A Commentary on “The American Revolution” by Ken Burns et al

Jennifer Jopp

British troops firing on American troops at Lexington, April 1775. (Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/ 2004670199/)

FOR CONTRADICTIONS AND contradictory legacies, one can hardly top the American Revolution.

There is much in the history of the era to stir the heart and make one proud to be an inheritor of such a country. And yet this history is also replete with conmen, cads, racists, and rapacious profiteers. And they were sometimes the same people!

Ken Burns’ latest excavation of our heritage takes on this period in all its complexities and — while ultimately landing on the side of the revolutionaries — doesn’t shy away from peeling back the patriotic patina to reveal the rot underneath.

There is nothing more patriotic than men and women willing to risk their lives for the chance of a better life for others and for the future of their (imagined) country. There were many such people who took up arms to fight the British, inspired by the ideals of a movement struggling to “break the chains of slavery” with which the metropole fettered the colonies.

Many of these people began, as well, to take this idea more literally and fought for an end to the enslavement of Black people.

Freedom and Unfreedom

For countless others, an understanding of their own freedom rested on that very enslavement.

They understood “freedom” to encompass a life of ease for themselves and their families while others labored for them. And indeed, the enslavement of others forecast their own freedom. These men feared the social chaos wrought by revolution and worked to maintain their own “property and standing.”

They were not alone in seeing their own “free” way of life resting on the destruction of the autonomy of others: many men were drawn into the revolutionary movement with the promise of lands in the west and those lands were Indigenous lands. The Jeffersonian notion that political independence was rooted in property ownership was a powerful engine of expansion.

There were many forms of unfreedom in the colonies, and the material circumstances of one’s life often influenced the decision to become a revolutionary: many tenant farmers became supporters of the fight against the British when the holders of their tenancies declared loyalty to the Crown.

Thus in any given place at any given time, local politics and local tensions shaped the conflicts among the colonials about fighting against or with the British and about who might rule when the war was over. The contest over the west was also part of this global contest for control of the vast, fertile and mineral-rich lands of the American continent.

The war itself contributed to many of the contradictions of its conduct. Wars require materiel, and materiel requires money (of which there was not much in the colonies) and this need spurred all kinds of schemes for the enrichment of shady characters with an eye to the main chance.

War profiteering made some men immensely wealthy while others lost everything to defend the ideals of the revolution. And even the most noble — Washington among them — dabbled in investments in western lands.

Bloody Enterprise

Speaking about Ken Burns’ new documentary, the magnificent six-part exploration of the American Revolutionary war, a colleague remarked, “Oh, it’s dull; it’s one battle after another.”

An American coming of age anytime in the last half century might be forgiven for believing that battles are the dull part and of little significance. We have come to see our war for independence as a bloodless, preordained affair. And images of Washington and others in clean, white coats astride robust horses convey an image of certainty and certitude.

Indeed, Ronald Reagan once remarked that the United States would not support any country that “came to power by the barrel of the gun,” as if we had not ourselves done so.

Over six two-hour episodes, what the filmmakers make abundantly clear is that winning independence involved a whole lot of guns, guns of all kinds, guns made, purchased, borrowed and stolen. In fact, it was a vast bloody enterprise, one that involved hundreds of places, dozens of nations, oceans, rivers, and all matter of waterways and highways.

The magnitude of the conflict — one that was an anticolonial rebellion, a global war for empire, a civil war, and a war about both home rule and “who would rule at home” — is astonishing. It defies easy categorization and is the source of both our joys and our sorrows. As historian Maya Jasanoff notes, it has given us “an actual idea of a moment of origin” and a touchstone which compels us to ask the most central questions about our history and our society.

Burns’ first episode opens with the view from Native land; that placement creates the context within which the story will be told (somewhat akin to the experience of seeing the world map on the wall in another country; we are so accustomed to being the center of the world).

Centering on Native voices reminds the viewer that all those who arrived — with varying degrees of control over their destinies — were all “newcomers.”

The scale of the conflict and its global nature defy description: at any given moment, battles took place across the continent and around the world. The people drawn to participate, likewise, defy any kind of simple categorization.

Free Blacks from what would become Haiti joined the French in attacking the British and the Loyalists, while young men from a host of countries became mercenaries for the British or came to help the American cause. People fought for a whole range of reasons, not all of them having to do with the war.

