Walter> Ken when you were going to Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

How much history of the American Revolution did you get?

Ken> About as little as you could possibly imagine.

I remember more a history I took in Russian history class.

I took in Russian history because the professor or the teacher Randy Peacock was so dramatic, and he was doing a course from the serfs, the freeing of the serfs in '61 to the Russian Revolution.

But he said, first day, I'm going to tell you how Rasputin died.

And even the people in the back of the room who normally spent their time drawing pictures of horses heads were up and eyes agape but I had a good American history teacher.

I remember her she did a good job, and I'd always loved history, so I can't say exactly when something was absorbed and wasn't.

Walter> Typical of textbooks that were published after World War II in this country usually started off in Lexington and Concord.

Bunker Hill always got in there.

Then Saratoga... Yorktown.

The war's over.

Ken> Yeah the war's over and I had that complaint when I was working on my Civil War film, which is that whenever I spoke to anyone and you said you were interested in the battles and what actually happened, the sequence of the battles and what they meant and with the strategy, they'd say: "Oh, you want old professor so-and-so."

People were just interested in causes and effects.

And I think the Revolution suffers doubly from it.

One, it's in a pre-photographic era.

So we don't have newsreels, we don't have still photographs, we don't have any sense that people that look like us, actually lived through it.

And, and as you say, we do Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill; "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes" and then Saratoga, only because it brings the French in and then Yorktown.

And yet our film is six parts and 12 hours of many, many, many more battles, as well as each one of those that we've mentioned with, we hope, new enough information or information from different perspectives enough that it triangulates in an important and meaningful way what actually took place.

If you were with Hannah Davis, whose husband you know, Isaac leaves their house in Acton early on the morning of the 19th because they've heard of what's happened at Lexington, and you're at the north bridge and you're the first person killed, and then the body is brought back in at the end of the day with Abner Hosmer and another, person who's killed in Lexington in the afternoon and the bodies are laid out in the funeral is going to be in your house.

What Hannah Davis has to say is pretty important, and it certainly is not at the high 30,000ft level of, say, you know, what Benjamin Franklin is saying about the Battle of Bunker Hill or what people write about later about the midnight ride of Paul Revere, but it sure matters to Hannah Davis.

And I think it really matters to us.

Walter> Well, it should.

My hobby horse has been the Southern Campaign for the last 25 years.

And what happened here in South Carolina was truly America's first civil war.

They actually used that term.

George Washington referred to it.

Sir Henry Clinton referred to it as a civil war.

And it was a very brutal struggle.

Ken> I think our civil war is a sectional war.

It's one part of the country against the other.

The trope brother against brother is invoked all the time, but it's not to the extent that it is everywhere.

In the American Revolution, Lucy Knox, the new wife of Henry Knox, loses her father, her mother, her brother, and her sisters because she chooses to join the Patriot cause, and they remain Loyalists in Boston and sail off.

It's true all up and down.

It's particularly true in New Jersey, but no more true than in South Carolina, where there are battles like Kings Mountain, in which everyone on every side, with the exception of Ferguson, the Loyalist leader who is a Scottish officer, are Americans killing one another over whether you're a Patriot or a Loyalist.

Walter> And we have wounded Tories at Kings Mountain asking for assistance, and his brother passes by and basically tells him to go to hell.

Ken> Yeah, at one point we had decided to enlarge the role of Loyalists there were lots of Loyalist voices were unafraid of giving them some space.

and they're not negative folks or they're what we call conservatives today.

They don't want to change the prosperity that they have inherited from the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain, which is, by all accounts, the best form of government heretofore.

But we decided we would enlarge one and we based, it on a quote of a guy named John Peters at the Battle of Bennington he's leading a Loyalist regiment that he's formed, and he is obliged, as he puts it, to, to kill his best friend growing up who has just put his bayonet through him, saying, you know, Jeremiah Post is saying Peters, you Tory devil and he shoots him and the bone, deflects the bayonet, and he shoots him.

