the war. Though it is touched upon, I would have liked to see it explicitly stated just how often and how well John Glover and his Marbleheaders saved the revolution. As with Greene and Morgan, they were crucial. And if you wanted to bring up race, they would have been a great example.

The series feels almost as if it had been designed to fit a pattern, and it didn’t quite. The pattern had been made for “The Civil War,” so of course that fit was perfect. While the narrator for the earlier series, David McCullough, was excellent as is Peter Coyote in “The American Revolution,” other parts don’t work quite as well. There are historians in the current series, but none of them is as remarkable as the earlier ones. I would like to have seen Rick Brookhiser (and any of several people he could have recommended). There is no equivalent, for instance, of Shelby Foote.

There is nothing in “The American Revolution” to match the Civil War letter from Sullivan Ballou to his wife, read by Paul Roebling, the mere mention of which is sufficient to make grown men cry. While in the current production there is frequent use of a voice actress reading words of Abigail Adams, would it not have been better to alternate between her letters and those of her husband John, separated during most of the war?

“The Civil War” had Jay Ungar’s heart-rending — he wrote it when his heart was rent — Ashokan Farewell. “The American Revolution” has nondescript fiddle music that seems written to remind us of Ashokan Farewell without actually being it. So we regret its absence instead. It’s not for lack of other, contemporaneous, material. The 18^th^ century was not devoid of interesting music, much of it readily available. (Though not “The World Turned Upside Down,” which we can be grateful is not used at the Yorktown surrender.)

My sense is that while “The Civil War” was a labor of love by a small and dedicated group of people, “The American Revolution” was not. It feels like an imitation, made by many more people to much less effect.

Which is too bad. Though there is much of value in the new Ken Burns series, I found myself wishing that rather than do what he did, he had remained true to the vision that gave us “The Civil War.”