The American Revolution, part 6: “The Most Sacred Thing” (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 21, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, November 21) my husband Charles and I watched “The Most Sacred Thing,” the sixth and last episode of the mega-documentary mini-series The American Revolution directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. “The Most Sacred Thing” dealt with the years 1778 to 1781 (when combat in the American Revolution effectively ended with the British defeat at Yorktown, Virginia) and beyond, well beyond. Ken Burns and company chose to make The American Revolution at a time in our history when the whole question of whether the United States will remain a democratic republic or degenerate into tyranny the way Plato said all democracies would is frighteningly open. Among the many events that call into question America’s future as a republic that happened during the six days PBS was airing this program were Donald Trump hosting Mohammed Bin Salman, crown prince and effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, at the White House with full honors; him giving Ukraine an ultimatum that they must effectively accept his terms (which are basically the same as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s) for an end to the war or face the total withdrawal of American support; and his extraordinary threat to six sitting Democratic members of Congress (Senators Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan, and Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, and House of Representatives members Jason Crow, D-Colorado; Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio, D-Pennsylvania; and Maggie Goodlander, D-New Hampshire) that they should be tried, convicted, and executed for “seditious behaviour at the highest level.” The “crime” for which Trump wants them put to death was making a social-media video telling U.S. servicemembers that they don’t have to follow illegal orders, and indeed they have a legal obligation to resist them. Already I’ve received texts from Slotkin and Kelly asking me to respond by – guess what? – donating to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. I’m sure Trump envies the power Putin and MBS (as the Saudi crown prince is universally called) of simply having their political enemies put to death without bothering with such niceties as due process and a criminal justice system.

The “Most Sacred Thing” episode of The American Revolution covered the period during which George Washington fiercely sought to coordinate his operations with those of the French officers and troops sent to bail out the Revolution despite the fact that they literally didn’t know each other’s languages – most of the Frenchmen sent to aid the American Revolution spoke no English and almost none of the Americans knew French. He also brought in the German Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben to train his troops and give them a sense of real discipline. Von Steuben (who’s become so much of a hero to German-Americans they even hold “Steuben Day parades” in cities with large German-descended populations; one figures prominently in John Hughes’s teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) had been driven out of Europe for having seduced underage boys, and while I’m not sure whether his sexual activities would have been considered part of a Gay identity today, he was definitely attracted to his own gender. Steuben was bilingual in German and French, but the only English word he knew when he arrived was “Goddamn!” So he would swear colorfully in the languages he did know until the troops got the message that he disapproved of their screw-ups. Also the French expeditionary force sent to aid the Americans, the Expédition Particulière, was led by Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, and like the French officers assigned to command the navy (Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, who had the job until 1780; and François Joseph Paul de Grasse, who replaced him after d’Estaing bombed badly in a naval battle with the British on the open seas outside Virginia in 1780), he spoke barely any English. The person brought along to interpret for him was a Swedish diplomat named Axel von Fersen, who later became friends (and possibly more than that) with French queen Marie Antoinette. Unlike most of the French officers who helped win the American Revolution, Rochambeau narrowly escaped the guillotine when his own country erupted into revolt in 1789. He was actually scheduled to be executed when the so-called “Thermidorian Reaction” of 1794 abruptly brought an end to the Reign of Terror and saved his life, and he was rehabilitated by Napoleon, allowed to retire with honors, and died quietly in 1807 at age 81.

