What’s Wrong with The American Revolution by Ken Burns
The six-episode, 12-hour extravaganza, The American Revolution: A Film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein & David Schmidt, closes with a famous passage written by the esteemed Philadelphia physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush, in 1787: “The American war is over: but this is far from being the case with the American revolution.” Rush observed:
On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government; and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens, for these forms of government, after they are established and brought to perfection.
Historians often quote this passage because its appeal is so obvious. I did so myself in my first book, The Beginnings of National Politics, published nearly a half-century ago.
But Burns and company revealingly omit the opening sentence of Rush’s passage, and that omission illustrates the essential disturbing flaw in their saga, which is appearing on PBS stations this autumn and winter. “There is nothing more common than to confound the terms of the American revolution with those of the late American war,” Rush wrote. The revolution itself had to be distinguished, Rush implied, from the war which brought its success. But its meaning and significance cannot be explained or subsumed by the one-battle-after-another motif, which gives the much-discussed saga its narrative force but also its tedium.
Watching The American Revolution reminded me of Burns’ similarly epochal treatment, The Civil War, which aired 35 years ago. Its greatest shortcoming became evident in its final episode, which begins with Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, then surveys the postwar period. This concluding episode relegates the history of Reconstruction to a virtual back story, worth noting but not explaining, when, in fact, its failure marked the greatest tragedy in American constitutional history. It consigned the nation to decades of Jim Crow segregation, the need for a Second Reconstruction of the South in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, and the enactment of crucial civil rights statutes—including the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 that our current Supreme Court, in its jurisprudential wisdom, seems so intent on cancelling.
The breakout star of The Civil War series, also on PBS, was Shelby Foote, the Mississippi novelist and lay historian whose mellifluous old-fashioned southern charm appealed to many viewers. But Foote—descended from prominent Mississippi slaveowners on his father’s side and Viennese Jews on his mother’s—was also a Lost Cause spokesman who said he would have happily fought for the Confederacy, as his ancestors had. Making him the leading narrative voice suggests the problem Burns wrestled with. The military history of the Civil War that Foote sketched so well can almost tell itself; its political origins and consequences, and thus its deeper significance, demanded and deserved more analysis.
The dominant figure in The American Revolution is Rick Atkinson, a distinguished former Washington Post journalist and military historian who has already published one trilogy on the liberation of Europe in World War II and published two volumes of another trilogy on the Revolutionary War. Thankfully, Atkinson carries none of Foote’s ideological baggage. He is not here to carry the flag of the Loyalists, a subject that one of his colleagues on the program, Maya Jasanoff of Harvard, has covered quite well in her scholarship. Atkinson’s approach is purely military, and it is well complemented by the English historian, Stephen Conway. It is crucial to recall that the strategic initiative in the war always resided with the British. As heroic as the American fight proved, as many difficulties as it had to overcome, one can only understand the war by giving the British side an equal part in the story.
Much of this military history, though, is still old news for historians and even general viewers. Where the series breaks ground is in its descriptions of the war’s impact on different groups of Americans or, more neutrally, on different inhabitants of British North America. Scholarly work on the American Revolution over the last quarter century has had two main themes. One involves the war’s effect on the general population, or what we call the social history of the Revolution. It is not simply a question of who took which side, but rather a matter of how individuals, families, and communities, or ethnic and racial groups, coped with the opportunities the Revolution created and the costs its duration imposed.
The second main theme concerns the geographical diversity of North America, what scholars now call “Vast Early America.” Histories of the Revolution long emphasized the role of the major port towns, from Boston to Charles Town (soon to become Charleston). Much of the American countryside mattered only when the armies straggled over their terrain. In fact, the Revolution had profound impacts across the Appalachians and from the Great Plains to the Gulf of Mexico.
But the political history of the Revolution—its origins, innovations, consequences—remains the strangely understated part of the story. In the final episode, just before we hear Dr. Rush’s concluding remarks, we listen to a few platitudinous sentences on the Constitutional Convention that would barely pass muster in a junior high school textbook. The two premier analysts of the Revolution’s political origins and its constitutional consequences—my late mentor, Bernard Bailyn, and his most distinguished student, Gordon S. Wood—do make a few brief appearances here and there. But their remarkable effort to describe the transformative impact of the Revolution on American governance, politics, and culture never seeps through.
And without examining that impact, no viewer of this series would ever understand what made the Revolution revolutionary. Nor would anyone be able to explain why, at this moment of all moments in our history, with the Constitution teetering on implosion, the best way to think about the legacy of the Revolution involves retracing the course of the war from one campaign to another. That judgment seems all the more compelling because the techniques that Burns deployed so well in his other great productions are sorely missed here. There are no photographs to search minutely, no films to replay. Instead, we get modern painted renderings of events, historical re-enactors firing muskets, and dreamy videos of American landscapes, like the fog-swept mountains of the Carolinas.