The war was fought in fields, in forests, on mountains, and along waterways of all kinds. The scattered population meant that the battles of the war took place over a vast territory, indeed, all over the world. It was both a war against empire and for empire. The great prize was North America, a fertile and prosperous set of colonies, and the contestants for the prize were many.

To Be Free

Episode One, “In Order to be Free” (May 1754-May 1775) explores the beginning of the colonial conflict with England, tracing the growing alienation of the Americans from their metropolitan rulers.

Why did the colonials, who were among the most prosperous, literate and productive peoples in the world at the time, become so distanced from the monarchy? How did they craft a resistance powerful enough to defeat the world’s strongest military power?

The roots of the conflict lay — as is so often the case — in an earlier conflict. The experience of the British during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63, yet another global war for empire) had brought the prosperity of the colonials to British attention. Now facing a recalcitrant domestic population, George III’s government determined to draw wealth from its growing global empire.

The Crown’s early forays into revenue gathering — the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, and the Stamp Act — were met with resistance. To add insult to injury, the revenue thereby produced was to pay for the increased troop presence in the colonies to enforce the Proclamation Line of 1763.

Ki-On-Twog-Ky (also known as Cornplanter), 1732/40-1836, chief of the Seneca tribe, by F. Bartoli. During the American Revolution the tribes of the Six Nations saw the conflict as a civil war and resisted being involved. Eventually the Seneca supported the British and became a defeated nation. In 1790 he delivered a speech to Washington, asking that the new nation would honor past treaty obligations, The Seneca were forced to leave their home in New York state. https://emuseum.nyhistory.org/objects/40589/ gayetwahgeh-also-known-as-cornplanter-1732401846)

From the British perspective, such a line — drawn along the Appalachians — was designed to forestall further western expansion and quell the extensive violence that accompanied colonial incursions into Native lands. The colonials had envisaged such lands as theirs for the taking, while the Native peoples dreamed of a “Heaven where there are no White People.”

Britain’s imperial dreams of permanently fending off the French and Spanish and keeping the colonials in check meant sending 7500 soldiers to the colonies and warships to patrol the coast. All the British revenue schemes were met with resistance, but none more so than the Stamp Act. The Act required the payment of a special tax on the English-made paper needed for any transaction involving paper — deeds, wills, newspapers — and thus at one stroke had a direct impact on all colonials, and especially struck a blow at the people who used the most paper: lawyers, printers, merchants.

In crafting their response to this newly intrusive imperial power, the colonials began the construction of a set of ideas that would shape the discourse over the ensuing decades.

Drawing from a diverse set of sources — 17th century opposition thought, their readings of the ancients, and their understanding of the British Constitution — they defended their rights. Accompanying such high-minded rhetoric, street fighting and effigy-burning took place, as did a call to boycott British goods.

The repeal of the Stamp Act, accompanied as it was by the Declaratory Act, and new duties on glass, lead, paper and tea, did little to quell the colonials’ resistance to imperial policy.

New boycotts of British goods drew more colonials into refusing to comply with British demands and — more importantly — to articulate to themselves and others why they were doing so. Hundreds of women and girls began to participate in public spinning bees while wearing homespun and drinking teas made with local herbs.

The arrival of troops and the occupation of Boston further inflamed the populace and drew more people into resistance to British policy. The escalation of conflict with England is traced throughout the episode, ending with the outbreak of war.

A “Cause of Mankind”

In “An Asylum for Mankind,” (May 1775-August 1776) the second episode covers the widening of the war, the beginning of the Continental Congress’s work as a content-wide civil government, and the selection of Washington as commander of the army.

While many were fired up with revolutionary fervor, some remained loyalists, and others sought initially to stay out of the conflict. The muddy, grubby business of war attracted few men willing to stay after their terms of enlistment were over, not least because their farms and shops required their labor.

Yet the course of the revolutionary movement began to shift with publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. It is often called the most important pamphlet in American history and still makes good reading today.

“The cause of America,” Paine asserted, “is the cause of all mankind.” In powerful language. Paine asks his readers to think again about ideas that they had imagined cannot be undone, particularly hereditary monarchy and the divine right of kings.

