Ken Burns on the American Revolution, Independence, and How to Tell History

Ken Burns

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Ken Burns

Surely it's not irritating. I got a really great friendship with Steve Jobs out of it. I've been trying, since the earliest days — even back at university in the early '70s — to figure out how to wake up an old photograph, to treat it the way a feature filmmaker would: a master shot, a long shot, a medium, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, zooming out, inserts of details, and complex sound effects. This developed over years and years. In 2002, Steve Jobs called me up and invited me in. He had this very simple manoeuvre on a computer — I'm still pretty much of a Luddite — and he just said, "Next month, January of 2003, all Mac computers will have this." I said, "Cool." He said, "We want to use the working title." I said, "What's that?" He said, "The Ken Burns effect." I said, "I don't do commercial endorsements." He went, "What?" And so we ended up having this long, hour-long private conversation, after the attendant engineers were sufficiently freaked out that this might provoke his legendary temper — something I never saw. He ended up giving me a lot of hardware and software, which I donated to schools and nonprofits around my area, and it stuck. So what is a very simple pan, zoom and dissolve in the iPhone and the iMac is representative of this complex desire to figure out how you will the documents of the past to come alive, and make that moment something more than an arm's-length relationship. How do you get inside a photograph of soldiers in the Civil War? How do you understand a jazz thing, or something from World War Two or Vietnam?

Ken Burns

Land. The American Revolution can be seen, if you want to turn it around and take it from a purely European or British context, as a global war — the fifth global war over the prize of North America. And when you say prize, you mean the land. And when you mean land, you mean Native American land. After what we call the French and Indian War, and you call the Seven Years' War, Britain — be careful what you wish for — ends up with the most far-flung empire on earth, including most of the North American territories, which were contested with the French and their native allies. Unable to guard all of that property, and faced with the desire of the colonists and recent immigrants from Ireland, England, Wales, Scotland and Germany to pour over the Appalachians, the British in 1763 drew a line of demarcation saying don't go over it. That enraged the colonists. So while the grade-school student certainly gets a high mark for saying "taxes and representation" — which was the next step, a depleted treasury looking to tax people; the average colonist paid their local colony a shilling a year in taxes compared to an average person in England, who paid twenty-six shillings, so it seemed only reasonable to pay for your stuff — all of these things cascade in the years from the beginning of the Seven Years' War to the beginning of the revolution in 1775. Interestingly, these sort of petty arguments between Englishmen — because it is the Enlightenment — get broken out into these natural rights. So you end up with an unintended consequence: not just democracy — it wasn't the intention of the separatists, who were thinking more of a republic in the old classical sense, an elite and aristocracy of not just white men but white men of property and some note — it becomes a kind of democratic revolution, but more importantly it articulates human rights that make it the most consequential revolution in the history of the world.

