The American Revolution, part 1: "In Order to Be Free" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 16. 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 16) my husband Charles and I watched the first of six two-hour episodes of Ken Burns’s latest mega-documentary, The American Revolution. It was probably inevitable that a director who “made his bones” with an even longer mega-documentary on the Civil War would take on the American Revolution, though an event from the 18th century was harder for him to dramatize than one from the 19th century because the American Revolution happened before the invention of photography and therefore a lot less visual material existed from the era. Burns and his co-directors, Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt, had to work with the covers of the famous pamphlets that promoted the patriots’ cause, and a few of the equally famous cartoons of the period like “Live Free or Die.” The directors and their writer, Geoffrey C. Ward, didn’t pussyfoot around the seamier aspects of the Revolution, including the fact (as British people and British-sympathizing Americans pointed out at the time) that the Revolutionaries prattled on about the British tax restrictions somehow “enslaving” the Colonists when many of the Colonists owned actual slaves themselves. It’s long been an historical quirk I’m well aware of that the slavery apologists of Thomas Jefferson’s time (including Jefferson himself) defended it as basically a necessary evil – someone had to get the work done, and white indentured servants weren’t going to do it after their indentures expired – while a generation or two later the aristocrats whose livelihoods depended on slave labor regarded it as a positive good. John C. Calhoun argued that the experience of Athens in ancient Greece proved that you couldn’t make a democracy work without a permanent servant class, and given that the American republic was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” (which in practice really meant “all white male landowners”), the permanent servant class couldn’t be white.

One of the points made in Ward’s script was that immigrants continued to come in a steady stream from Britain to the Colonies despite the growing unrest in the period between 1754 and 1775 covered in the first episode, “In Order to Be Free,” many of them either tenant farmers or workers for hire who had no claim to any land of their own. Land was the big demand of the American Colonists, and at least one of the provocations for the Revolution was that Britain was trying to restrain the Colonies from expanding westward and actually set up a line by which all the North American continent west of the Appalachians was supposed to be reserved for Native Americans. For the settlers, Natives were an impediment to be got rid of by any means necessary so they could help themselves to the vast land of the Great Plains and other points west. That’s why, to the extent Native Americans participated in the Revolution at all, they mostly fought on the side of the British. (Natives allied with Britain during the War of 1812, too, and one of the most fascinating articles I read about that conflict was about the Native chief Tecumseh, a British ally in the War of 1812 who had to deal with the blithering incompetence of the British generals sent to fight it. Most of them were the worst in the British armed forces because the most capable ones were in Europe fighting the war against Napoleon that was an existential conflict for the British, which the War of 1812 was not.) Ward’s writing also highlighted the importance of women in the battle for American independence, especially the ones who organized mass spinning bees to protest the taxes the British Parliament was imposing on cloth exported from Britain (an interesting anticipation of how Mahatma Gandhi would make home-spinning an iconic tactic in India’s successful campaign to end British colonization).

Other than that, this documentary hits all the expected high points of the American Revolution, including the Stamp Act of 1764 (which was supposed to tax the colonies to pay for the British defense of them against French incursions in the so-called French and Indian Wars, which were only one struggle in an ongoing conflict between Britain and France that burst out into the Seven Years’ War between them); the Boston Massacre of 1770; the odd role of British General Thomas Gage (who was married to an American woman and wasn’t necessarily in favor of the hard-line policies of the British Crown and Parliament, but he followed orders); and the battles at Lexington and Concord that kicked off the Revolutionary War itself. There are brief mentions of Edmund Burke, the British politician who actually favored the American Revolution even though that amounted to treason (later he would become the founder of modern conservative political ideology from his horror of the Revolution in France), and Phyllis Wheatley, who despite being a slave was allowed by her owner to publish her own books of poetry and essays and was therefore, at least according to Geoffrey Ward, the first African-American published author of either gender.

But the biggest irony about PBS producing a documentary about the American Revolution in 2025 is how many of the abuses the British government inflicted on the Americans are being done today by the Trump administration and their handmaidens in Congress and the Supreme Court. One of the big complaints about British rule was that they were sending soldiers into American cities and marching them through the streets, to “keep order” according to the British, to intimidate the local population and keep them from rebelling according to the Americans, Trump and his administration is, of course, doing the same thing. The 1700’s were a period of increasing inequalities of wealth and income; so are the 2000’s, in which technological company owners and founders have assumed the role of the giant landowners in 17th, 18th, and 19th century Britain. Like the landed gentry of Britain, today’s “tech bros” are using their economic power to decide how we shall live and what we will be allowed to do, including using their control over artificial intelligence to displace millions of people and leave them to starve. As I’ve lived all these years I’ve become more despairing of any attempts to challenge the powers that be in the hope of actually improving the lives of ordinary people; while acts of resistance are sometimes necessary, ultimately what passes for human “civilization” always seems to end up with a handful of rich and privileged people ruling over everybody else. It’s what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said, “Anybody who’s 20 and isn’t a socialist has no heart; anyone who’s 40 and is a socialist has no head” – and what Pete Townshend meant when he sang, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”