One of the fascinating stories about the American Revolution is that the cause was nearly lost because the U.S. Congress had no money to pay the troops, and therefore a number of them mutinied. Washington ended one mutiny by negotiating with the mutineers and getting them to re-enlist; he ended another by hanging the two ringleaders in full view of their followers and thus scaring the rest of the men into submission (which may be what Trump meant when he said of the six sitting U.S. Senators and House members he’s accused of “seditious behavior,” “Hang them! George Washington would”). The immediate crisis ended when the French arrived and paid off the restive American troops in silver coins instead of worthless Continental paper money, but even after the Revolution ended (with a 1783 treaty that, though it was negotiated in Paris, involved direct talks between the Americans and British that did not include the French, despite their decisive role in winning the Revolution in the first place), there were still mutinies. One of the most famous was Shays’s Rebellion, which took place in Massachusetts in 1786-1787 and was led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays. It was ultimately put down by a militia force led by another Revolutionary War commander, Benjamin Lincoln, but the spectre of civil war on top of what had already largely been a civil war (a number of battles in the Revolution featured Loyalist Americans fighting in support of the British Crown against their fellow Americans on the Patriot side, including some instances of brother against brother) led to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Originally called just to revise the Articles of Confederation of 1778, which had created a federal government but a surprisingly weak one with no independent taxing authority, the Convention decided early on to write an entirely new founding document which became the Constitution of the United States. George Washington chaired the Constitutional Convention, and one reason the President was given such extensive authority was everyone at the Convention assumed Washington would be the first one. At the same time some of the people who later became the nucleus of the Federalist Party wanted an even more powerful executive: Alexander Hamilton wanted the President to be elected for life (it was the biggest battle he lost at the Convention) and John Adams wanted a more royal-sounding title for the chief executive, which Washington successfully stopped. (At the same time I’ve long suspected that one of the reasons the United States didn’t become a monarchy was Washington’s low sperm count. Washington never had children of his own, though one of his wife Martha’s sons by her late first husband called himself “George Washington, Jr.,” and you can’t very well start an hereditary monarchy with someone who can’t produce heirs.)

The saddest part of The American Revolution’s final episode was the treatment of Native Americans and African-Americans who had fought in the war on both the Patriot and Loyalist sides. A number of Black slaves who had joined the British army lured by promises of freedom after the war if the British won were ordered returned to their owners, and some fled to Canada rather than allow that to happen. As for the Natives, long-standing tribal alliances split over the question of which side would be better for them to ally with, and as I’ve noted in discussing previous episodes of the series, even while the war was still going on Washington and the other officers running the American army were promising soldiers “Indian land” in areas where there were still self-governing Native nations and which white Americans hadn’t conquered yet. At the same time, The American Revolution also challenged some of my ideas about the history of warfare, especially on the American continent. Some of the fighting forces in the American Revolution on the Patriot side included Black and white troops fighting alongside each other – a distinction that wasn’t repeated again in U.S. history until 1948, when President Harry Truman ordered an end to the segregation of the U.S. military that had required Black soldiers to participate only in all-Black units (under white commanders). The American Revolution was also the first war that involved trench warfare; I’d long assumed that Ulysses S. Grant and his fellow Union commanders in the American Civil War invented trench warfare, but not only were there American commanders in the Revolution who ordered their men to dig trenches, the final victory at Yorktown was achieved in part through two long trenches by which the American forces and their French allies were able to surround the British general, Charles Cornwallis, and force him to surrender.

Overall, The American Revolution was a fascinating program and aired at a particularly fraught time in U.S. history, when the nation is led by a rogue President who longs to be a dictator; the separation-of-powers scheme by which the Framers of the Constitution sought to keep that from happening has almost completely broken down (Trump essentially owns both houses of Congress as well as the Supreme Court, and they meekly do his bidding at least 90 percent of the time); he’s doing the classic dictator thing of ruling by decree through a seemingly unending series of “executive orders”; and by pardoning all the rioters who fought to keep him in power on January 6, 2021 even though he’d lost the 2020 Presidential election (and in some cases pardoning them again for crimes they’ve committed since his last pardon of them), he’s created a cadre of people who’ve already proven themselves willing to commit political violence on his behalf and proclaimed on social media their willingness to do so again. Reason enough that the six Democratic Senators and House members Trump directly threatened have had their security details increased, lest some maniac pro-Trumpers try to do themselves what Trump has so far been unable to do on his own, namely kill his so-called political “enemies.”