Paine in a sense popularizes Locke by leading his readers through a discussion of the purpose of government, and asks them whether what is now being wrought is good government. Such words fell on fertile ground because the colonials had also been reading scathing critiques of George III and imbibed ideas about good government.

Paine himself had arrived in the colonies — like so many others — with a deep resentment of the inequalities of English society. He drew together many threads of arguments made by others and helped to forge a language of republicanism.

Paine came to the colonies already steeped in a long tradition of British republican thought. Drawing on 17th century republican theorists, artisans, intellectuals and clergymen decried the growing wealth of the aristocracy and the loss of virtue in politics. In the colonies he found a people already primed to imbibe such thinking, as it seemed to explain their own observations of the monarchy and the aristocracy.

Indeed, Paine turned on its head the very idea of a republic. Until that point, colonials had seen the historical record on republics as proof that one could not survive. Paine, by contrast, presented a republic as an ideal form of government and America as the ideal site for such a government.

Trying Times

Thomas Paine, Spirit of the Revolution (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print)

“These are the Times that Try Men’s Souls” wrote Paine in The American Crisis, and the third episode (July 1776-January 1777) details the privations and depredations of 1776: vicious border wars, as Native peoples sought to defend their lands; other imperial powers — such as Spain and Russia — moving across North America; and tremendous losses to the British.

Forming a coordinated opposition to the British proved difficult, yet it was clear to Washington and to others that everyone was going to need to work together to wage war. While states jealously guarded their autonomy, as well as their own claims to western lands, only an allied group of colonies could persuade France to come to their assistance.

Paine’s words sustained soldiers after a series of bitter, bitter losses. “The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country;” wrote Paine, “but he that stands by it now, deserves the thanks of men and women.” “Tyranny, like Hell,” Paine once again rallied his readers, “is not easily conquered.”

The series reminds viewers that far from a foregone conclusion, the movement for independence was hard fought and that becoming a revolutionary meant risking uncertainty, poverty, and death.

The Declaration of Independence — in words that still stir today — laid out the vision of the revolutionaries and their grievances against the King. And we see in the document the ideas about good governance that had been emerging during the battles with British policy makers and the King.

In crafting these words, the revolutionaries were drawing not just on their experiences with the British, but on a long colonial history as an “asylum for mankind,” which had drawn people from all over the world. In the almost two centuries of colonial existence, people fleeing religious persecution, people desiring an escape from a failed estate or a failed marriage, or those desiring to improve their lot in life found their way to one of the colonies.

The colonies were peopled, as well, by those sent willingly and unwillingly to start over. In addition to slaves, there were indentured servants, apprentices, debtors, and many others who lived in various forms of unfreedom. For many of these people, the revolutionary era opened a world of possibilities.

Americans like to imagine that we are peopled solely by those who came willingly and those who were clever and adventurous. That is undoubtedly part of the story, but all kinds of people were compelled to come who might rather have stayed at home. The British had long sent “rogues and vagabonds” to the colonies and especially sought to rid themselves of those “such as who will not be reformed of their roguish kinde of Lyfe.”(1)

Drawn Game

In the fourth episode “To Conquer by a Drawn Game” (January 1777-February 1778), the dire straits of the American position are clear. They need the assistance of the French to defeat the British, yet the French are reluctant to enter the war without a strong chance of success on the part of the Americans.

The cause drew young men from all over the world, some seeking their fortunes and others fired by revolutionary fervor. Among the latter was the Marquis de Lafayette, who believed that the welfare of America “is intimately bound up with the happiness of humanity. She is going to become the …refuge of virtue, …and liberty.”(2)

The brutal war ground on; scenes of hand-to-hand combat, deaths by hacking, emaciated armies marching over the countryside, and the devastation wrought on the civilian populations tell a shattering tale. The scenes of war were fanned out throughout the colonies, and news often took days or weeks to reach either Washington or the political leadership.

The Continental Congress, driven from Philadelphia by the British, worked to construct a frame of government that would prove worthy enough for French support. News of the surrender of the British at Saratoga hastened their work and drew the French to the side of the Americans.

Episode Five, “The Soul of All America” (December 1777-1780), traces the many months before French assistance arrived, when the American Continental Army straggled into Valley Forge for the winter. The condition of the soldiers, unshod, barely clothed, starving, housed in canvas tents through a Pennsylvania winter, hardly bears reading: one wonders how they survived. Many did not, and many others simply walked away.

