The American Revolution, part 4: "Conquer by a Drawn Game" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 19, 2025)

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

Last night (Wednesday, November 19) I watched the fourth episode of Ken Burns’s (and Sarah Botstein’s and David P. Schmidt’s) mega-documentary (12 hours over six straight nights on PBS-TV) The American Revolution. The episode was called “Conquer by a Drawn Game,” a title that comes from one of Thomas Paine’s later Revolutionary War essays, the same one in which he denounced ‘the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots” who turned their backs on the war and walked out on it. (They had a perfect right to do that since most of them were militiamen who had enlisted for a limited time, usually one year, and were free to go once their term expired.) Paine was arguing basically the guerrilla war strategy before the term “guerrilla warfare” existed: wear down your enemy, avoid engaging in pitched all-out battles unless absolutely compelled to, fight skirmishes all over the place, and ultimately cause their country to lose the will to win so they withdraw and give you back peace. At the same time the Americans were in the sort of quandary that would later befall the British, our enemies in the Revolution and the War of 1812 and our solid (to the extent that any American alliance can be considered “solid” under the wild, mercurial, mistrustful leadership of Führer Donald Trump) allies since. While Winston Churchill was bravely carrying on about how the British would fight to the bitter end, he was secretly in communication with Franklin Roosevelt over whether and how the Americans would enter the war on his side, which he was well aware was the only way he could conceivably withstand Nazi Germany’s assaults long-term. Likewise the Colonial Americans in the 1770’s were aware that their only hope for a victory lay in winning one of the European powers to enter the war on their side – and the logical one to go after as an ally was Britain’s centuries-old enemy, France. The French were still smarting from their defeat at the hands of Britain in the Seven Years’ War, of which the French and Indian War that cost the French their own North American colonies in Canada had been just a part of what amounted to a world (or at least a Western-world) war. They were anxious to strike back however they could against their traditional enemies, Britain and Russia, and one way to do that would be to help the Americans win their war of independence against Britain. But the French proceeded cautiously, understandably reluctant to go all-in to help an insurgency which seemed to be losing steadily as the Americans retreated from Fort Ticonderoga and its neighboring Fort Independence on either side of Lake Champlain in upstate New York.

The French first opened their ports to U.S. merchants and then carefully provided arms to the Americans on an arrangement that anticipated the Lend-Lease program President Franklin Roosevelt would initiate, on shaky legal ground, to help the British in World War II while still maintaining America’s official neutrality. The battle that turned the tide for the Americans was one, ironically, on which British General John Burgoyne had pinned his hopes for ending the war altogether and forcing the Colonials to surrender: a three-pronged assault on Albany, New York. Unfortunately for Burgoyne, his three-pronged assault only was a two-pronged one in fact because General William Howe decided not to march on Albany but to send his forces south to conquer the rebel capital, Philadelphia. The narration, delivered by Peter Coyote from a script by Geoffrey C. Ward, noted that most European wars at the time ended when one country captured the other’s capital. Howe successfully took Philadelphia, forcing the Continental Congress and what there was of a national American government to retreat to a small town north of the city, largely due to George Washington making some of the same mistakes he’d made earlier in the battle of Long Island and the defense of New York. He overestimated the depth of the river separating the city from the British forces, and the British army was able to ford the river where the water was waist-high, sneak up behind the Americans, and catch them in a pincer movement on both sides. Meanwhile, Burgoyne’s strategy was to capture Albany and use it to isolate the New England colonies, which the British considered the heart of the rebellion, from the rest of the American territories. One thing the British didn’t realize was that their actions of offering enslaved African-Americans their freedom if they fought for the British and also enlisting the support of Native Americans backfired and solidified the support for American independence throughout the 13 colonies. It scared slaveowners and white settlers anxious to grab Native lands and made them more, not less, willing to support the Patriot cause.

