The American Revolution, part 5: "The Soul of All America" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 20, 2025)

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

Two nights ago (Thursday, November 20) I watched the fifth and next-to-last episode of the major documentary Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David P. Schmidt, The American Revolution: “The Soul of All America.” This episode covered the years 1778 and 1779 and covered the catastrophic winter George Washington and his army spent in the freezing cold of an abandoned ironworks at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania as well as the long-sought alliance between the U.S. and France. The French entry into the war on the American side (and the likelihood that Spain and The Netherlands would soon join them, Spain in hopes of regaining their former colonies in the West Indies they’d lost to Britain in the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763, and The Netherlands may have dreamed of retaking New York, formerly New Amsterdam, from the British) turned the American Revolution into a European conflict. The French sent a fleet of ships too big for American harbors and gave its command to Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, who proved spectacularly incompetent. Defeated by the British Navy in their first sea battle off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island, d’Estaing then sailed for the West Indies, where he tried and failed to conquer the British-held islands of St. Lucia and Grenada. Ultimately he was recalled to France after a coordinated attack by the French and American navies on the British position at Savannah, Georgia in 1780 also failed. D’Estaing was replaced by François Joseph Paul de Grasse, who led the French participation in the successful siege of Yorktown, Virginia in 1781 that finally won the war for the U.S., and when he returned to France he was targeted by its own revolutionaries after 1789 and guillotined in 1794 largely due to his friendship with the deposed Queen Marie Antoinette. “The Soul of All America” also featured a segment on U.S. naval commander John Paul Jones, who sailed a barely seaworthy ship called the Bonhomme Richard (after the French title for Benjamin Franklin’s book Poor Richard’s Almanack) and staged a series of successful raids on British ships sailing to bring supplies to their embattled armies in America.

Most guerrilla campaigns by rebels seeking to regain control of their countries by foreign forces work by wearing down the willingness of the government of the occupying country to resist – the collapse of public support for the U.S. war in Viet Nam was the most obvious modern example – and the American Revolution was no exception. As the war dragged on and the British Parliament started to realize that the Americans wouldn’t be the pushovers they’d thought originally (much as the modern-day Russians have gradually realized that the Ukrainians won’t going to be the pushovers they originally thought), a number of Members of Parliament started to wonder just why they were putting so much money and resources into what was beginning to look like an unwinnable war. What’s more, the American Revolution was one that was dragging other European countries into alliance against the British, and it was threatening important parts of the British Empire, including not only the West Indies but also the port of Gibraltar on the Spanish coast. Meanwhile, the Americans were able to retake Philadelphia and return the Continental Congress there after its exile to an old meeting house in York, Pennsylvania. Perhaps the most moving part of this episode was the sequence which depicted the roller-coaster ride the population of Philadelphia went through as the city went from American to British control and then back, and when Philadelphia finally went back to the Americans a number of the Loyalists that had sought refuge there fled to New York, which remained under British control until the war finally ended and the British withdrew. There was also a segment about the American campaign against the Native Americans throughout what later became known as the American Midwest, where American raiders got as far as modern-day Illinois before they were stopped by Native resistance and the anxieties of Colonial commanders who called them back to the main front. This part of the documentary reinforces the critique of Left-wing historians who point out that the rise of the United States was inexorably tied in with genocide against the Native Americans and the economic prosperity of a nation built on the labor of enslaved African-Americans.