Before railroad crossings had red lights, gates, and warning bells, they had a simple but effective sign: a wooden X with one board marked RAILROAD CROSSING and the other STOP LOOK AND LISTEN. The sign was invented in America in the early days of the automobile and quickly spread to the rest of the world—for a reason not flattering to the human species. Before the automobile, people traveled by horse, and the average horse has enough sense not to cross the tracks when a train is coming. The average motorist, not so much.

Horse sense is still rare among humans. So, a similar warning sign is needed for the danger now threatening a certain hard-won wisdom about the American colonies’ decisive break with Great Britain. This wisdom has been accumulated by generations of historians, biographers, political theorists, librarians, archivists, government agencies, philanthropists, and educators unafraid to correct, criticize, and confirm one another. It is broad, deep, inclusive, and open-ended. But right now, it is idling on the tracks in the path of a runaway locomotive.

Fueling that locomotive are two polarized versions of history. The first asserts that the principles of equality, liberty, and constitutional self-government were transparent lies, because the Revolution’s real purpose was to perpetuate slavery. The second defends those principles with understandable zeal, but too often downplays the tragic injustices that accompanied their triumph. The hopes of countless human beings were fulfilled by the American Revolution, but the hopes of countless others were crushed.

Because these rival histories are combustible and ignite upon contact, they endanger the hard-won wisdom idling on the tracks. Coming to the rescue is The American Revolution, the twelve-hour historical documentary directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt that debuted on PBS last November. To friends who after a quick look pronounce the series “boring” and “didactic,” I’d say give it a chance. It’s no ordinary documentary, even by Burns’s exacting standards. It’s a labor of love that requires—and rewards—close attention by adapting a great deal of scholarship to a format proven to be digestible by all kinds of people. The exact opposite of doom-scrolling, the Burns style of filmmaking is popular precisely because it gives the viewer time to think.

I do have one substantive criticism: the series’ neglect of religion. This is a real oversight because, as Alexis de Tocqueville saw clearly from the vantage point of the 1830s, religion played a very different role in the American Revolution than it did in the French. The Americans fought with their churches against the British king, resulting in what historian Sydney Ahlstrom in A Religious History of the American People (1972) called a “complete absence of anticlericalism,” while the French fought against both the Bourbon monarchy and the Catholic Church, giving their revolution a bitter aftertaste of anticlericalism. In Tocqueville’s cogent summary: “In France, I had seen the spirits of religion and freedom almost always marching in different directions. In America, I found them intimately linked together in joint reign.”

Several of the founders were deists, but as David L. Holmes argues in his illuminating book, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (2006), their outlook was nonetheless strongly marked by a faith in Providence. And they would likely have appreciated this line from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most famous speech, given during the 1963 March on Washington: “With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” Though not an exact quote, the line resonates with a number of Biblical passages, especially the prophecy in Daniel 2 that a stone “not cut by human hands” will destroy all earthly rulers and establish the eternal kingdom of God.

Accepting the Hard Facts

In a recent interview with co-directors Botstein and Schmidt, I asked how they managed to find enough images and sounds to fill a lengthy series about a historical period that, while exceedingly rich in written material, predates photography, recording, and film. Their answer was “time,” because it took nine years to assemble a sufficiently large array of visual and auditory materials. They might also have said “money,” because a lot of those materials do not come cheap. It helps that ever since Burns received his first grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 1977, his production company, Florentine Films, has maintained a partnership with both the NEH and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), as well as a solid donor base.

It was time and money well spent, though the best part is probably the least costly. I am referring to the interviews with Gordon Wood, Joseph Ellis, Annette Gordon-Reed, Colin Calloway, the late Bernard Bailyn, and the more than 20 other historians and writers whose work informed the narration, which was written by Geoffrey C. Ward and read by Peter Coyote (both long-time Burns veterans). These interviews can be seen in their entirety on the PBS website, and the clips used in the series make clear the scholars’ divergent concerns and perspectives. Rather than know-it-all talking heads, they come off as colleagues sparring on Zoom. But that is the point. Dissonance is preferable to harmony, especially when the facts are hard to accept.

