Ken Burns Wants You to Rethink What You Know About the American Revolution

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: When it comes to American history, it is the Holy Grail, the American Revolution, of course. But there is still much to be learned. That is certainly what our next guest thinks, and he should know. Ken Burns has been chronicling American history and culture for decades. He first rose to prominence 35 years ago with his PBS series on the Civil War. And now, he’s turning his lens to that much-vaunted American origin story, “The American Revolution,” with a new 12-hour documentary for PBS.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: From a small spark kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be extinguished.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We think about independence movements of the 20th century. You don’t always recognize the fact that the United States actually started that.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The American Revolutionary Movement served as a model for freedom from oppression.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: America is predicated on an idea that tells us who we are, where we came from, and what our forebears were willing to die for.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Collins said no taxation without representation. The fear was, if we give in to this precedent, what will they do in the future?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Crisis changes people. It gave different people different ideas about what they should be doing.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It gave them a space to make this democracy real.

 

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AMANPOUR: And he joins Walter Isaacson to talk about it.

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Ken Burns, welcome back to the show.

 

KEN BURNS: Great to be with you, Walter.

 

ISAACSON: You have this multi-part series, the American Revolution that’s coming out. And you say that, “the American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ.” Whoa. Tell me why you think it was that important.

 

BURNS: I wasn’t trying to be provocative. I was just beginning to realize that there’s a moment, a little bit after the phrase, “pursuit of happiness”  — the great second sentence of the Declaration — where Jefferson says, “All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable.” It’s not hard to parse, it just means that heretofore everybody’s been a subject to an authoritarian rule. And now we’re creating this new thing called citizens. The Old Testament says, there’s nothing new under the sun. That’s Ecclesiastes. So there’s actually for a moment, something new under the sun. And I wanna rivet people’s attention. 

 

ISAACSON: Do you think they felt it was that big of a deal?

 

BURNS: Yes. 

 

ISAACSON: Or did they think it was a rebellion against taxes or something? 

 

BURNS: Well, It starts off that way. It just —  it gathers momentum like a snowball going down the hill. You know, at first it’s parliament, and it’s British complaints about British law, and then all of a sudden it gets broken out ’cause It’s the Enlightenment, you know, into universal truths. And then all of a sudden they’re saying things like, “All men are created equal.” Now I know the Jefferson men, all white men are property, free of debt. But the word “all” as the scholar Yuval Levin says, you know, that’s just like the walls of Jericho is just broken down. It’s a trumpet that is going to just wear away. And even though it’s four score and nine years before slavery ends — and it’s an unforgivable 144 years before women get the right to vote — this is a big deal. So it’s, it’s constantly enlarging.

 

And if you think about it, the whole project is about that. It’s pursuit of happiness. It’s a more perfect union. We’re sort of a nation in the process of becoming, and this is our big bang of which we know nothing about. And we’re in an expanding universe, even when we can fret and Chicken Little, a particular moment and say, we’re so divided. We’ll go back to our revolution. We’re as divided as ever. It’s a revolution. And it’s a bloody one. It’s also a civil war in a way that our own civil war is a sectional war. And it’s also a global war. And it is the fourth global war over the prize of North America. So you’ve got all of these free electrons sort of banging around this thing. 

 

And they’re people, though. They know how important it is. They’re talking about us. They’re talking about you and me, Walter. They’re saying “millions yet unborn.” They have a sense of a responsibility, not just to themselves and their families in this crazy impossible, never gonna happen idea that has zero chance of success at Lexington green on April 19, ‘75. 

 

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BURNS: And it’s just a spectacular thing. And it’s not just the top down guys. It’s not just the boldface names who have sort of been so encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality. Our job is to sort of make them a little bit more human and dimensional and people that you can relate to. But the better thing is to introduce you to literally scores and scores of other people — I’d never heard about — who are central to this story as well. 

 

ISAACSON: You talk about, yeah, the barnacles of sentimentality that have encrusted. And we all think of the Grand Statesmen who go into Independence Hall. But your whole show, as you just said, is about the ordinary people. The ones where the bullet goes thud and it hits their chest.

 

BURNS: It hits them… 

 

ISAACSON: Or the slave or the woman home spinning. How did you decide to tell it through so many people as opposed to the grand leaders of the revolution? 

 

BURNS: Well you know, it —  they’re not mutually exclusive. And that’s the problem with our binary sensibilities today. We’re so dialectically preoccupied. You think you have to then throw everybody out. George Washington had slaves, so he’s gotta go. Well, we don’t have a country without George Washington. So you’re gonna just have to get over that there’s this stuff and there’s this stuff. And the scales of justice and his, his creator will deal, have, has dealt with him in this. But we need to tell all the stories and, and tell a complicated and dimensional story. 

