Because of course it’s about land. This global war is the fourth war over the prize of North America. And what represents that prize? It’s that land. But the land has also been inhabited for, you pick the number, 12,000 to 22,000 years, by other people who do not have the same tradition of landownership. They’re not disinterested in the land. As we openly [quote in the first episode], “White people don’t think we know how valuable the land is. We know how valuable it is.” This is the open door to just say, “Well, they’re really savages, and they don’t really care about it.”
“We might as well take it.”
Someone points out in the film they didn’t call this the Eastern Seaboard Congress. They didn’t put George Washington in charge of the Eastern Seaboard Army. They called it the Continental Army, the Continental Congress. They knew what direction they were headed.
The Brits get a “be careful what you wish for” [moment] when they win what we call the French and Indian War and everyone else calls the Seven Years’ War. Their treasury is bankrupt, they’ve got the most far-flung empire on the earth, and they can’t protect people. So they say, “You can’t cross the Appalachians.”
The colonies are going, “What? That was our whole plan.” The new immigrants are going, “What? We were going to own land for the first time in 1,000 years.” And it’s enraging the mega-speculators like Franklin and Washington, who’ve bought up tens of thousands of lands to sell to those colonists. So this is a big deal. Land’s a big deal. You can still get an A on the test if you say, “Taxes and representation.” But it’s more complicated.
The thought that democracy wasn’t really an intention of the dispute but a by-product of it, some folks would call that a very radical contention.
Yeah, but it’s organic and it’s true. And it then becomes, to me, weirdly inspirational. John Adams does not intend to extend this to anybody that isn’t a white male who has property. And yet, if you’re going to win this war—he doesn’t fire a gun. George Washington does. Thomas Jefferson doesn’t. But Alexander Hamilton does, Aaron Burr does, James Madison does.
The people who are going to win it are the teenagers and the ne’er-do-wells and the felons and the recent immigrants without any property and the second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance. They’re going to win the war for Washington, and they have to be accommodated. And so what you find is that this elite aristocracy that will run things has got to also acknowledge that there is a bottom-up story of the people who did the fighting and the dying.