From today’s perspective, the least acceptable fact is that the founders, for all their condemnations of slavery and expressed admiration for Native American dignity, could not conceive of the United States becoming a continent-sized democratic republic in which people of European descent lived on equal terms with people of African and Native descent. At the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, the colonial population of North America was approaching 2 million, one-fifth of whom were enslaved. There is no accurate count of the Native population, but it is estimated to have been significantly larger than the rest. And Native nations controlled 70-80% of the land.

At the risk of deploring what has already been relentlessly deplored, it is worth pondering the near-total absence of these populations in the elegant portraits and grand battle tableaux displayed in our museums and government buildings. Executed in the highly artificial style of 18th-century British and European history painting, these are the images most people have in mind when envisioning the American Revolution. And that is unfortunate, because even at the time, they were viewed with skepticism by those who knew the story best.

For example, in his 2001 biography, John Adams, David McCullough reports that a few years before the famous painter John Trumbull undertook his colossal Declaration of Independence, Adams had cautioned him by saying, “Truth, nature, fact, should be your sole guide. Let not our posterity be deluded with fictions under the pretense of poetical or graphical license.” Trumbull ignored him, clearly, and painted an event that never happened, giving it all the liveliness of a waxwork. But as usual, Abigail Adams cut to the chase. Trumbull’s paintings, she commented in a letter to her sister, Elizabeth, were meant to “command the admirations of future ages,” and prevent the key “characters and actions…from ever passing away into the dark abyss of time.”

But that abyss is not entirely dark. In his magisterial study Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas (2005), David Hackett Fischer argues that while rank-and-file soldiers in the war “did not write extended texts and treatises on liberty and freedom,” they did leave “[c]omplex symbols of these ideas…painted on their battle flags, etched into their musket stocks, carved upon their powder horns, and embroidered on their coats and hats.”

Many of those artifacts have survived, and when properly used, they can forge a connection with the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children of all colors and creeds who, after playing their part in the War of Independence, passed into that same dark abyss. I also asked Botstein and Schmidt why they hadn’t enlisted the thousands of history buffs who every year re-enact famous battles from the past. Their answer was that they didn’t want the audience to feel “tricked” into thinking their film was a drama.

So, they did something similar but different. With the cooperation of historic locations such as Sturbridge Village, Mount Vernon, and Williamsburg, they filmed the skilled printers, blacksmiths, carpenters, dressmakers, weavers, wigmakers, and cooks who delight visitors with demonstrations of period tools and machines. They also filmed military re-enactors, but without presuming to dramatize battles. For reasons of privacy, the faces of these people are not shown. But a great deal of empathy and respect is evoked by simply watching their hands and bodies at work—while listening to just the right music, and to the voices of actors reading from the letters, petitions, and diaries of everyday people.

But at a certain point, faces and battle scenes are needed. To meet this need, the producers recruited a dozen or so gifted artists and illustrators who specialize in bringing history to life in ways undreamt of in the founding era. Two names that come to mind are Mark Maritato, whose painstakingly detailed oil paintings can be seen in the museums at several famous battle sites; and Greg Harlin, whose luminous watercolors evoke moods and weathers with great subtlety. These image-makers, and the music-makers who contributed to the soundtrack, deserve more credit than they get from most reviews. So, I applaud them here, not least for illuminating Abigail Adams’s dark abyss.

Dealing with Diversity

The American Revolution does not “celebrate” diversity so much as straightforwardly report the variety of ethnic, religious, and regional backgrounds that existed in the colonies at the time. To start with the population defined as “white,” the majority were from England, Scotland, and Ireland. But there were also significant numbers from the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and other parts of Europe.

