The film honestly and passionately depicts the oppression and dispossession that the American slaves and Native Americans were fighting to resist, mostly without success. The film does not reduce the Patriot cause to these injustices. It honors the courage, skill, and sacrifices of those who fought; it celebrates General Washington as the indomitable man who managed the impossible task of keeping the continental army together despite countless blunders and setbacks, then boldly seized victory at precisely the right moment. But when it comes to explaining what all this patriotic heroism and sacrifice was for, the film is noncommittal and vague, occasionally almost unintelligible.
Consider the historian’s commentary that Burns chose to open the final episode:
I think that to believe in America, rooted in the American Revolution, is to believe in possibility. That to me is the extraordinary thing about the patriot side of the fight. I think everybody on every side, including people who were denied even the ownership of themselves, had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.
The peril and promise of speaking extemporaneously in response to interview questions is that sometimes you will spontaneously say something brilliant and sometimes you stumble into talking nonsense. So it is no criticism of this accomplished historian—Jane Kamensky of Harvard and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation—to point out that this is meaningless. What is significant is that Burns chose this word salad to open his final episode.
Toward the end of the series, after General Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown, the narrator says, “The world would never be the same.” But what had changed? The final 40 minutes describe how peace between Great Britain and the United States closed the opening to freedom briefly available to American slaves and betrayed the Native Americans. The Americans demanded that all runaways be returned to their masters; the British honored its promise to the escaped slaves of rebels while enforcing their loyal subjects’ right to reclaim theirs. The Native Americans who fought as allies on both sides went unmentioned in the treaty between the United States and Britain. For them, “there would be no peace. As the United States moved inexorably westward, Native Americans would fight for their independence for another century,” the narrator relates. If the world had changed in these respects, it was for the worse.