So he said, let's find out more about John Peters.

And we go and it turns out he's a well-respected person in a Vermont town.

Vermont's nowhere.

It's contested territory between New England and New York.

He sent to the First Continental Congress.

He gets there and he goes, I am not about this.

He's arrested on the way home in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and Hartford, Springfield, Massachusetts, and in his own town, in his own father is insisting that the other Patriots in town, you know, sort of give him severe bruising.

He's finally driven out of town.

After that, he makes his way to Canada.

After that, his wife, infant child and two other children are forced to, in the winter, escape.

They make their way to Lake Champlain and find a British patrol boat.

They are reunited.

He starts a Loyalist brigade that comes down to the Battle of Bennington.

His 15 year old son is the first person to sign up in this Loyalist regiment, and they're at the Battle of Bennington, which is a disastrous defeat for Burgoyne's army.

And then it goes on.

I mean, they end up in Nova Scotia, as so many Loyalists did.

And I think that people are just unaware of how much of the population is either disaffected, Loyalist, not sure, committed unevenly to a Patriot cause or whatever it might be.

Walter> Well when I was growing up, I don't know, about ten years older than than you are and going through school and in college, they'd say, well, one third Loyalist, one third Patriot, one third changing, whose army is in in the front yard.

I don't think it's quite that simple.

South Carolina, at least according to the Loyalist transcript, we have a greater record of the South Carolina Loyalists than anybody else.

They made more claims, and they are an incredible cross-section, ranging from free persons of color to wealthy planters to an innkeeper; a female innkeeper in Charleston.

And so you can't say, well, everybody from this part of the state was a Loyalist or, this one was a Patriot.

It did not work that.

Ken> And it's fluid too.

This is the thing that's understanding that you can capture Charleston.

You can, you know, capture Benjamin Lincoln's army.

You can impose a sort of loyalty oath.

and it begins the way you see the Loyalists taking revenge on Patriot neighbors.

And all of a sudden, things are changing.

Same thing happened in New Jersey, which is the other great guerrilla warfare that's going on, where so many people are dying less from major battles than they are from these smaller skirmishes or just individual vendettas.

And, the total tenor of it, people, you know, rush after New York falls to sign a declaration of dependance.

But then all of a sudden, they change, and it may be a foraging German or British soldier that, you know, destroys your china or perhaps rapes your wife or daughter, and suddenly your loyalties are changed again.

And I think the complexity of the American Revolution has been sort of sanded over and smoothed over.

I think in some ways we don't want to disturb the great ideals if we accept, as we do, the violence of the Civil War and our involvement in 20th century wars, we kind of don't want us to understand how violent the American Revolution is, as if it might diminish those ideals.

In fact, I think those ideals are incredibly put in even more profound relief when you have an understanding of the of the individual stakes, the level of the violence.

What's going on?

We haven't even talked, about Native Peoples on the edges and within communities and where their loyalties are.

You mentioned enslaved people and free Blacks these are dynamics within this incredibly dynamic universe.

Walter> Well, and that's where, without being too chauvinistic in South Carolina, things have not been told before in terms of Native Americans.

The Catawba fought with the Patriots.

And that's the term I use.

See you can't say "the Americans" because the American front on the other side is as.

Ken> We've had that linguistic issue for the last several years in the editing room.

When you say "American" you better for the most part mean, everybody who can claim to be an American at that point, sometimes you can get away with it.

Slipping it in in the the old fashioned, chauvinistic way.

But it's it's you have to make these distinctions.

Walter> It's hard to do it otherwise.

I mean, when I wrote my little book on the Revolution, I just... Okay, we've got Tories and we've got Patriots and let's work at it that way.

And I already mentioned the Catawbas; when my book came out, an artist that I was not really that familiar with showed the Battle of Hanging Rock and there are Catawba warriors there, and I was immediately accused of trying to include, I said, no, the Catawbas not just fought for with the South Carolinian Patriots there, but in the Civil War they fought for South Carolina.