 

So when I say the prize of North America, what am I talking about? I’m talking about land. Who, who occupies that land? Hundreds of different peoples. Not to, not them, but hundreds of peoples who’ve been on the world scene in —  at least those on the eastern seaboard and the Ohio Valley. They’ve been on the world scene in, in trade and in diplomacy for centuries. They know Britain, they know Spain, they know France. They know the Dutch. It is — their, their, each one of them has a different set. And it’s, it’s their confederacy, their union among the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy that inspires Franklin 20 years before the revolution to say, Hey, we could do this. We could have a union just like them. And — 

 

ISAACSON: Wait, explain that a bit more ’cause It’s key to the, what you’ve done. 

 

BURNS: Yeah. So, so there’s — 

 

ISAACSON: Which is, they have a federation of the Six Nations, and it’s a federal system. And Ben Franklin says, Okay, the Albany Plan, we’ll make that our system.

 

BURNS: So he draws a picture of a cutup snake with the most of the states. And underneath it is this dire warning, join or die. And he convened seven of the 13 colonies at Albany in 1754. And they adopt his plan of union based on the Haudenosaunee, the six nations: the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida and Mohawk of the, which you, of the Iroquois Confederacy. And then they go home to try to sell it and nobody wants to give up their autonomy. Not a single colony wants to give up their autonomy so the, the plan dies. But 20 years later, join or die is a war cry in the most consequential revolution in history. So you’ve got to center, whatever the common word is, a Native American experience. 

 

Half the population are women. Out of the 3 million people, 500,000 are enslaved or free Black Americans. You’ve got Spanish to the South, you’ve got French licking their wounds. You have British hiring German soldiers. You have back country people. You have educated, sort of the elites, we’d call them today, who are trying to sort of figure out, well, maybe we are gonna split and we’re gonna start a republic. The dynamism is so intense that you just can’t ignore it. 

 

Let me just take one kid, 15 years old. 15 years old. Signs up a few days after the declaration in July of 1776. Joseph Plumb Martin from Connecticut. He’s the archetypal grunt you’ve made in every film about the Civil War, about World War II, about Vietnam — complaining about the food, complaining about the weather, complaining about the orders. And he’s there.

 

ISAACSON: And by the way, you’ve got his letters. 

 

BURNS: We got his letters. 

 

ISAACSON: Explain how those type of things informed this film.

 

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BURNS: So, Joseph Plumb Martin comes in, he’s blooded in the Battle of Long Island, which is the biggest battle in a total disaster for the Patriots. But he’s there at Redoubt Number 10 at Yorktown, that’s being led by Lafayette and by Alexander Hamilton. But he’s leading the charge into this Redoubt with the Abbott, the spiked French, you know the logs of the British positions.

 

And he says, you know, The man at my left was hit with a bullet and falls, crying bitterly, but there was no stopping us. And it’s, it’s, there’s a great famous painting of the attack over Redoubt number 10. But it is so powerful that there’s Joseph Plumb Martin, who’s right behind him? Free Black soldiers from Rhode Island who’ve been promised their freedom once the war is over. And even Connecticut and Rhode Island are talking about compensating their owners for the property that they’ve lost as a result of this. This one charge. 

 

You’ve got a Frenchman, our pal. You’ve got Alexander Hamilton who’s gonna play, who has played a huge role and will continue to play a huge role in the history of the United States.

 

And this is what we tried to capture and bottle. We followed reenactors for six years, filming them not to give us reenact this battle, but to collect a critical mass of imagery to offset the fact that clearly, obviously, there’s no photographs and no news reels. But that doesn’t mean those people are different than us. Photographs sort of prove a similarity. And we see the paintings and the buckles and the hose and the breaches, and the waistcoats and the powdered wigs, and think they can’t be like us. They’re exactly like us. 

 

ISAACSON: Well, as you say, it’s a tapestry filled with all sorts of people, large and small. But the hero line throughout is George Washington, the person you’ve mentioned, who’s done it all. But you do have to wrestle with the fact that he not only is an enslaver, but a pretty cruel one at that. He also loses a lot of battles and lots of blunders. And he was ruthless to the Native Americans. I think you quote Jane Kaminsky in episode two, “do not look for the gilded statues of marble men.” 

 

BURNS: That’s right. 

 

ISAACSON: That’s the theme of what you’ve done, is make these people flesh, not marble. But explain how hard that was with Washington.

 

BURNS: Well, first of all, Washington is so endlessly interesting. You, he just — but there’s an opacity to him. But as you say, if you can take him all in all, then he’s dimensional in his failures. He’s also incredibly modest, you know. And so the letters that he writes…and so I got the actor Josh Brolin to play him. And I said, Josh, this man is unknowable. Can you help me understand a little bit about him? Let that leak in a little bit.

 

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Let’s just put it this way — without Washington’s leadership, we don’t have a country. And that’s the key to this, is that what we do, particularly in a media culture or a computer culture where everything’s a one or a zero, a yes or a no, a red state or a blue state, is, we think it’s just divided that way. But everybody has complication and undertow. 