To complicate things further, the white population belonged to 13 different colonies, each of which considered itself a separate nation. The series quotes General Thomas Gage, the commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, belittling the First Continental Congress in 1774: “Their plan is to frighten and intimidate. But supposing the worst, you have nothing to fear from anyone but the New England provinces…. As for the Southern people they talk very high, but it’s nothing more than words…. [T]heir numerous slaves in the bowells of their country, and the Indians at their backs, will always keep them quiet.”

The point is underscored by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Atkinson, who has this to say about George Washington:

He shows up in Cambridge in early July, 1775, as a Virginian commanding, almost exclusively, New England militiamen. He doesn’t know what to make of them; they don’t know quite what to make of him. He has nothing good to say about New Englanders, privately. They’re almost from different countries.

As for African Americans, the series includes them in ways that go beyond their bondage. Apart from a few period pieces, there are no images of slave ships, shackles, auction blocks, labor in fields, or whippings. The black people we see are active participants, not passive victims. It is true that a larger number served in the British army than in the American, because a few British commanders promised them freedom. Those commanders were hardly abolitionists, though. They needed labor, and on their Southern campaigns, they hoped to terrify white rebels with the specter of slave rebellions.

Because the Continental Army, by contrast, was always struggling to fill its ranks, it welcomed free blacks from the beginning, and over time turned a blind eye to the legal status of others. But even in the North, it was dicey to include emancipation among the goals of what was called the Cause. There is much more to this story, but to quote from an excellent summary by Adam E. Zielinski of the American Battlefield Trust:

The complexities are part of the reason why these stories have remained on the margins of our general knowledge of the time period. The lack of simplicity leaves many to fumble the truth…. For many African Americans, the choice has always been freedom, and the many who served during the American Revolution is further proof of how much they were willing to sacrifice to obtain it.

Also present are the Native peoples, whose spacious lands are clearly delineated on maps. But equally clear are the myriad ways in which each nation, as they were called, sought to save itself by leveraging its alliances with the British, French, and Americans, while competing with and undercutting one another.

The exception, for a while, was the Iroquois Confederacy, an alliance of six linguistically related tribes—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora—whose lands formed a natural barrier between French Canada and the British colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Some scholars have argued that the Iroquois Confederacy inspired both the 1754 Albany Plan of Union, an early effort by Benjamin Franklin to unite the fractious colonies, and the 1777 Articles of Confederation. This argument is easily refuted by tracing the intellectual roots of both the Albany Plan and the 1777 Articles of Confederation to the usual sources in Western political thought and British common law. Indeed, both documents would likely be the same if the Iroquois Confederation had never existed.

And by August 1777 it no longer did. Looking back on a fatal split between the Oneida, who sided with the American Patriots, and Mohawks and Senecas, who sided with the British, the Mohawk scholar Darren Bonaparte calls it “the all-time worst-case scenario, where we’re actually killing each other in combat. For what? So somebody else can claim our land?”

Toward the end of the series, when Franklin, Adams, John Jay, and Henry Laurens sign the Treaty of Paris with their former enemy, the British, while ignoring the concerns of their French and Indian allies, Joseph Ellis says what no one wants to hear: “The losers in the negotiation of Paris are the Native Americans.” He is right. It’s not a contest, but there is a difference between the Africans, who looked back at the past and saw themselves being torn from their world; and the Native peoples, who looked ahead to the future and saw their world being torn from them.

A Cartoon and a Tune

In a 1751 letter to a fellow printer, Franklin pays the Iroquois a backhanded compliment: “It would be a strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.” To reinforce the point, he published a cartoon in the Pennsylvania Gazette showing a snake cut into eight pieces under the slogan “Join, or Die.” The cartoon is shown on the screen, and then the narrator informs us that “Twenty years later, ‘Join, or Die’ would be a rallying cry in the most consequential revolution in history.”