The Cherokee on the other hand, sided with the British.

And in a very brutal campaign, if you know, by the South Carolina militia, joined by the Georgians and Virginians, pretty well eliminated the Cherokee east of the Appalachian Mountains.

Ken> We tell that story, too.

And I think it's so funny that history has become such a, you know, a political football when it need not be.

It's always been complicated.

I have in my editing room a neon sign that says "It's Complicated" because, you know, there's not a filmmaker on earth that when the scene is working, you don't want to touch it.

But we always said we find out new information and we destabilize good things because you want it to be complicated.

This is the way it was, and the only way we're going to be able to negotiate the headwinds and the complication of our current moment is to understand exactly how dimensional it is.

It isn't some sanitized, romantic version of the American Revolution.

It's got to be warts and all.

Walter> Well speaking of romantic: Leslie Nielsen as Francis Marion.

Ken> You know, Walter, I have to fully admit that one of my great, great loves as a kid where some of my interest in history is coming from is watching some of those live action Disney things that happen, and I admit an affection for Leslie Nielsen's Francis Marion Swamp Fox.

And I would many times in our woods, outside our little track development in Newark, Delaware, play Francis Marion.

Walter> Could you sing his song?

Ken> I could at the time but I will not humiliate myself right now.

Walter> Well, my son in law sent me a little 78 record, and I played it once.

And that that was... Ken> That was enough.

Walter> That was enough.

Ken> Yeah, no no no.

And I think that that's good for many of us.

That's our entry point.

You know, as a boy, it might be the Daniel Boone series.

It might be an invented gunslinger in Texas.

John Slaughter, another one of those things in which you begin to realize there is a dimension, and interesting individuals who've come before us.

And then as you get older, you understand how incredibly more interesting the real story is.

Walter> Well you know what is often left out: you already mentioned women and minorities.

In South Carolina, the British recruited a unit of Black dragoons.

And after the Revolution, they were shipped to the West Indies to track down runaway slaves.

And their regimental tune was "Carolina in a Sultry Clime".

I mean, the Brits have got to have the regimental air.

Ken> You can't make this up and that's what I think makes the history so much more interesting.

And I think offers points of identification not just for various groups, but for all of us.

It's the way you make the history of the American Revolution, which of course started out as a quarrel between Englishmen over English rights and suddenly breaks out into natural rights that are articulated in language so vague that we and every subsequent generation has been able to drive a truck through expanding the idea of all men are created equal.

Because Thomas Jefferson meant all White men of property free of debt.

That's what he meant.

And we don't mean that anymore.

Walter> Well and see before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, South Carolina became the second colony to have a constitution.

And at the beginning of that constitution is a list of about 20 complaints where the British have oppressed us.

And you can match that against the Declaration of Independence.

And it's the... Walter> same thing.

Ken> Same thing.

And these are all anti-authoritarian reactions.

We have been, what did they call it?

"Salutory Neglect" was how most, one British politician said they treated the North American colonies.

Remember, these 13 are only half of the 26 colonies that Britain has in the New World.

The other 13 are in the Caribbean, and they're super profitable.

Only South Carolina and Virginia are are really profitable because of the large number of enslaved people they have.

Massachusetts is the least profitable.

But this is, these are the most populous of the colonies.

They produce things and they trade and they bargain.

So there's and they're obviously sitting on this goldmine of property which belongs to Native People.

So all of a sudden, you have a dynamic into which you're suddenly going to inject the Enlightenment and all of these ideas of natural rights.

Sort of can't make it up.

And you would do a disservice if you were going to limit it and sanitize it and make it the most superficial and sort of bland pablum.

It's much more interesting to understand South Carolina, for example, in the context of the war, by understanding just the sheer violence and upheaval that was going on.

The British were using the term "pacification" the way we did in Vietnam.

