The story that “The American Revolution” tells is of the emergence of the most important ideas of the modern world, fought over in a bloody and courageous rebellion against tyranny which was at once a civil war and a global war whose notions of freedom and slavery and conquest and independence tangled together the fates of British soldiers and American militiamen, Lenape diplomats and Seneca warriors, German mercenaries and French sailors, Akan men and Igbo women, backwoods pioneers and city ladies, the free and the unfree, the rich and the poor. It’s a canvas, part Bruegel, part Goya, a political carrousel, a teeming, moving, terrifying story, relating a chain of events forged of bravery and betrayal, of ferocity and torment, of ambition and terror, and yet a chain held together by the single organizing idea, as Kamensky points out, of possibility, of a sense of living on the edge of a knife: “Everybody on every side, including people who were denied even the ownership of themselves, had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.” Throughout history, humans had been ruled by tyrants and armies, without their consent. Americans fought for the freedom to rule themselves, and, more miraculously still, they won. Even after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, King George III told Parliament that he remained determined “to restore to my deluded subjects in America that happy and prosperous condition which they formerly derived from a due obedience to the laws.” Parliament, though, voted to give up on America. As the wryly smiling Stephen Conway, a distinguished British military historian, observes in the PBS series’ stirring final episode, “The American Revolution changed the world.”
The series’ achievement lies in honoring the dignity and meaning of the founding’s revolutionary ideals, and the sacrifices of all who fought for them, while taking an unsparing look at the war’s cruelties and costs, especially for women, Black Americans, and Native nations denied the equality, liberty, and sovereignty the Revolution promised. The Revolution that failed is the Revolution the Trump Administration cannot bear for Americans to know and mourn. The Revolution that succeeded is the one some American institutions are determined to ignore.
And maybe this is a balm, or false comfort, but “The American Revolution” is also a reminder that this very division was a feature of the eighteenth century, too, when there seemed, to many observers, to be so many different kinds of Americans that it was exceedingly difficult to believe they could ever constitute a people. No army in history seemed ever to have been more ragged and motley and mongrel and polyglot than the Continental, rich and poor, learned and illiterate, from boys to old men, skilled and unskilled, born all over the world, speaking dozens of languages, believing in different gods and in no god. It beggared belief that they could fight as one, and for no more than an idea. As a Hessian officer asked in his diary at the close of the war, “Who would have thought a hundred years ago that out of this multitude of rabble would arise a people who could defy kings?”