Ken Burns

It's hard to say. In an argument, in a divorce, in the things that lead up to a war, you go back and try to figure out the cause. It's definitely about land. Let me give you another argument: when the colonists finally decide to get together and work in concert against this common problem — which is not just the limitation of land but these new taxes — they meet in Philadelphia, and they don't call themselves the Eastern Seaboard Congress, nor a couple of years later do they put George Washington in charge of the Eastern Seaboard Army. It's the Continental Congress and the Continental Army. They know what they want, they know where they're going. So we have to understand this in the context of land — they wish to separate also from the entanglements of the old world and its history, to begin again. That's what Thomas Paine, an Englishman, says in Common Sense — not since the time of Noah do we have, in essence, a chance to reset, to start again. And so there is this broad sense that as these seemingly material and earthbound things about land and taxes and representation consume the arguments, they undergird these highfalutin ideas: all men are created equal, life, liberty, and — not John Locke's "property" — the "pursuit of happiness," which to the founders was not material things in a marketplace of advancement, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas, to earn the right of this new thing, citizenship, because everybody had heretofore been a subject. It's a very complex dynamic between ideals and the realities on the ground. But nonetheless, at core it's land, and then, of course — Burke is pretty good on this — we don't know how to retreat, and they don't know how to retreat. At some point you begin to see escalating rhetoric causing the thing: the more the Crown says you're acting like radicals, the more radical the colonists act; the more tyrannical they're accused of being by the colonists, the more tyrannical they act. They're self-fulfilling prophecies that just go out of control. And then, of course, you have signal events like the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. It's very interesting that in the Tea Party — as every American schoolchild knows, and I'm sure no English schoolchild does — the colonists, both rich and poor, about fifty or sixty men, white men, dressed as Native Americans. If you ask anybody in the United States why, they'd say, "Oh, to put the blame on them." No — it was to claim a kind of aboriginal status. It was one of the first significant symbolic cultural breaks: we're not of you any more. We've been here for a hundred and fifty years; for a hundred and fifty years you've left us alone, and we are identifying with something native. It's incredibly ironic, because the last hundred and fifty years has been the dispossession of the lands where those thirteen colonies are, and the next hundred and fifty years will be the dispossession of the rest of the continent from its original inhabitants. So this is not without hypocrisy, as you suggested with your reference to Mr Jefferson. And then, of course, the Boston Massacre had happened a few years before, and then Lexington and Concord, and it's out of control. I'd like to zoom ahead for one moment, to when John Adams, the first ambassador to the Court of St James, meets George III — who in our country is always a mad buffoon, and who is not; he's a really interesting and formidable person. The first thing he says to Adams is, "I was the last" — meaning he was the one who saw this as a kind of domino theory: if we lost the North American colonies, Ireland could be next, Gibraltar, the holdings in the subcontinent, what is now the Philippines — all part of the far-flung British Isles. He's the one least willing to give it up. There's a huge sentiment throughout the revolution in Britain — the mayor of London and the council, the top naval commander, one of the most important army commanders are opposed to doing anything military against the colonies. Let them go. I'm living in a town called Walpole, named after a Whig who supported North American aspirations for freedom, or some form of autonomy. It's an incredibly complex dynamic that we Americans reduce, to help support what we think is the centrality of it, and, as you suggested, in your introduction it was just a tax rebellion.

Ken Burns

Right — exactly. Absurd to you, maybe, but anyway. They're very aware of it. And the thing that is most important, as I suggested, is that whatever taxes they were paying were being levied by colonial legislatures, and that seemed appropriate. So the most egregious aspect is not that there should be a tax — and we can discuss each one, because some of it is less about the tax itself than about the fact that my smuggling business, John Hancock might say, is not going to be going so well if the British government props up the East India sugar trade so you can have cheaper sugar, and there are people whose interest it is to keep the price a little higher and depend on the smuggling out of the Caribbean. The biggest thing Americans never get — and even given that the relationship for a hundred and fifty years was "salutary neglect," we forget there are thirteen other colonies in the Caribbean that are the profit centres of the British Empire. Only Virginia and South Carolina are profitable on the mainland, and that's because they have large numbers of slaves — but it doesn't compare, percentage-wise, to ninety per cent in Jamaica or Barbados, which are the real profit centre. But we're the most populous, and we make things — we're a trading partner, and one of the growing parts, in the 1760s but particularly the early 1770s, is the growing trade with what will become the United States. So these taxes are not only "hey, that's not fair, I'm not electing anybody who's going to represent me in these decisions" — they're disrupting these economies. It's incredibly destabilising on both sides. And the rhetoric only increases it — for a while, even after Lexington and Concord in April of '75, nobody's talking about, as they called it, "independency"; they want to get back to the way things were. It's Paine who comes in, in January of '76, with Common Sense, and says: it's not Parliament that's the evil, it's the whole idea of hereditary succession — it doesn't make natural sense. And this begins to intermix with the Enlightenment arguments the founders are mustering for these essentially local financial grievances.

Ken Burns

Indeed. And he's a dedicated constitutional monarch — he understands checks and balances. He's really an impressive human being; he's just wrong. He holds on to the idea for way too long. Even after Yorktown, the last British troop doesn't leave New York City for two years and a month, in large measure because of this inability to think that they could possibly lose these North American territories.