The presence of large numbers of women and children with the army presented Washington with a dilemma. Their presence made it difficult to move the army and created even more severe food shortages, yet in the absence of any kind of professional army infrastructure, it was these women who washed and sewed and nursed and cooked and kept the army alive.

The incredibly variegated population fighting for the Americans was abundantly clear at Valley Forge; the soldiery was composed of colonials, new immigrants, people of color and some Native Americans, bound together by an ideal.

The lack of an infrastructure for the army, the collapse of the currency, and the misery of the conditions meant that these were not men who were there for personal gain in a monetary sense. Indeed, they exhibited great sacrifice while many others were gaining great wealth from war profiteering.

The colonial suspicion of standing armies had deep roots and played a central role in revolutionary ideology. Indeed, the behavior of British troops forcibly quartered in the homes of Americans seemed to confirm their worst fears about the dangers of standing armies to liberty.

Yet as the war ground on, it was abundantly clear that a more disciplined, martial corps was necessary for victory. By March of 1778, Washington had managed to appeal to state governments for food and uniforms. Weapons newly purchased from France began to arrive, and Washington could turn his attention to more standardized training.

Another newcomer to America — Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a sympathetic Prussian military officer — instituted standardized training. He noted the character of Americans; in a letter to a friend, he remarked that while soldiers elsewhere did as ordered, here “I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that’.”

Sacred Paradox

Moran, Percy, Artist. Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga / Percy Moran. Photograph. (Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/94504652/)

The final episode “The Most Sacred Thing” (May 1780- Onward) follows the fortunes of the Americans from the victory at Yorktown, the wary years waiting for peace, and the end of the war in 1783 with the Peace of Paris.

At the end of the many years of fighting and brutality, Americans sought to make sense of what they had accomplished and all that they had endured.

The difficulty of assessing these years remains. One may outline the events of the revolution — Lexington and Concord, Saratoga, Yorktown — without in any sense capturing the enormity of the global conflagration of which it was a part.

It drew people from all over the world, and ended in a great scattering of people back out into the world — Loyalists, those who had fought for and with the British, and those who had come temporarily to aid the American cause.

America rests on a paradox: a republic grounded in the most soaring radical ideals, and a republic founded on slavery and empire. “But if America is rooted in conquest and bondage,” notes Susan Neiman, “it’s also rooted in resistance to conquest and bondage.”(3)

What is also abundantly clear is that any project desiring the United States to be a “white man’s country,” and to assert that the Revolution was not about fighting for ideals, is both doomed to failure and not reflective of our complicated past.

In almost every battle, the forces fighting for freedom were reflective of the population in all its complexity. Young and old, men and women, boys and girls, escaped slaves and free Blacks, Indigenous peoples, and immigrants of all kinds fought alongside each other.

This is not to suggest that a society that exhibited any kind of true equality existed, but it does suggest that the forces that drew people to battle affected broad swathes of the population. And each took in ideas in the air and imbued their actions with a sense of purpose.

Revolutionary movements require both material and ideological underpinnings. Few people will willingly go to war, risk their lives and their livelihoods and the security of their families, for an idea alone. The ideas motivating the movement must reflect and echo their own material circumstances.

Likewise, few people will willingly risk their lives for a war that doesn’t seem to impinge a great deal on their own material circumstances. A three-penny increase in the tax on sugar does not by itself explain what happened.

The outcome of the war only makes sense if at any given time and at any given place, enough of the population was politicized to participate. How else to explain the victory of a small group of colonies against what was at the time the greatest military power on the globe?

Yes, certainly the assistance of France and Spain was central to the victory of the Americans. So, too, was the brutality and the ineptitude of British colonial policy.

The British army — the world’s most powerful military force in the world at the time — achieved many victories and was good at seizing urban areas, yet failed to hold the countryside. The presence of British troops often had the effect of politicizing a population that had sought to remain neutral. The reliance on Loyalists within the population often had the effect of turning those men and women against the British cause, particularly given the troops’ brutality and desire to avenge military losses.

J.D. Vance vs. Burns

In recent weeks, J. D. Vance has taken again to asserting that the Revolution was not about ideas, but about a home-grown “blood and soil.” America, Vance asserts, is “about a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”

He roots this “particular way of life” in a Kentucky graveyard (though he was born in Ohio) and “in a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” It’s a strange kind of insistence on the idea that people will only fight for their “homeland” rather than “some abstract idea.”

