In a large ballroom in Williamsburg, Virginia, representatives from around the nation gathered to talk about revolution.
With the 250th anniversary of our nation’s battle for independence soon to commence, planners of the American Revolution 250 Commission were discussing how to reignite common cause in Americans through the mechanism of our fight for nationhood. It would be no mean feat. Much like our forefathers, who plotted the course for independence from vastly divergent ideological viewpoints, the assembled men and women had to unify people at increasing loggerheads over the country’s future.
If I doubted whether efforts to amplify the memory of our bloody, seven-year battle for nationhood could be an antidote for the rancor and divisiveness of current domestic politics, the fervor of assembled delegates, historians, thought leaders, and beloved American storytellers Ken Burns and his Florentine Films co-producers Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, would soon extinguish my pessimism.
In the last decade, Burns, Botstein, and Schmidt have been filming The American Revolution, a six-part, 12-hour PBS documentary set to premiere in November. From the moment I sat with the filmmaking team at a small roundtable in a hidden-away media room, Burns was radiant with exuberance about their undertaking.
“The American Revolution is the best subject to regather our forces,” he told me. “When we tell the story of us, the U.S. and ‘us,’ we’re more of us than them, and that brings us together.”
Burns also promised that the filmmakers had not glossed over the era’s brutal warfare.
“Wars are violent, but we’re surrounded with nostalgia for the revolutionary period,” he said. “[Don’t] think that if we get into the fact that this was a bloody civil war, that will somehow diminish the great ideas. The great ideas are put in even greater relief by understanding that these are just ordinary people.”
“We’re a country that was also born in violence,” Botstein added. While previous documentarians of the conflict “either made it about the big ideas, leaving out the war, or made it about the war, sort of leaving out the big ideas,” the team’s new documentary will unite both aspects of the period.
“Viewers, hopefully, when they’re hearing about the big ideas, will be thinking about the people who are dying and being wounded and dealing with what it means to fight an 18th-century war with horrendous weather, disease, bayonets,” Botstein said.
Schmidt said it was important to show the “wildly varied” cast of historical figures who created the nation.
“Certain people that you wouldn’t expect necessarily get along, whether it’s back country farmers and wealthy merchants, whether it’s Anglicans and atheists, whether it’s black, white, native and the coalition they fought against was equally diverse,” Schmidt said. He explained that the breadth of voices “gives this opportunity for us to know the past better, see ourselves in it.”
In the afternoon, commission delegates got their first private glimpse of The American Revolution. Though we screened just a quarter hour of footage, it was decisive proof of the quality of the undertaking. The steadiness of Peter Coyote’s crisp narration, the rich-toned reenactments of historical events, the star-studded cast of voice actors who shook every mote of dust from centuries-old text, and Burns’s signature skill at bringing the still image to life made the past seem both familiar and sparkling new.
Burns and the team put flesh on the bones of the characters from our history books. Before describing how Thomas Paine’s renowned pamphlet Common Sense took off as an “accelerant for the colonies,” documentarians took a moment to unwrap Paine from his success. The author who inspired the Patriot cause survived two failed marriages, witnessed “his possessions auctioned off to pay his debts,” and had to be carried off the boat that brought him from England to Philadelphia while suffering from typhus, Coyote described. Rather than diminishing the importance of his contribution, Paine’s stumbling blocks painted our revolutionary hero as a whole human, flawed but capable of greatness.
The remainder of the conference was filled with sparks of insight from leaders and historians. Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson spoke to the audience about the “sepia tone” we have cast on a war in which a third of combat deaths were inflicted by bayonet, while discussing the second installment of his American Revolution trilogy, The Fate of the Day.
Carly Fiorina, the VA 250 national honorary chairwoman and chairwoman of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, gave a rousing speech about the importance of the semiquincentennial celebration. “When we do not know our history, when we do not care who or what came before us, when we no longer understand the foundation upon which our nation is built, then we do not know why we are Americans,” she said. “And our differences, which have always existed, tear us apart because we have no national identity that holds us together.”
Just as inspiring as Fiorina and Atkinson were delegates who chatted with me between sessions, eagerly telling me about their efforts in Virginia, Ohio, South Carolina, and at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center to bring Americans together in a world where so many forces are trying to split us apart.
As evening approached, delegates walked together to the lawn of the Colonial Governor’s Palace for a public viewing of The American Revolution. Though the forecast called for rain, onlookers of all ages had packed the grassy expanse, which was dotted with glowing torches emitting clouds of tarry smoke. Burns addressed the waiting crowd as darkness fell.
“The great novelist Richard Powers said that the best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view, and he was right,” he said. “But then he added, ‘The only thing that can do that is a good story.’ And we’ve devoted our entire professional lives to trying to figure out how to tell good stories about American history. And there is no story more important or more riveting than this one.”
Under a drizzle of cool spring rain, viewers stood, mesmerized, for a 25-minute preview that touched down in each of the documentary’s six segments. Some clips showed the high ideals we associate with our journey toward independence, while others showed the impact on women and everyday Americans. The final scenes focused on the conflict’s deeply grisly warfare, including when Gen. George Washington sent his men to attack British Gen. Sir William Howe at Germantown, Pennsylvania, in October 1777.
En route to the battle, colonists “found themselves face to face with the British light infantry, the same soldiers who had massacred so many of their comrades at [the Battle of] Paoli just two weeks earlier.” The colonists “pushed on with their bayonets and took ample vengeance for that night’s work. The rage and fury of the soldiers were not to be restrained,” the voice actor portraying Gen. Anthony Wayne explained.
Inside Germantown, Washington’s forces came across the largest home in the city, owned by Loyalist Benjamin Chew. British soldiers had occupied the house and waited behind 2-foot-thick stone walls with the order “to bayonet anyone who dared try to enter.” When Gen. Henry Knox “insisted that the house had to be taken,” American artillery “blew in the front door” as “Continentals from New Jersey repeatedly stormed the house and were cut down on the long and front steps as the siege at the Chew house went on.”
The screen displayed illustrator Howard Pyle’s 1898 oil painting The Attack upon the Chew House, which imagines British and American bodies stacked on the house’s stone steps, the smoke of the battle, and the jagged gashes that American cannons dug into an ornate white colonnade. Burns’s moving camera brings the painting to gruesome life, lending credence to a British soldier’s recollection that the Chew residence was left “riddled by cannonball and looked like a slaughterhouse because of the blood spattered around.”
‘WARFARE’ IS A ZOOMED-IN VIEW OF COMBAT STRIPPED TO ITS ESSENTIALS
After final scenes depicting the Battle of Yorktown and the British surrender in October 1781, the words of Johann Ewald, a German officer serving with the British military, rang through the night: “Who would have thought 100 years ago that out of this multitude of rebels would arise a people who could defy kings?”
Amid resounding applause and an explosive fireworks display, it was clear that onlookers had been moved. As I watched the semiquincentennial planners return to the conference, I thought of the great variety of efforts underway to celebrate American history around the nation and in the cities and counties where we do our daily living. I was certain that the historians, filmmakers, and history devotees at work could, together, reinvigorate the shared sense of identity our forefathers felt at the outset of our great American experiment.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News and the host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into nearly two decades of war and the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