As about we are now pacified.

Now we're no longer pacified because the whole country is in an uproar.

And how it goes from like that to that is pretty interesting.

Walter> Back in 1970 when this state had a tricentennial there was a young military historian who wrote a pamphlet on the partisan war.

That's what he calls it.

And he was a veteran of Vietnam, and he was comparing Vietnam and it just basically got ignored by everybody.

I mean, some of the most modern histories in the 21st century had said: "Oh it wasn't a real guerilla uprising in South Carolina, because it has to be better organized", you know, like, I mean, come on.

No, the British never.

And you, I don't really have sympathy for them because of their tactics, but they never knew who their friends truly were.

Ken> Exactly right.

It is true in New Jersey.

It was interesting.

The film we did about a war before this one was on Vietnam, and there were several moments- a young boy who was killed in Vietnam is writing home to his mother and says that if I were Vietnamese, I'd definitely be on the side of the Viet Cong because they're like the Patriots during our Revolution.

Another Army guy who would become a journalist of Neil Caputo's says that as he's watching through the somber faces as he's marching through a village, is they're looking at me as I imagine the inhabitants of Ipswitch, Massachusetts did when the British marched through.

And so you had all of these continual comparisons, and you begin to realize Mark Twain is right.

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

You know that you're.

You're only looking at the, you know the varieties of human nature, good and bad, that manifest themselves in all eras.

And so you can find these footholds you can struggle for purchase with the complexity of the current moment in the past, and with the past it gives you- it arms you in a particularly important way to understand what's going on now and in the future.

Walter> Well, I have said several times if you follow Francis Marion's campaign, I think Mao Zedong was sitting on his the back of his horse on how you fight a guerrilla warfare.

You don't fight a stayed battle.

And as Mao Zedong would say: "You feign from the east, but you come from the west."

You fight and then flight.

You don't hang around.

Ken> Some of Nathanael Greene's soldiers said we fight, we get beat, we fight again and they're winning.

The attrition- when your home office is 3000 miles away and the supply is really, really difficult and because of your behavior, sort of, you know, turning the countryside against you.

This is the only strategy; this is George Washington's strategy, too.

He understands that he has to just avoid being captured, avoid being surrendered.

That the British have to win.

Joe Ellis says in our film, they have to win.

Washington only has to not lose because eventually, as Thomas Paine said: "We conquer by the drawn game."

We fight to a draw here, even we retreat.

We've won.

You've lost Walter> Well, sadly the first two Continental generals in the south did not recognize that.

Ken> No, they did not.

Walter> Benjamin Lincoln, although some of my fellow historians are still trying to resurrect his conduct putting his army in Charleston and as a British officer said, well, he went into bottle and we put the stopper in.

One of the greatest defeats in the history of the United States.

Ken> I think it is the greatest defeat in the history of the United States Army, I can't imagine.

Well, I mean, I guess Vietnam, but.

But we know this was this was really hugely important.

And of course, Horatio Gates's unmitigated cowardice at Camden.

Walter> You mean "Galloping Gates"?

Ken> Yeah, yes.

Walter> There are people trying to resurrect him.

Trying to excuse what... Ken> See because he's the hero of Saratoga.

But really, the hero in Saratoga is Benedict Arnold and Daniel Morgan.

Walter> Well, and Washington really wanted Greene to replace Lincoln, but Congress insisted upon... Ken> I'll give.

I don't know as much as you, Walter, but I'll give Lincoln not a pass... I know the extent to which they are foolishly, the Congress and everyone else pouring people into an undefendable Charleston.

And so we cannot blame this entirely because of the conflicting politics of the time.

You can't blame it.

We're sending the best troops into Charleston in and I think the memories of Sullivan's Island must have coated their ideas of of what's going on.

So it is interesting that Lincoln is the person chosen by Washington to receive the sort of surrender from Cornwallis's second in command Charles O'Hara.