Vance is also participating in Hillsdale College’s joint project with the White House to present a counter to Burns’ program. Introduced by Trump, it links the defeat of the British to the “taming of the west” and to putting a man on the moon, with swelling music and images of all white soldiers. And, of course, keeps the focus squarely on the United States.

One might wonder at this insistence, against even a cursory set of questions. As Burns makes abundantly clear throughout the six episodes, all kinds of ragtag people from all over the globe assisted the American cause.

Yes, the wealthy of the colonies invested in all kinds of land schemes and crafted an argument for freedom from constraints with some of their own interests in mind, but the powerful language that they used to do so escaped its bounds and drew in people from all walks of life who made it their own.

The soaring ideals of the Revolution and its promise that all those who shared the ideals could be part of a global, radical movement, is frightening to those who would like to be able to decide to whom sovereignty belongs.

The idea of popular sovereignty — that the power of the ruler comes from the consent of the governed — was a radical idea in the 18th century, and one that has inspired revolutionary movements around the globe in the centuries since.

Both the French and the Haitian Revolutions were part of a movement of revolutionary ideas spreading around the Atlantic world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In two centuries since, revolutions as diverse as those in the fights for independence in post-WWII African nations, Vietnam and elsewhere have turned again and again to the soaring rhetoric of our founding documents.

Cross Currents

On another side of the political spectrum are those who see the Revolution as a shell game, designed to wrest the colonies away from British control and put power in the hands of an elite determined to seize lands in the west and maintain slavery. One of the reasons for declaring independence, assert the authors of the 1619 Project:

Darton, William, and William Guthrie. A map of the United States of America agreeable to the peace of. [London, 1783] Map. (Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/74696218/)

“was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. …In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.”(4)

Yet here too the experiences of the many people drawn to support the cause of freedom, and the process of politicization that took place during the war, meant that many, many people endured unimaginable hardships for the freedoms of others.

And throughout the Northern colonies and later states, slavery was abolished, as the contradictions of fighting against the “chains of slavery” of the British while allowing chattel slavery in your midst became too apparent.

There are number of cross currents in the debates about the revolutionary generation and the founding era. The fabulous success of “Hamilton” has produced its own kind of misunderstanding of our past.

With its cast of actors of color, Hamilton reminded audi­ences of the complicated backgrounds of the revolutionary generation, especially of figures like Alexander Hamilton. Yet it did little to add to the understanding of the scale of the participation of men and women of color in the revolution itself.

Indeed, historian Peter Linebaugh has noted how working class people from all over the world contributed, wittingly and unwittingly, to the victory of the Americans. He asserts that “Washington owed his victory to the apron strings of working-class women in England” who pilfered wood from naval store yards and thereby weakened British ships.5

Revolutions are, of course, fluid and fluctuating affairs. Historians often estimate that at any given time about a third of the population supported the revolution, a third opposed it, and a third hoped to keep their heads down and see what happened.

The revolution, as it dragged on, of necessity drew in people from all walks of life. Revolutions are also about creating a “new man” and a “new woman” for the newly formed society, and in this the United States was no different.

Although we rarely like to see ourselves in such a comparative framework, successful revolutions require new dress, new habits, new ways of speaking, new ways of comporting with one another, and a new material culture.

For many people, above all the young (and the age structure of the population in the 18th century was such that a high percentage of the population was composed of the young), the profound transformations sweeping the society opened a world of possibility.

Of course, one of the issues is that ideas are accessible to all; anyone — from anywhere in the world — might come to the United States, absorb its ideals, and become an American. Such an idea is anathema to the right and to ideologues like Vance.

As Burns makes abundantly clear, among the aspects of British policy that enraged the Americans was the Proclamation Line of 1763. This policy, designed to “protect” the Indigenous peoples from violent incursions by colonials, effectively cut the people of the colonies off from the lands in the west.

As the war dragged on, freedom for many came to mean the freedom to own land and that land was in the west. It is telling, of course, that many Native peoples sided with the British in a forlorn hope that their lands might be protected.