Ken Burns

I think we have a phrase — Monday-morning quarterbacking, from our football, where the next day it's very easy to describe. No, I don't think so. I think a lot of those charges are exaggerated and dramatic — remember, this is an internal document, the argument for why we should separate. I've read the Declaration to my kids every Fourth of July for the last thirty-five years, and now my grandkids too, and I make them listen — though I don't always go through all eighteen "injuries and usurpations," depending on the age of the audience. But it is true that the governor of Canada had been initiating relationships with Native American tribes along the St Lawrence. It is true that Dunmore's Proclamation seems incredibly hypocritical — Dunmore owns dozens of human beings, and he's not freeing them, but he's offering to free the enslaved people of rebels — not of loyalists; if you're the enslaved person of a loyalist, you have no chance. It's a disastrous thing, and it enrages people. Some scholars want to argue that this — Britain offering an uneven understanding of slavery — is the whole reason for the revolution, but nothing is going to change Britain's hold on the Caribbean and its interest in that for many decades to come. It's a much more complex thing than that. Yes, they're quartering troops in Boston, the soldiers are doing things an occupying army does — stealing, burning pews from churches, assaulting and marrying women. We have the Boston Massacre, where we still don't really understand who yelled "fire" and how it happened, but it leaves five Americans dead. Paul Revere's engraving, "The Bloody Massacre," is hugely important. So the Declaration is there to list all these bad things, however exaggerated any one of them might be — there's a kernel of truth in each. It's also a foreign-policy document, because they know they can't do this without help, and the only people likely to help are those also licking their wounds from the Seven Years' War — the French. So declaring themselves a separate country, and then searching for the victory that will convince the French to come in — which happens in the autumn of '77, with Burgoyne's disastrous campaign ending in the surrender of an entire British army at Saratoga. That's not the small victory the French were looking for, but a major one, which permits them to come in. So all of these things, and the Declaration itself, are at the heart of our identity — and most people don't even know about the eighteen injuries and usurpations. What they know is the second sentence, which — I like to say, after "I love you" — is the most important sentence in the English language.

Ken Burns

It would depend where you were — there wouldn't be a uniform decision. If you were anywhere near Dunmore, you'd go, "I'm going to the British" — because you have a chance to be free. Even if you were the enslaved person of a loyalist, you might say, "My master isn't in fact loyal." You do anything to get free, for your children and your children's children. Statistically, we think around twenty thousand African-Americans fought in the American Revolution — fifteen thousand for the British, five thousand for the Americans. These are local decisions people are making. As the late historian David McCullough says, there's no foreseeable future in the past — nobody knows Britain is going to outlaw slavery well before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, issued in 1862. But it's really important to go back to that second sentence of the Declaration. While everyone knew, in one sense, that "all men are created equal" meant all white men of property, the cat was out of the bag. Once you use these natural-rights arguments, and not just political and economic ones, the Declaration — as the Yale legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk said to us in our film — becomes deeply significant to people at the margins. African-Americans immediately begin to write even more vociferously. Slavery wasn't a big issue before — people acknowledged its evils, as the late historian Bernard Bailyn says in our film, but it wasn't a big deal. The second the revolution started, and the second the Declaration was issued, it was a big deal, from then on until the Emancipation Proclamation — or arguably to this moment, because we still don't judge people by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin, in this country or any country. It was the central issue. For women, the poor, native people and Africans, the Declaration is hugely significant. There's a free man of colour at Fort Ticonderoga, where the Declaration was read a few days after it was issued — they were licking their wounds from smallpox and the defeat in the failed invasion of Canada — and Lemuel Haynes writes a piece called "Liberty Further Extended." Instantly the cat is out of the bag. And while it takes an impossible fourscore-and-nine years until the Thirteenth Amendment outlaws slavery in the United States in 1865, and an unforgivable hundred and forty-four years before women get the vote, it's going to happen. There's a sense of inevitability, because you've migrated these basic political and economic arguments into the sphere of natural rights.