Walter> Well yes, Lincoln does get a bad rap, but there were civilian authorities in Charleston who insisted that he defend the city.

In fact a British officer said later, told American officers is we had people from Charleston coming out giving us information the whole time.

you under siege.

Ken> Well, and Savannah as well as in Charleston.

You have Loyalists who are incredibly helpful to the British success in those campaigns.

Walter> But then see the British if they really wanted to pacify... Georgia would be a good example.

They reinstituted civil government even though the former lieutenant governor.

And if those people move back in, it was always a military government in South Carolina.

And it was pretty brutal just even in Charleston.

Ken> Yeah we have a British historian admitting exactly that, Walter, in our series that we'll share some clips with you later on that realizes that what happens after the success of Charleston is sort of undermined by the brutality of military rule in the former colony.

Walter> Well, we can start with blaming Sir Henry Clinton or thanking him depending on which... which side you're on.

When he revokes the parole and says you've got to take an oath, which means you're going to fight against your neighbors, and that's when it begins to unravel.

And because of what was going on towards the end, there's the hanging of Isaac Hayne in Charleston because he was a Patriot officer and he had taken parole, but he came back to fight with Marion.

And then he got captured, and the British decided to hang him as a threat.

Well, the threat didn't last very long because Nathanael Greene said I have more... I have lots of English officers, than the next American that's hanged I'm going to hang one, too.

So that ended that.

But that was just an example of "Give him the sword, give him the torch."

Little towns.

You burn Georgetown for what?

Well, there were a couple thousand people.

They just burned the whole thing.

That was the fire and the sword.

Ken> I agree.

You know about Christian Huck?

Walter> Oh!

Ken> I mean I think that he created more Patriots than just about anybody in his just completely awful campaign.

Walter> Well that's the genesis of my book on the Revolution, "Partisans and Redcoats" that I really think it began to unravel because it was just about six weeks from Huck's Defeat to Kings Mountain and about 40 miles.

And in between, then you've got a whole series of engagements that are increasingly Patriot partisan band victories, and each one the British are losing forces they can't replace.

And in the countryside, people are thinking twice "Do I really want to sign up for the Tory militia?

Because I do.

I just put an X on my house, my front door."

And so, as I told my friends in Charleston, I tell them all the time, the Revolution in the state may have begun and ended here, but it was won in the back country.

Ken> Oh, absolutely.

I agree completely.

And you could also say that it's the reluctance of backcountry people to come to the aid of Charleston for a variety of class reasons and concerns about disease that also contribute.

I mean, no amount of soldiers are going to be able to withstand... Charleston is just too vulnerable.

And I think the '76 campaign with Moultrie, must have just convinced people that it would be okay.

But Clinton understands.

Walter> I mean, the Battle of Sullivan's Island was such... It's a wonderful story.

You know, the cannonballs bouncing off the palmetto logs, and the British deciding to cross the inlet, which they could not.

But on paper it was a good plan because there was no back side to the fort.

Had they been able to cross Breach Inlet, then it would have been all over.

Ken> Then it would have been all over that early, as early as June of '76 instead of May of '80.

Walter> Yeah, well, you know, it's just I think particularly in the backcountry the thing that amazed me in my research is literally every segment of the population was involved.

You know, my friends in Boston, and that's where my two of my grandchildren live.

And they celebrate Patriots Day there in Massachusetts.

We don't celebrate Palmetto Day here in South Carolina, which I've often found a little bit disconcerting.

But the fact that just before Kings Mountain, critical intelligence was taken by one of the members of a partisan band, but he had been crippled by life.

So he couldn't really be a fighter, but nobody paid him any attention.

Ken> Right, so he could be a gatherer of information.

Walter> He could become a gatherer of intelligence and he got critical intelligence before the Battle of Kings Mountain as to where Ferguson and his folks really were.

Ken> We've elevated James Collins, who's the son of a Patriot and who is a collector of news, a spy, someone who, because of that, is a young boy.