For Native Americans, the Revolution was an existentially destructive force, and the victory of the Americans meant loss of lands and livelihoods and the forcible relocation farther west.

People of African descent — both free and enslaved — also had to make calculated decisions about the best chance for liberty and it is telling that so many sided with the British. Yet many fought alongside the Americans and realized a heady sense of possibility.

Much of what we today pride ourselves on about our country was forged in the battle with Britain. The insistence that government draws its power from the consent of the governed, that the people must be represented by leaders accessible to them, and that the people have a right to assess their leaders and find them wanting, all stem from the long years of war. Most significantly, the emergence from subjectship to citizenship grew out of years of articulating their purpose.

American revolutionary ideology was crafted of classical texts, 17th century English political tracts, religious writings like sermons, and newly produced works like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. The 18th century arrival of larger numbers of English periodicals of all kinds, as well printing presses, meant an explosion of printed material in the colonies.

In many of the colonies, particularly in the North, the literacy rate was high. As the population became politicized, the people were immersed in a war of words and pamphlets were also read aloud at taverns and in workshops.

Who Belongs Here?

In a recent speech to the Munich Security Conference, Marco Rubio — echoing others on the right — insisted that mass migration threatens the “cohesion of our society, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.”

It’s a strange remark from someone whose own family emigrated from elsewhere, but stranger still when one considers that that future was, in fact, built on the millions who have come to the United States from all over the globe.

In the same speech, Rubio asserted that Europeans and Americans were bound together by a connection “forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, and the sacrifices our forefathers made.” As Burns makes abundantly clear, much of that sacrifice was borne by the very people who, Rubio would insist, do not belong.

Far from not being Americans, it is Black Americans both enslaved and free, and women and Indigenous people and immigrants, who takes in the lessons of our heady sense of freedom and possibility. In defending it for themselves, they have defended it for all of us.

We are a better nation for the long train of activists who have sought to put the ideals of the founding generation into practice. Far from not being Americans, it is in fact the poor and working people from all over the world who sacrificed in the name of building a new society.

“By energizing and leading the movement from below, …[sailors and seamen] … shaped the social, organizational, and intellectual histories of the era and demonstrated that the American Revolution was neither an elite nor a national event, since its genesis, process, outcome, and influence all depended on the circulation of proletarian experience around the Atlantic.”(6)

At first glance this production might indeed seem like “one battle after another,” and the many, many maps with arrows indicating troop movements and the images of soldiers and officers might lead one to see this rendition of the revolution to follow the traditional story arc.

Indeed, a friend of mine and fellow historian found herself exasperated with this documentary, one that seemed to her like every other one that Burns has made; she noted that his approach was innovative at one point but has now shaped documentary filmmaking to the point that they all seem similar.

I take her point: there are the familiar historians, the sweeping musical score, and the letters home to soldiers’ wives. Yet it is offering viewers a radical interpretation of the revolutionary era, and one much at odds with the version of our history that Vance, Rubio, and others are currently peddling.

Burns’ approach — including episodes filled with maps and battle formations and all kinds of information about numbers of soldiers and numbers of arms — is perhaps a necessary corrective to the view that the Revolution was about elite, well-dressed men penning some pamphlets for a foreordained outcome. The privations of those who fought, battling not just the enemy but cold, hunger, and lice remind us that such revolutionary movements are hard-won affairs.

It was a radical idea that the people would be citizens, not merely subjects. New ideas about personhood, education, and crime and punishment took hold and further transformed society. People struggled — not just in street battles but in militias, in town meetings, and on juries — to assert their rights to participation in the affairs of their society.

One lasting impact of the side-by-side nature of the struggle — as von Steuben’s comment makes clear — was the erosion of social deference that had previously been accorded the well-to-do. It was a radical idea then that power to govern should come from the people; it is a radical idea now and today, when that idea is contested at the highest levels of government. It is vital that we conquer by a drawn game and hang onto our revolutionary heritage.

Notes

1. Marilyn C. Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”: America 1607-1800, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 35.
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2. Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, The American Revolution: An Intimate History, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025), p. 302.
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3. Susan Neiman, Left ≠ Woke, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024), 135.
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4. The New York Times, August 18, 2019, The 1619 Project, 18.
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5. Peter Linebaugh, Interview on “The Dig” on February 9.
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6. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 212.
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May-June 2026, ATC 242