Burns and his colleagues cannot be oblivious to the choices they made. Back in 2016, he gave a wonderful commencement address at Stanford University, where I began teaching Revolutionary history in 1980. Burns vigorously denounced the striking ignorance and abuse of American history that Donald Trump displayed during his first presidential campaign. A few scattered boos were heard around the football stadium, but it was a bold performance that foresaw the unique dangers a Trump presidency would pose.
Nine years and one foiled presidential coup later, the politically concerned viewer might ask: How should we think about the Republic’s revolutionary origins as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of its independence? Challenges to our constitutional practices and the norms of governance arise daily, affecting all our major institutions of governance: the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. Would it not be timely to explain how the governance in revolutionary America became the birth moment for the invention of the American constitutional tradition?
What, then, did make the Revolution truly revolutionary? Consider this question, as historians do, from the vantage point of the participants.
When the First Continental Congress met at Philadelphia in early September 1774, its basic purpose was to persuade Britain to repeal the Coercive Acts that Parliament had adopted to punish the town of Boston and the province of Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party. In effect, Congress and its constituents wanted a return to the status quo ante of 1763. That would be an act of restoration, not revolution. When it adjourned in late October, many of its members hoped that the British government would realize how badly it had erred and find a way to accommodate the Americans. John Adams left Philadelphia thinking he would not need to attend a second Congress that would not be held.
Eighteen months later, in May 1776, the Second Continental Congress resolved that the colonies should begin drafting new constitutions of government, and Adams exulted at being “sent into life, at a time when the greatest law-givers of antiquity would have wished to have lived.” His new friend Thomas Jefferson, soon to begin drafting the Declaration of Independence that brought him eternal fame, wrote that the framing of these constitutions had become “the whole object of the present controversy.” That was a truly revolutionary idea, but one whose significance Burns ignores.
Rush, the revolutionary physician, had a much better diagnosis of the problem in 1787, when he drafted the Address to the People of the United States that Burns invokes at the close of the final episode. Burns draws upon the first and last paragraphs of this address but neglects everything that comes in between. And what were Rush’s real concerns? The agenda of the Constitutional Convention, set to gather in Philadelphia three and a half months later.
Consider just one of the issues Rush discussed that remains relevant today. Any modern analyst of Congress assumes that the desire of incumbents to be reelected is the best explanation of their behavior. In fact, that became important only in the 20th century. The vast majority of members of the House of Representatives before 1900 served only one or two terms. Few senators served more than one term.
Back in 1787, though, Rush had a different view of political ambition. He wanted to challenge the conventional view of the men who wrote the first state constitutions, who valued rotation in office and the practice of annual elections. “Where annual elections end,” the maxim went, “slavery begins.” Under the Articles of Confederation, a delegate to Congress could serve only three years out of six. The first member to be term-limited out of Congress was—of all people—James Madison.
Rush, by contrast, believed that “Government is a science” and that public service could become a “profession.” Madison agreed. He thought members of the lower houses of the state legislatures should serve three-year terms, and if they were reelected, that would be beneficial to the public good. More important, what brought them to these conclusions was not some abstract musing about the best form of republicanism but the actual experience of wartime governance. There were, of course, multiple issues at play in shaping the agenda of the Federal Convention of 1787, but lessons learned from the war ranked high among them.
Given the profound contempt that we now rightly direct against Congress, this is a fine moment to learn more about how the intertwining of wartime experience and political reflection gave Americans the Constitution they still inhabit. Perhaps we would do better with a term-limited Congress. It is clearly unconstitutional now, but it could prove a more popular amendment than we might fancy. The point is, the superficial treatment of the political dimensions and dynamics of the Revolution deprives the whole series of its educational value.
Of course, Burns admittedly had good reasons to make the choices he did. But one cannot understand the Revolution unless one wrestles with its political ideas as well as the egalitarian ideals we ascribe to the Declaration. Describing those ideas is no easy task. Documentary makers always have educational aims, but they are entertainers, too, and Burns surely knew that the Civil War is more engaging than the Revolution. Focusing on the war for independence—its campaigns and battles, its examples of bravery and treachery, its impact on ordinary Americans, whether free, enslaved, or indigenous—thus makes narrative sense.
But we, the people, have a right to be disappointed. Many viewers could have learned much more about what made the Revolution genuinely revolutionary, especially as our beleaguered constitutional Republic is lurching from one crisis to another under the reign of a king far madder than George III was in 1776. This is not quite the best way to commemorate the bold visions that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson shared, down to their providential deaths on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration.
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