Ken Burns

It's even earlier than that. He arrives in Cambridge in the early summer of '75 and says, "What, you've got black troops? No more enlisting." He brings, as the historian Jane Kamensky says in our film, the hard "no" of a Virginia planter. But he sees how they fight, how the other commanders — local militia commanders — want these black troops, and Native American troops, whom he's more willing to arm. And armed Native Americans — you could ask the same question: would you rather fight with the British? Many tribes, particularly on the western borders, think that at least the British were opposed to the movement to take their land. That's not true — if Britain had won the American Revolution and kept the colonies, they would still be talking about the inevitable, manifest-destiny push to spread across the entire continent. So Native Americans are screwed whatever happens. It's so ironic — we discovered a document listing a Mohegan woman from north-central Connecticut who lost five sons fighting for the patriot cause. In the United States, in the Second World War, we celebrate Mrs Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, who lost four sons when their ship was sunk off Guadalcanal in '42 — and we made a rule separating all family members so they'd never be in the same place, which gave some mothers a measure of security that Mrs Sullivan didn't have, and also gives us Saving Private Ryan, one of Spielberg's better war films. But it does nothing for the sacrifice of Rebecca Tanner, who lost five sons. There's a really complex dynamic about freedom and participation. George Washington, almost immediately, by the end of '75, is willing to change, and he moves. Everybody knows, by the way, Dominic, that slavery is wrong — they're anti-slavery, Jefferson's anti-slavery, Washington's anti-slavery. Washington will free his slaves; Jefferson will not. We like to get the "gotcha" — aha, here's the monumental hypocrisy — but Washington distils a century of Enlightenment thinking; his sentence is a foot in the door, and the door is never going to be closed again.

Ken Burns

I don't think so — I think it's central. Americans, as you suggest, don't like that; just as you don't spend much time teaching your children about this revolution, we don't spend much time talking directly about it either. We talk about the French coming in, we romanticise the relationship with Lafayette — he's an impressive teenager when he comes over, Washington loves him, brings him into his family, into his inner circle. As the historian Joseph Ellis says in our film, nobody gets into Washington's inner orbit except his wife Martha, and maybe Hamilton, and maybe Lafayette, and woe to anybody who presumes to be in there. That Lafayette could get into Washington's orbit is pretty impressive — and he's a great, interesting soldier and human being, and fabulously wealthy, and the Americans take advantage of it. No, I don't see how this happens without France. Even after they come in, the first couple of naval and military actions are blunders, in Rhode Island. The British begin to put their southern strategy into effect — they can't win in New England, they've lost the ability to cut New England off after the disastrous Burgoyne campaign, they're not doing well in the Mid-Atlantic; New Jersey was pacified and then wasn't, it's guerrilla warfare, and in one season more British and Hessian troops were killed foraging than fell in any battle — that's stunning. It'll be worse in South Carolina, but they don't know that yet. They take Georgia, rip a star from the flag, report to Clinton and Germain back in London, successfully take Charleston, and at that point, in May of '80, Washington thinks it's all over — he doesn't know how it's going to be won even with French support. Then fortuitous things happen. He wants the French to come and lay siege to New York, which would have been disastrous — Clinton was well dug in. Instead Rochambeau, and particularly the second French admiral, comes in, goes to the mouth of the Chesapeake and blocks it. The British send their navy, they fight to a draw, but the British have to withdraw to repair, which lets the French take the fight outside the mouth of the Chesapeake, allowing the big guns to come up the James River and lay siege to Yorktown — it is the end of any possibility for the British. There's a wonderful quote from an Irish soldier who says America on the map looks no bigger than Yorkshire — and there's weather, distance, in the age of sail two thousand miles between the home office and the front, so information transfer is desperately slow, while the Americans have the ability to resupply. It's nearly impossible — when Cornwallis decides to disobey Clinton and Germain's orders and move, because South Carolina, once pacified, turns into a mess, and moves into North Carolina and then Virginia, thinking if he gets Virginia — it seals his fate, choosing, as his engineers did, the deep-water port of Yorktown, which was completely indefensible. Washington knew it, and had warned his own commanders years before: don't try to hold Yorktown, nobody can do it — it's a trap. It's interesting, and gives Americans who pay attention to it some satisfaction, that when Cornwallis agrees to surrender and then doesn't show up — sends his second-in-command, Charles O'Hara, too humiliated, claiming he's sick — O'Hara insists his soldiers, German as well as English, not look at the Americans, only acknowledge the French, because they alone are worthy given the pain of this loss. Then O'Hara tries to surrender to Rochambeau, and Rochambeau says, "I am subordinate to the Americans — General Washington will give you his orders." Washington was so furious that his own second-in-command, Benjamin Lincoln, when he surrendered Charleston, had been treated not with the privileges of war but as a rebel, that — as the historian Stephen Conway says in our film — it becomes the ultimate humiliation, surrendering to the second-in-command. But this is October the seventeenth, 1781, and the last British soldier doesn't leave New York until November the twenty-fifth, 1783. There's a huge period in which it could have gone anywhere — and then, of course, we haven't even discussed the War of 1812.