Indeed, one of the ironies of the American Revolution was that it broke apart the Six Nations Confederacy of six Native nations – the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora – in upstate New York that the framers of the Constitution would later cite as an example of how to make a confederation of independent states work. As explained here in Ward’s narration, the Six Nations Confederation was a forerunner of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Each nation would continue to govern itself as it always had, but they would regard an attack on one nation as an attack on all of them and mobilize to defend each other. The Oneida and Tuscarora aligned themselves with the Americans while the rest of the nations sided with the British. The Mohawk leader Thayendanegea, also known by his British name Joseph Brant, was the most aggressively pro-British member of the Confederation and recruited his own raiding parties to help the British in their battles. Meanwhile, the Marquis de Lafayette, the well-to-do heir of a major French noble family, decided on his own to help the Americans and use some of his family fortune to do so. He arrived in the U.S. on a ship he’d paid for himself – and, naturally, he was quick to point that out. He also helped pay for arms and uniforms for the American soldiers. Ultimately the Americans won a major victory at Saratoga in upstate New York, where in a battle in which Benedict Arnold was one of the key commanders (his later treachery to the American cause has so far eclipsed his earlier successes in the war on the U.S. side he’s basically been “unpersonned” in U.S. histories of the Revolution and his importance in battle after battle has been ignored) the Patriot forces seized Saratoga and surrounded Burgoyne and his men. The overall U.S. commander at Saratoga, Horatio Gates, was promoted after his victory and put in charge of the Continental Army in the South (where he led it to a major defeat at Camden, South Carolina in 1780 and never commanded it again even though after his victory at Saratoga he’d been talked about as a possible replacement for George Washington). He cut a deal with Burgoyne and the German general who had led troops in the battle, Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, to allow them to leave the U.S. and never return in exchange for their freedom, but the Continental Congress reneged on the deal and forced the defeated British and German armies on a long march stretching all the way to Virginia, where they were incarcerated as prisoners of war.

Saratoga was in many ways the turning point of the American Revolution; one British officer is quoted as saying, “The courage and obstinacy with which the Americans fought were the astonishment of everyone, and we now became fully convinced that they are not that contemptible enemy we had hitherto imagined them, incapable of standing a regular engagement and that they would only fight behind strong and powerful works.” Word of the sweeping American victory reached France about seven weeks later – that’s how long it took for information to travel in an age before electronic communications of any kind – and it helped America’s ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin, in convincing the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, the Comte de Vergennes, that the American cause was a worthy investment for France. (Vergennes’ career is fascinating; before he was recalled to Versailles as foreign minister he’d been an ambassador to Sweden and Ottoman Turkey. He was recalled from his Turkish posting because he married his long-time mistress without King Louis XV’s consent and he hadn’t done enough to provoke the war between Turkey and Russia his boss, the Duc de Choiseul, had wanted. When Louis XV died and his son Louis XVI became king, Vergennes was rehabilitated and served first as foreign minister and then also as prime minister until his death in 1787.) Actually the Americans had sent two ambassadors to France, Franklin and John Adams, but the French were put off by the strait-laced Puritan Adams while they eagerly embraced Franklin, with his love of fine wines and women, as one of their own. In Ken Burns’s previous documentary on Franklin, he showed how Franklin became a celebrity, the most well-known American in the world at the time, and essentially charmed the French court into accepting his plea for an alliance with the nascent United States to help them win their revolution.

This episode also narrates how George Washington changed his mind about requiring his troops to be inoculated against smallpox when the Continental Army was so swamped with troops, many unknowingly carrying the disease with them. Before he’d hung back from requiring inoculations because he’d been concerned that the process would put the men out of action for weeks. It’s fascinating to note how far back the tradition of requiring American military enlistees to get inoculated or vaccinated runs, especially given the absurd accusations of various Right-wing conspiracy theorists (including, alas, Trump’s appointee as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) that this was part of some sinister plot against the lives and health of American citizens. And it also mentioned how, when Washington finally realized that he couldn’t rely on a volunteer army consisting of militiamen and he would need to pay his troops something to keep them in the field, among the promises he made to them was the offer of “Indian land” – in parts of the country where the Natives still ruled and weren’t yet under the control of the American government. This is yet another indication (as is the official name of Washington’s force, the “Continental Army”) that the American Revolution was intended from the get-go as an imperialist struggle to build an empire across the entire American continent, not just a struggle about “taxation without representation.” One of the major ironies of the American Revolution is what it did to the French government whose support was crucial to its success; it drained the French treasury so dry that the French regime raised taxes on its own people so high that eventually they rebelled, overthrew the King and his royal government, and did so using the same sort of high-falutin’ rhetoric about “liberty, equality, fraternity” the Americans had used in their struggle.