He eventually joins the the Patriot ranks.

But he can, you can sort of see what's going on.

And I think people forget the extent to which.

these battles unfold.

And sometimes just that personal side.

You didn't go to the backside or this, Quamino Dolly leads you through the swamp in Savannah, and you get, right.

Walter> And then there's Jane Black Thomas.

Have you run across her?

Ken> Mhmm.

Walter> Here is a woman who's... She's over 60, and that's pretty old back in the time of the Revolution.

She steals a horse, rides through enemy occupied territory to warn the Patriots in Spartan District who then ambush the British.

And as more than one South Carolinian would say "Hey, she finished her ride.

She did not ride down a paved highway shouting "The British are coming, the British are coming!""

And she finished her mission.

Ken> Well now that you're bringing up Massachusetts or inferring it from your friends in Boston and your, relatives there.

And Paul Revere, do you know who Rebecca Tanner is?

Walter> No.

Ken> So you know, the Sullivan mother from World War II who has four sons lost on a ship and so the rule that essentially... Delivers us "Saving Private Ryan" comes into being, but Rebecca Tanner is, a Mohegan, loses five sons for the Patriot cause.

A Native American woman, five sons, which puts her way above any other mother in American history, as far as I can tell.

Walter> And sometimes these stories can be funny.

There was a young teenager, Sarah McJunkin; backcountry with her family.

We think in her probably mid-teens.

She sounds like a 15 year old relation.

Actually, we don't really know at the time.

And Tory militia taking everything out of the family house and she grabs her grandmother's quilt and it becomes a tug-of-war.

And the Tory officer says: "Okay, see who wins?"

Well, she maneuvers him where he slips in a pile of cow manure and she, you know, takes the quilt and they let her have it.

But under other circumstances, they could have just literally killed her.

Ken> Yeah, well, I think this is where the historian Maya Jasanoff says in our film that we forget that the United States is born in violence and it is our... We do an incredible disservice if we just think it's about Founding Fathers signing documents in Philadelphia but it's so much more than that.

And to me, so much more interesting that and then it makes the common cause of people in Georgia and South Carolina who have almost nothing in common with people in New Hampshire and Massachusetts that common cause all the more spectacular given the circumstances, the violence of the war and the powerful, agency of those words and those ideas.

Walter> You know, really, after 1769 there was almost no royal government in South Carolina.

And after 1771, there was nothing passed.

I think there were six assemblies dismissed in that period of time, and even before 1776, there were shadow governments in South Carolina.

Yes.

Getting the powder in Williamsburg I know about.

But in South Carolina, they did.

They did the same thing.

So they weren't following anybody.

They were just were just doing it.

Ken> Yes.

And most of the royal governors are floating somewhere off their former colonies, trying to figure out or trying to convince themselves that the majority of their citizens are Loyalist and they'll rise up to support the King at a moment's notice Walter> The last royal governor in South Carolina, Governor Campbell, had actually been in touch with people in the backcountry where loyalty to the revolutionaries in Charleston as you mentioned, was kind of iffy.

I mean, more than one backcountry leader would say, you're fighting England.

You've treated us the same way.

We have not had proper representation.

The land tax is unfair.

A poor man upstate, his acres were taxed at the same value per acre as those of the richest rice planter in the lowcountry.

So they had a lot of complaints, too.

In fact, at the very beginning, the lowcountry rebels, revolutionaries sent a delegation to the backcountry to try to get them to... When you sign on and they basically agreed to sign a "peace treaty" so they would not; they promised not to stab the lowcountry in the back.

Ken> That's fantastic.

That all quickly dissolved and the civil war nature between those who were loyal to the Crown and those who opted for... Ken> And we have to understand that this is on a almost a person by person, certainly family by family sort of stage that these are retributions carried out.

These are, people taking revenge, prisoners being shot and disappearing.

And that's open civil war.