Ken Burns

Of course it is, of course it is. I think these parlour games, the counterfactual stuff, are just that — culs-de-sac, to borrow a French term, wonderful to play. We play the game in the United States: if the Confederacy had won, they wouldn't really have "won" — it would have been so painful that the North would have said, "Erring sisters, go," and the South would have become a third-world country, degraded by the perpetual institution of slavery, and I imagine by the First World War it would have been desperate to rejoin the Union. You can play all these things out. What actually happened is so interesting, so improbable, so amazing. I've done four big series on wars — the Civil War, a history of the Second World War, a history of the Vietnam War, and now this. The terminology from Vietnam — "pacification of provinces" — and the admission that it's no longer guerrilla warfare, the tactics George Washington, as an insurrectionary leader, has to adapt: he doesn't have to win, he just can't be captured. He can lose every battle — and it happens throughout the revolution, he gets away, and it just depletes the British. It looks exactly like almost every war we've studied in the twentieth century.

Ken Burns

Let's examine that. There's a wonderful German soldier, Johann Ewald, who arrives in July of '76 at Staten Island, and takes part in what will be the largest operation, the largest battle of the Revolutionary War — a total British victory, based on tactical mistakes George Washington makes as a commander, which he'll repeat at Brandywine, another disastrous and major loss, after Long Island. Ewald is openly contemptuous of these people, but he's part of the surrendering army at Yorktown, and he says: "Who would have thought, a hundred years ago, that out of this multitude of rabble would arise a people who could defy kings?" What you have, in the isolation of North America, is the incubation of what he calls "liberty." It's a powerful, unifying force. Washington loses five or six hundred officers at Valley Forge, who get letters from home saying, "We're making money off this" — the officers are from the landed gentry, both sides are making money off it, and they leave. But those who stay, stay for an abstract reason — this sense of self, the idea that you could govern yourself. It's new, and it's intoxicating. You begin to see it in a young girl in Yorktown, a fifteen-year-old soldier from Connecticut, a fourteen-year-old soldier from Massachusetts, in Thomas Paine, who issues not just Common Sense but, during the war, The American Crisis — this articulation of an American sense, both obstinate and pure, of what it is to be free. It's incredibly powerful, and I was unprepared for how moving it was, that you are starving, freezing, dying of disease in February of '77, and you're staying.

Ken Burns

Yes, please.

