“If there was a single event that caused the Civil War, it was the establishment of the United States in independence from Great Britain with slavery still a part of its heritage.”
Ken Burns’ The Civil War opens with that line from historian Barbara J. Fields. Now, 36 years later, Burns returns with a new documentary miniseries about the nation’s first war.
The American Revolution is yet another triumph in a career full of them. Burns has created remarkably watchable documentaries on subjects ranging from baseball to literature to music to mass media. His films are always meticulously researched, creatively presented, and often narrated by the incomparable Peter Coyote. Coyote’s voice feels at once commanding and comforting, a rare combination.
Coyote returns for this series, and that’s far from the only thing working in its favor. Perhaps the greatest strength of The American Revolution is how deeply we need it in this moment. We are watching a sitting president openly present himself as a king and show contempt for the Constitution and basic American ideals. At the same time, his political party is engaged in an effort to whitewash history into a bedtime story catering to white supremacy.
American history is complicated. It’s not a simple narrative, and the version many of us learned in school often glosses over the messy truth.
As historian Alan Taylor notes: “The greatest misconception about the American Revolution is that it was something that unified Americans. It leaves out the reality that it was a civil war among Americans.”
He adds that colonial American history “for most of us is drowning in sentimentality and nostalgia and is incredibly superficial and doesn’t have the respect for what actually took place, and all the participants and the incredible violence of it. One of the casualties of that superficiality is that we’ve seen it in bloodless, gallant terms.”
Burns dismantles that “bloodless, gallant” mythology. The stories in The American Revolution include brutal battles that sometimes pitted Americans against Americans, and had moments of poor decision-making, including by George Washington. They recount the horrific conditions endured by prisoners of war, particularly those held on British prison ships, while acknowledging that American treatment of British POWs was far from ethical. The film also details heartbreaking setbacks, moments when morale and support for the war faltered, and, of course, the country’s and the war’s deep entanglement with slavery.
One segment of interest explores the British campaign in South Carolina led by Banastre Tarleton, a notoriously cruel officer who viewed Americans as rebellious ingrates. His vicious treatment, including horrifying murders, of captured soldiers was intended to break the rebellion, but instead enraged locals. Some loyalists switched sides, and many others joined the fight against Britain. Instead of suppressing the revolution, he intensified it.
It’s a mistake that feels familiar, one the United States has repeated in more recent conflicts, including Iraq.
The series also challenges the idealized image of the Founding Fathers that still shapes American politics. Burns confronts lesser-told truths, including George Washington’s role as a slaveholder.
But The American Revolution isn’t designed to shock or tear down national myths for the sake of it. It simply presents the story of where we came from and the struggle that secured the freedoms we often take for granted, even as some political actors attempt to erase this history. If there’s a moral to Burns’ telling, it’s that hindsight is never perfect, and building the future on a sanitized past is dangerous. It’s a mistake the country has made more than once.
For that reason, the documentary is worth every minute of its twelve-hour runtime.
The last word belongs, fittingly, to the original cast of the Broadway retelling of those events: Hamilton.