 

But, you know, you’ve got to be able to understand people in their totality and to celebrate that contradiction. And this reminds us of our own lives, the own paradoxes within ourselves, and the paradoxes we feel to the people that are closest to us that we love the most, who remain, in some ways, inscrutable to us. So, good history is, of course, thinking it might not turn out the way, you know, it did. 

 

ISAACSON: So many of your documentaries deal with race, whether it’s jazz, whether it’s baseball, whether it’s civil rights. This one deals with race too. Explain how you felt race was so critical here.

 

BURNS: Well, look, it’s, it’s there in all my other films, because the guy who wrote our catechism, the second sentence of the declaration, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” You and I know the story of the word self-evident. More complicated than that, that all men are created equal — let’s stop there — owned hundreds of human beings and didn’t see the contradiction. Didn’t see the hypocrisy, and didn’t see fit in his lifetime to free any of those slaves and set in motion an American narrative, not responsible entirely to Jefferson, but symbolically attached to Jefferson, because he gave words to our aspirations, our noblest aspirations. So this is gonna play out all through the decades, but no more so in this moment, when the people, particularly southern planters and enslavers of a great number of people are describing what they think George III is doing to them as enslaving them.

 

And the liberty talk, as Jane Kaminsky says in our film, is leaky. The people that are serving them are hearing it, and they want it too. Native Americans want it. Women want it too. 

 

ISAACSON: Well, you give voice to a lot of enslaved and former slaves. And one of the things that struck me is how they had to choose sides in this revolution. 

 

BURNS: Yes. 

 

ISAACSON: And I think, what, 15,000 or so end up on the… 

 

BURNS: British side. 

 

ISAACSON: British side and less than that 5,000 end up on the patriot side. Tell me about having to make that choice.

 

BURNS: So there, the entire British Empire’s profit depends on the 13 colonies in the Caribbean that are hugely profitable because it’s the work of enslaved people and only — and our 13 are the least profitable — and only Virginia and the Carolinas, for the obvious reason, have some profitability for the British Empire. But cynically, Lord Dunmore, who owns other human beings himself says, well, if you’re the an enslaved person of a rebel, please come and get your freedom from me. If you’re the enslaved person of a loyalist, by the way, stay where you are. You’re enslaved for the rest of your life, right?

 

So you’re seeing Black families making decisions about what to do, running for daylight. And as it turns out, many of them make a decision to fight with the British, or at least align themselves with the British. 5,000 make a decision to fight. We think 20,000 are engaged, 15 fight for the British. 

 

Native Americans are making the same kind of choice. But also all other Americans are too. This is a bloody civil war. There are people who are loyalists and saying, “All of my good fortune, all of my literacy, my health, the fact that I own land, when my family for a thousand years was working dependent land in Wales and Scotland and Ireland and England never had this chance, I have it here. Why am I gonna risk it for this crazy untested idea when the British constitutional monarchy looks to be the finest form of government on earth?” At least in the western sense of that and they’re not wrong.

 

And so we don’t make loyalists bad people. We make them understandable. We have Roger Lamb, an Irish soldier watching in a lull in the fighting at the Battle of Saratoga one British soldier. They’re trading insults or jokes or whatever. They’re happy to have a lull as all soldiers are. And one just gets up and runs down, jumps in the water and swims midstream. Meanwhile, an American gets down and jumps. And they’re two brothers. They embrace midstream. They didn’t know. They hadn’t talked to each other, seen each other for years, and they were on the other side trying to kill each other in the battle of Saratoga.

 

ISAACSON: Let me read you some of the charges from the end of the Declaration of Independence against the king. And they kind of resonate today in what we would think. One of it’s for “Obstructing laws for naturalization…refusing to encourage immigration here…made judges dependent on his will…kept among us standing armies in times of peace…quartering bodies of armed troops among us…cutting off our trade with all parts of the world…and he’s excited domestic insurrections against us.” Every one of those you might notice could be echoed today, the domestic insurrection.

 

BURNS: Yeah. You know, our, our friend Mark Twain is supposed to have said that history doesn’t repeat itself, which of course it doesn’t. No event has happened twice. But Twain said it rhymes. And anybody who spent any time talking about the past suddenly realizes in every instance — my first film that was on PBS, you know, back in the early eighties on the Brooklyn Bridge, you know, rhymed with things that were going on. This rhymes in spectacular ways. Our job is to tell what happened and to know that it will rhyme, but also to be aware of the fact that you date your film, if you say, isn’t this so much like this moment? Because what you want with good history is to have it be durable. 

 

So anything that makes to, that puts my thumb on the scale and says, oh, isn’t this like today, is a distraction. It is always going to be like today and tomorrow as it was yesterday. And we benefit from what’s happened over the last 50 years in this increase of knowledge since the bicentennial to the semi quincentennial that gives us a chance to have a complicated American conversation with, I hope, little shouting.

 

ISAACSON: Ken Burns as always, thank you for joining us.

 

BURNS: Thank you, Walter.