Ken Burns

Absolutely fair — as long as you have a monarch who's actually a supreme leader; and we begin to watch, after the American Revolution, the balance shift entirely to Parliament, the monarch becoming more of a symbol. Up to that point, I'd agree the Americans had invented something new. There are lots of ways to get to this freedom, but we articulate it. Jefferson has a wonderful line, a few phrases after the famous second sentence, that my countrymen never really focus on: "All experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable." He's acknowledging that most people, up to that point, have been subjects, willing to put up with the vagaries of being under an authoritarian's control. The greatest con job ever is Franklin selling the French on support — a Catholic, oppressive monarchy, nothing like the British constitutional monarchy, convinced to help a republican revolution that will, by the way, doom that monarchy within a few years. He does it. It has to do with the ideas — Franklin doesn't just go to Vergennes and Louis XVI and say, "Here's the Declaration," he has it printed up in French. And let's remember the philosophical underpinnings aren't just Locke and Hume and the Scottish — what we call the Scottish Enlightenment; you probably prefer a different name for it, I'd probably call it the English Enlightenment, frankly.

Ken Burns

It's also from Montesquieu and others — these are ideas that have been percolating, and we give them their first full expression. We are a tangible manifestation of the ideals of the Enlightenment, and whether other countries catch up or supersede doesn't really matter. I'll acknowledge the main point — that it's the wave of the future — and that the strength of the British form of government at this moment is not the power of the king, which is now incredibly limited, if it's anything at all, but the symbolic meaning of it. And I have to say, as an American, that your king articulated American values more forcefully a couple of months ago than our president did.

Ken Burns

You wish, you wish.

Ken Burns

No, I really think — the French get it. There was a French minister, at the time of the French loss in the Seven Years' War, who basically said: you know what's going to happen? Be careful what you wish for — this is too big a thing to control, and these people are going to want autonomy, and this is what's going to happen. It's a story that runs right through to the middle of the 1960s, for you and the other major colonial powers.

Ken Burns

Exactly. And it's so interesting that in the negotiations on the Treaty of Paris, the Americans — not entirely through arrogance, though maybe that's part of it — keep the French out of the negotiations. If you look at the global list of losers from this: the winners are the new United States. Within that, Native Americans suffer most, followed by the perpetuation of slavery, which continues everywhere. Women, of course, are not included. The French are the next losers. And then the country that comes off best, second to the United States, is Great Britain — which is a very interesting dynamic to deal with, as we try to in our series. The fear that hangs over any republican movement in the eighteenth century is that you will repeat the trajectory of Rome, and end up with a dictator who makes himself an emperor.

Ken Burns

I have spent my entire professional life, half a century, on both bottom-up and top-down history, and I have to admit, Dominic, that it's exhilarating in the extreme to tell you that in this particular instance, we don't have a country without a single person — and that is George Washington. He's that marble statue collecting pigeons in the park, but it's important to understand him and his frailties too: he owns five hundred and seventy-seven human beings. As the historian Rick Atkinson says, two-thirds of the way through his magisterial trilogy of the American Revolution, "you can't square that circle" — and you can't; there's no excuse, "man of his times" or whatever, it's just not right. He makes the tactical errors I described, particularly at Long Island and Brandywine. He's not as funny as the others, but let's list a few things he does: he doesn't need a monument to himself; he inspires people in the dead of night to fight for this abstract concept; he convinces people from my state, New Hampshire, and from Georgia, that they're not these separate countries, as they believe, but one thing; he defers to Congress, he has incredible humility, he picks subordinate talent better than himself, unafraid of that talent — in fact, Benedict Arnold and Nathanael Greene are much better tactical battlefield commanders than he is, and he knows it, and accepts it. And more than anything else, at the height of his military power, the second the British had left New York, he rides to Annapolis, Maryland, where Congress is meeting, and resigns his military commission. And at the height of his political power, he resigns the presidency. So that George the Third, when he hears this, says, "Then he is the most important character of the age" — and that set in motion at least two hundred and fifty years, so far, of amazing consequence. It's all George Washington. If you're arguing about the best president, it's like the Beatles, or in baseball, Babe Ruth — you can argue about second place, you can't argue about first place. It's the Beatles. It's George Washington. You can say, "Oh, I think it's Lincoln," "Oh, I think it's FDR," and have perfectly legitimate arguments about second place. We do not have the United States of America without George Washington, for all his flaws.

Ken Burns

Bye. Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure, Dominic. Thank you.