Walter> Well in terms of looking at why do people do what they do?

Thomas Sumter and Andrew Pickens, two of the great partisan leaders in South Carolina with the fall of Charleston, they took parole and went back home.

You know, that's where the British really screwed up.

Most South Carolinians, particularly the backcountry they just wanted to be left alone!

And instead, you've got people like Banastre Tarleton, who really was as big a... Whatever.

Ken> Right.

Walter> And he had several compatriots, James Williams and Major Cruger.

And they all brutalized the local population.

Ken> And that is bound to earn you enemies and not friends.

And the treatment of the Overmountain Men is, of course, responsible in part for the overwhelming defeat at Kings Mountain.

Walter> And a lot of those, they're over the mountain but they had come from the two Carolinas and Virginia I mean we call them the "Over the Mountain Men".

And quite frankly, at Kings Mountain, they get a little bit more press than.

You know, they weren't the only... Ken> No no, no.

James Collins was... Walter> I mean, there were Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia militia, as well as the Over the Mountain boys.

But when you challenge their masculinity, that's not a very smart... Ken> It's not a smart move to make.

Walter> Well, I know you have written books, and I had a wonderful editor, William Morrow, and I concluded my account of the Battle of Kings Mountain with what the Over the Mountain Men did to Ferguson's corpse.

And I said they pissed on his corpse, and I was told, well, that we need to say "urinate".

And I said, I'm sorry.

Over the Mountain boys... Ken> Would not say that.

Walter> They did not urinate, they did not wee-wee, they pissed.

Ken> Right.

Walter> And I said, by the way, that's a very good 18th century word, and the OED Agreed with me.

Ken> Yes.

Walter> So I was safe.

Ken> Did you win?

Walter> I won.

Ken> Good, great.

I'm glad to hear that.

Walter> And the other battle I had was Martha Bratton's enslaved person his name was Watt.

W-A-T-T.

And he carried messages just before Huck's Defeat the Battle of Williamson's Plantation.

And I was told unless he has a last name, you can't include him.

And I said, I'm sorry.

I sent a picture of his gravestone.

I said, is this how certain people get left out if they don't have a last name?

So I won that battle too.

But those are the only two real issues that, other than how... Ken> Well, I, you know, I'm a filmmaker.

I've written the introductions to the books that we've done, mostly by Geoffrey Ward and Dayton Duncan.

And so I've, I've been mostly free of the vagaries of, of copy editing.

But I must say that our own editing over draft after draft in the films are so distilled and so rigorous that, we've already experienced almost all of the vagaries we're just having to find out, you know, adding the word "perhaps" to make what may be apocryphal just slightly more palatable.

Walter> Since we're going to share this with South Carolina listeners anything you'd like to add before we...?

Ken> No, I'm very happy to be in South Carolina.

I'm very happy to share the story of South Carolina that we tell.

I think, pretty well in our series and that I hope that the, the stories in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and New York and Massachusetts will be equally as compelling and understand just the remarkable achievement of creating the United States of America.

We like to say all the time that human nature doesn't change from Ecclesiastes: "There's nothing new under the sun."

But for a moment, there was something new under the sun, and that was the United States of America.

Everyone else had been, subject before that and after that, at least you had a few people who were citizens.

And the great gift of the United States is the huge responsibility of citizenship on the part of its, individuals, and that citizenship required, as the founders believed, from Georgia to New Hampshire, a kind of virtue and a lifelong learning to perfect that.

And whenever you feel that the Republic is in some ways threatened, it usually comes from the fact that we're willing to substitute sort of story and fiction and misinformation for what actually took place.

It's really important, even in the Revolution, to understand just how complex it was, because it's only then that you have the the power to continue to act as a citizen.

Walter> As important as the documents in the Congress was, particularly here in South Carolina, it was the average man and woman who decided to make a stand.

And that made the difference.

Ken> That made the total difference for the history of the world, not just the United States, we're the original movement towards freedom.