The American Revolution, part 3: "The Times That Try Men's Souls" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 18, 2025)

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

Last night (Tuesday, November 18) my husband Charles and I watched the third episode of Ken Burns’s latest mega-documentary, The American Revolution, which he co-directed with Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt from a script by Burns’s usual collaborator, Geoffrey C. Ward. This was actually more than the first two episodes had been about the nitty-gritty of the war itself, particularly the battles in and around New York City that resulted in New York becoming the bastion of Loyalist (anti-Revolutionary) support for the rest of the war. Ward’s script was quite out front about the strategic mistakes George Washington made during the battle for Long Island and New York itself (though at the time “New York” was just a village of one square mile at the southern tip of Manhattan Island), including not guarding the Jamaica pass that the British were able to use to encircle the American forces, and moving most of his army to repel the attacks the British meant just as feints. The troops of the Continental Army started grumbling about how good they were getting at retreats, since the British had them on the run and gradually forced them out of New York City, New York state, and New Jersey until they reached Trenton, on the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. About the only thing that saved Washington’s army was his successful mobilization of a fleet of whatever boats he could solicit, requisition or just plain grab to ferry his men across one of the rivers in an operation both Charles and I compared to the fabled British retreat at Dunkirk, France in 1940. When he finally got his men to safety it was already December 1776, and most of the troops under his command were militiamen whose enlistments were due to expire at the end of the year. This was one of the issues that bedeviled the American side throughout the Revolution; the Americans were relying on militias that didn’t consider themselves bound by military discipline and considered themselves loyal to their individual states rather than the entire U.S. Through two stirring speeches, Washington managed to convince most of his troops to stick it out for three months more.

The show also touched on the debate over the Articles of Confederation, which are usually dated from 1778 but which were actually discussed and fought over two years earlier. As it happened, the Articles of Confederation were being drafted and debated by the Continental Congress in the same building as the Pennsylvania legislature was drafting its own state’s constitution – and the radicalism of the Pennsylvania document, which among other things contained a Bill of Rights and guaranteed the right to vote to all adult white men whether they owned property or not, put off a lot of the delegates to the Continental Congress. (This probably reflects the view of the most famous Founding Father from Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin, who once joked that if a man owns a donkey, that’s considered “property” and he has the right to vote. Then, if his donkey dies, he loses his vote – so who held the franchise originally, the man or the donkey?) The Founding Fathers were in no way democrats: they equated democracy with anarchy and were quite specific that what they wanted the new nation to be was a republic governed by an elite political class. As James Madison wrote in Federalist #10, “[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions. A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”

In the same document, Madison wrote that one of the benefits of a representative republic rather than a pure democracy was “to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” (Ironically, one of the major anti-democratic provisions the Founders put into the Constitution – the Electoral College for electing the President – had exactly the opposite result from the one the Framers were seeking: the election of a pseudo-populist demagogue who lost the popular vote in 2016 but won the Electoral College and proceeded to govern in so wretched a way as to fulfill Madison’s dire predictions about the fate of democracies as well as Plato’s belief that democracy would always degenerate into tyranny because a democracy “will promote to honor anyone who merely calls himself the people’s friend.”) Regrettably, though the imdb.com pages on The American Revolution name the voice-over actors featured in the series (including major stars like Tom Hanks, Ethan Hawke, Kenneth Branagh, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Paul Giamatti, Michael Keaton, Edward Nortun, David Oyelowo, and Liev Schreiber), they don’t identify them as to who voiced whom. And the talking heads (mostly historians, among them a few African-Americans and Native Americans to make sure their sides of the story are included) aren’t identified at all, which is a shame because many of them tell compelling stories.

I was especially struck by Friedericke Baer, a woman historian from Germany who mentioned that a lot of the German troops who fought in the Revolution on the side of King George III (himself of German ancestry, by the way; he’d succeeded his grandfather George II and was the first of the Hanoverian kings who actually could speak English) were themselves conscripts who resented being drafted to fight in a war in which they had no personal stake in the outcome. Indeed, the show pointed out that a lot of the Germans (many of whom were from the state of Hesse, which led to all the German troops being nicknamed “Hessians” whether they were from Hesse or not) ultimately stayed behind or returned to America and became immigrants, and eventually citizens, of the United States. The American Revolution is turning out at its midway point to be a quite interesting and surprisingly relevant look at both the founding myth of our nation and the reality as it was lived on the ground by those who fought (on both sides) as well as those who just stood by and waited for the dust to settle and the conflict to finish one way or the other. I recently reviewed an Intrada Records re-release of John Williams’s soundtrack music for Roland Emmerich’s film about the American Revolution, The Patriot, in which I wrote, “In a sense, The Patriot is about an old order dying and a new one being born – but not necessarily in the way you’d think. One of the recurring themes is the death of the old chivalric ideal of warfare, where both sides were led by gentlemen whose senses of honor put limits on what they could do to each other, and its replacement by the modern free-for-all in which anything literally goes and the distinction between ‘soldier’ and ‘civilian’ essentially disappears.” Certainly the American Revolution featured war crimes, or what today would be considered war crimes, committed by both sides, as well as instances of what amounted to blacklisting by Patriot committees of people who were, rightly or wrongly, suspected of Royalist sympathies. People who’d been victimized by this process emigrated en masse to New York once the British solidified their hold over it and spent the rest of the war there.