The third chapter of Ken Burns’ s The American Revolution (co-directed with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt) focuses on the violence that accompanied the American Revolution. Departing from popular mythology, the documentary explicitly frames the Revolutionary struggle as a multi-faceted, chaotic, and often brutal civil war; one that not only pitted white colonists against one another but also sowed years of trauma, death, and destruction for Natives, the enslaved, and people living beyond the borders of the thirteen rebelling colonies. Many viewers will likely be surprised—and perhaps horrified—by the extent of the carnage involved in establishing American independence. Unfortunately, viewers are also likely to be left confused about just what, if any, role all that bloodshed actually played in shaping the American founding.

Thomas Paine by Laurent Dabos, 1792. From Wikimedia Commons.

Titled after a memorable passage from Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis, “The Times that Try Men’s Souls” opens with first-person narration of wartime hardships, and less than two minutes in the historian Maya Jasanoff tells us bluntly that “the United States came out of violence.” The remainder of the episode does not spare the gory details. Drawing on the work of scholars like Jasanoff, who in the last twenty-five years have fleshed out the experiences of the Revolution’s “losers,” the film depicts in vivid quotations and haunting images the suffering of loyalist refugees, prisoners of war, and civilians plundered and abused by marauding armies.[1] The words of the Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe anchor a segment on conflict between Natives and settlers on the borders of the southern colonies, and the film also relates how Revolutionary rhetoric and the chaos of an imperial civil war sparked rebellion amongst enslaved people and unrest amongst enslavers not just in North America but also in Britain’s West Indian provinces. By the time the credits roll, the truth of Jasanoff’s statement should be evident even to the most skeptical viewer.

The meaning of that violence, however, remains frustratingly elusive. For all the bloody tales on offer, the documentary—in this episode and elsewhere—struggles to connect incidents of violence that occurred outside the battlefield to the larger narrative that frames the film as a whole. The bulk of episode 3, like the majority of the series, is devoted to the trials and tribulations of the Continental Army and the Continental Congress. Spanning the second half of 1776, the film dwells especially on the Battles of Long Island and Manhattan, the establishment of state constitutions, and the Continental defense of Lake Champlain before concluding with Washington’s triumphant withdrawal from Princeton in January 1777. With these dramatic—and familiar—events serving as the “main” storyline, incidents such as the Cherokee War, the Great Fire of New York, and the Jamaican slave conspiracy are folded in where chronologically appropriate but largely stand apart from the rest of the narrative. Much like the pink and blue boxes that began appearing in history textbooks during the 1980s and 1990s to meet the demand for a more inclusive curriculum, these stories intersect Burns’s primary narrative but rarely affect the film’s overall interpretation of events. And just as the multi-colored textbooks of the late twentieth century relegated histories of women, African Americans, and other groups to the (sometimes literal) margins despite the best intentions of their authors, the interpretation on offer in The American Revolution robs the victims of Revolutionary violence of their role in the American founding.[2]

“Representation of the great fire at New York,” by Franz Xaver Habermann, 1776. From Wikimedia Commons.

Burns, himself a veteran of culture wars from the 1990s through the 2020s, surely did not set out to shortchange any of the film’s subjects—in fact, their careful attention to recent research and inclusion of a diverse and well-respected cast of scholars as talking heads suggests the co-directors hoped to tell a more inclusive tale of the Revolution. But the very storytelling structure they employ undermines this goal. The film’s depiction of the Cherokee War, for example, occupies five minutes and change, nestled between slightly longer discussions of the Battles of Sullivan’s and Long Islands. The segment treats this conflict with rigor and respect attention it deserves—impeccably researched images and quotations, somber music, ethnically appropriate voice actors, and testimony by renowned experts on the Native experience such as Kathleen DuVal and Colin Calloway. These very things, however, set it apart from the scenes immediately before and after. The two battle segments employ the same animated battle maps, re-enactment footage, martial music, and Rick Atkinson-heavy analysis that frame the film’s military and political “A Plot” throughout all six episodes. The message this structure sends to the viewer is that the Cherokee—and the violence inflicted by and against them—do not fit into the film’s primary narrative, damning them into interpretive irrelevance despite the filmmakers’ best intentions.

In a sense, that this episode takes its name from Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis is oddly appropriate. To build support for the Revolutionary project, Paine’s writings—like those of other Revolutionary propogandists—dramatized stories of atrocities committed by British soldiers, Natives, the enslaved, loyalists, and religious dissenters to persuade their countrymen to join the “Common Cause” against Great Britain.[3] That their efforts incited violence against loyalists, Natives, religious dissenters, and the enslaved went unacknowledged, even though many Revolutionary leaders understood perfectly the implications of their violent rhetoric. For the sake of keeping their Revolutionary coalition together, politicians like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson remained silent about the use of arbitrary violence against perceived enemies of the Revolution even as they decried the repressive tactics of Britain and the savagery of the Empire’s allies. In a similar way, Burns and his co-directors deploy de-contextualized incidents of Revolutionary violence to draw the viewer in and raise the stakes of their narrative and while remaining silent about the troubling implications of much of that violence.

The founders’ fraught and often hypocritical relationship with the violence that their Revolution unleashed remains with us today, and not just in Ken Burns’s The American Revolution. In recent years political violence and even armed insurrection have re-emerged as a major force in American politics, and while gallons of ink have been spilled on individual instances, there are astonishingly few serious attempts to understand the problem on a wider scale or in deep historical context. Perhaps a better understanding of how violence shaped the nation’s founding would give us better tools to comprehend our current moment and prevent such violence from repeating.

Endnotes

[1] Maya Jasanoff, Libert’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011); see also works over the past two decades or so by Cassandra Pybus, Sylvia Frey, Ruma Chopra, Alan Taylor, Colin Calloway, Kathleen DuVal, T. Cole Jones, Wayne Lee, Aaron Sullivan, and Lauren Duval, among others.

[2] On the fraught history of history textbooks, see Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 2000), esp. ch. 4–5 and 10.

[3] On how Patriot authors employed “war stories” in service to their cause, see Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016).