In episode 5, this prediction comes true. One of several real but obscure people whose stories are woven through the series, John Greenwood was eight years old on October 1, 1768, when 14 British warships and armed transports dropped anchor in Boston Harbor, aimed their cannons at the city, and began ferrying redcoats ashore. We don’t see Greenwood, but the actor Joe Keery reads these words from Greenwood’s journal: “I was so fond of hearing the fife and drum played by the British that somehow or another, I got an old split fife, and fixed it by puttying up the crack to make it sound, and then learned to play several tunes. I believe it was the sole cause of all my travails and disasters.”

That travail consisted of marching for weeks as a teenage fifer (not with the British, of course, but with the Continental Army), crossing the ice-locked Delaware River with General Washington, witnessing the surprise attack on the Hessian barracks at Trenton, and returning home half-starved and so infested with lice that his father put his ragged garments in a hot oven. We also learn that Greenwood became President Washington’s favorite dentist, because the false teeth he made didn’t hurt as much as all the others.

Then Franklin’s cartoon reappears. In 1779, John Greenwood went to sea aboard the Cumberland, one of many American privateering ships that during the Southern phase of the war made a great deal of money by seizing British vessels and relieving them of their cargo. And as Greenwood recalls, “Every ship had the right, or took it, to wear what kind of fancy flag the captain pleased. Captain Manley’s flag was a very singular one, with a pine tree painted green, and under the tree the representation of a large rattlesnake cut into 13 pieces, then in large black letters, ‘Join or Die.’”

This tale is bound up with another. In my interview with the producers, David Schmidt told me that he had grown up in Virginia, and as a boy played the fife for visitors to Colonial Williamsburg. One of his favorite tunes was a Scottish melody called “O’er the Water to Charlie,” and while researching music for the series, he discovered that it had also been a favorite of John Greenwood, who had learned it from a British soldier’s fife book.

That tune became a staple of the American side as well as the British, and we hear it in a number of scenes in which soldiers are marching. But the most affecting use of it comes in episode 5, when 18,000 British soldiers under a weary and dissatisfied General Henry Clinton are slogging their way through rural New Jersey in a sweltering heat wave and clouds of mosquitoes, hoping to provoke General Washington into trying to stop them.

The American soldiers are still weak from the privations of the previous winter in Valley Forge, so as Rick Atkinson explains, “Washington has decided that he is not going to directly intercept this column, which is very strong. He wants to nick at them, and peck at them from the rear, and make life miserable for them and watch for an opening.” We hear the actor Christian Friedel speaking the words of Johann Ewald, a Hessian mercenary: “The whole province was in arms, following us with Washington’s army, constantly surrounding us on our marches and besieging our camps. Each step cost human blood.”

Then, on the morning of June 24, 1778, when Clinton’s army had seen nearly 500 desertions, many of them Hessians seeking refuge in nearby German-speaking towns, the moon passed over the sun, and the world was plunged into darkness.

While listening to the narrator trace the North American path of that eclipse, we see images of a recent eclipse that the producers went to considerable trouble to film. The resulting sequence begins with the words, “Indians and Spanish colonists in Mexico and Texas,” and the image of an eclipse peeking through clouds; followed by “Spanish New Orleans and British Mobile” and an eclipse seen through the thin fabric of a rippling flag; “the Muscogee Creeks on the Chattahoochee River” and an eclipse above a tall pine tree; “the Maroon communities of self-emancipated former slaves hidden in the Great Dismal Swamp” and an eclipse reflected in a grassy creek; “Williamsburg, where lightning bugs were seen as at night” and a black screen with fireflies; and finally, “Washington’s army as it followed the British into New Jersey” and an eclipse giving way to the morning sun.

And throughout, we hear John Greenwood’s beloved Scottish melody played not on a fife but on a harp. It is possibly the most beautiful sequence in a series full of them. And the way it is entwined with the rest tells us all we need to know about the care, indeed reverence, that went into the making of this masterpiece.