The American Revolution, part 2: "Asylum for All Mankind" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 17, 2025)

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

Last night (Monday, November 17) I watched “An Asylum for Mankind,” the second installment in Ken Burns’s six-part TV mega-documentary The American Revolution. This one depicted how the attitude of the Colonists towards Great Britain hardened over time, from the willingness to live within the British Empire as a largely self-governing outpost while still remaining technically subject to the Crown (the arrangement under which Britain later devolved its empire into the Commonwealth of Nations, or the Irish Free State it allowed the Irish to form in between the two world wars before Ireland finally gained outright independence) to the demand for all-out independence. While not as contentious politically as the first episode, this one made the point that African-Americans and Native Americans fought on both sides of the Revolution. At least one of the main reasons fence-sitting Americans ultimately declared for independence was the decision of British commanders actively recruit both natives and enslaved Blacks for their side of the struggle. One of the most interesting stories told in “An Asylum for Mankind” was the effort of the British-appointed governor of Virginia, John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, to recruit Black slaves to the British cause by promising them freedom if they deserted their masters and fought for the British (in segregated units, as did the Blacks on the American side – the U.S. military wasn’t racially integrated until Harry Truman did it by executive order in 1948, and until then all America’s wars featured Black troops only in segregated units under white commanders).

Alas, the Black slaves who answered Dunmore’s call met a sad fate, mostly dying of smallpox in the camps Dunmore set up to train them. In fact, the American Revolution coincided with a severe smallpox epidemic throughout the country, at least partly because the war provided excellent conditions for the spread of a contagious and often fatal disease. Just as World War I triggered the so-called “Spanish flu” epidemic of 1918-1919 by creating ideal conditions for the flu virus to spread (and also continually renewing the supply of victims; normally viruses that kill off their hosts end up killing themselves when they can’t find enough new victims to remain alive, but the war generated an almost unending supply of victims), so the American Revolution, with its soldiers marching long distances from town to town and spreading whatever disease they had everywhere they went, turbo-charged a smallpox epidemic. At the time, according to Geoffrey C. Ward’s script, there were only two ways to stop smallpox from spreading: isolating the victims and keeping them from infecting anyone else, or inoculating people who hadn’t got it yet with reduced doses on purpose in hopes that they’d develop immunity rather than get the full-scale disease. George Washington was advised to have his entire army inoculated, but he declined on the basis that the troops who were inoculated would have to wait several weeks before they were sufficiently healthy to fight again. (At the time of the American Revolution, British scientists and doctors were just starting to explore injecting people with cowpox, a related disease that can cross over to humans, after discovering that milkmaids almost never got smallpox because their work had exposed them to cowpox. This was the start of vaccination, a term that derives from the Latin word for “cow,” vaca. But it wasn’t until 1796 that Edward Jenner demonstrated the first effective smallpox vaccine based on the cowpox virus.) Instead Washington insisted on isolating anyone in his army who caught smallpox and built prison-like hospitals, surrounded by armed guards, to maintain security.

The show also told the sad tale of Benedict Arnold’s attempt to invade and conquer Canada for the Americans; he and another American general, Robert Montgomery, successfully conquered and occupied Montréal but were stymied, and Montgomery killed, in an unsuccessful attempt to scale the fortress of Québec. (Not until Donald Trump regained the Presidency and talked about annexing Canada as “the 51st state” were any other Americans nuts enough to talk about taking over Canada.) I’ve read other sources that said Arnold blamed his failure to conquer Canada on George Washington not sending him enough troops and supplies to win the battles – Ward argued that part of the problem was that the Americans were relying on an old British map that showed the distance between Montréal and Québec as two-fifths of what it actually was – and this, along with falling in love with and marrying a Loyalist woman after his first wife had died while they were separated because he was off trying to conquer Canada, that led Arnold to switch sides and become America’s most infamous traitor. Needless to say, the show not only depicted the drafting of the Declaration of Independence but couldn’t resist pointing out the irony of a white man writing, “All men are created equal,” when he owned hundreds of slaves himself. I used to joke that Jefferson ordered one of his slaves, “Here, boy, sharpen my quill pen so I can write a declaration about how all men are created equal,” and it turns out my joke wasn’t far from the truth. Jefferson did bring a slave with him to Philadelphia when he went there to write the Declaration: Robert Hemings, teenage brother of Jefferson’s long-time slave mistress (and second cousin and half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife) Sally Hemings.

According to an historical post on the Associated Press’s Web site, written and published by Hillel Italie in 2020, https://www.cbs42.com/news/national/remembering-the-slave-who-joined-jefferson-in-philadelphia/, “The eldest of six children, Robert Hemings was born in 1762 into bondage, contradiction and entanglement. His father was the slave owner John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson’s future father-in-law; his mother was a slave, Elizabeth Hemings. Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman with whom Jefferson fathered several children, was Robert Hemings’ sister, and Jefferson’s future wife, Martha Wayles, was his half-sister. Robert Hemings himself would become both Jefferson’s in-law and his property. The Hemings siblings were brought to Monticello, Jefferson’s home in Virginia, not long after the 1773 death of Wayles. Within the plantation hierarchy, Robert Hemings held a high position and was described once by a friend of Jefferson’s as having ‘behaved exceeding well.’ He was just 12 when Jefferson chose him to replace the 31-year-old Jupiter Evans as his personal attendant. He was dressed more formally than other slaves, was permitted to read and write [most slaves weren’t, and if one tried to learn it was considered a whipping offense], travel on his own and to learn a craft, as a barber.” I’ve read some of Thomas Jefferson’s writings about slavery and they reminded me of George Soros’s writings about capitalism: both the work of intelligent men who realize that their wealth has been built on a fundamentally unjust system that has benefited them personally.

I think the ultimate comment on the Declaration of Independence and the contradiction between its promise of human equality and the reality of enormous human inequality that still persists in the U.S. today was made by Congressmember Thaddeus Stevens (R-Pennsylvania) in 1865 after the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. Stevens said in essence that the promise of the Declaration of Independence was fully sound, but the existence of slavery in the U.S. had prevented it from being completely realized. Of course it still hasn’t been completely realized, and in the yin and yang of American history today we’re in a period of at best retrenchment and at worst outright reaction. One of the ironies of Ken Burns’s series The American Revolution is that it’s being shown at a time when the second Trump administration is reproducing many of the injustices that brought rise to the American Revolution in the first place, including sending the military into American cities to intimidate the people into not protesting the authoritarian thuggery practiced by agents of whatever agencies Trump and his minions choose to send into large cities run by Democratic mayors to round up so-called “illegal” immigrants. Another irony is that funding for the production is still credited to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), billed for years as “a private corporation funded by the American people” (a wording that’s chilled me for years with its casual equation of “private” and “free”), when the Trump administration has demolished CPB by taking away its funding in a so-called “rescission” bill that was barely debated in Congress at all.