02: Revolutionary America

Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.

This line went down well with the crowd but brought the project’s limitations into focus. This kind of “just the facts” claim, while posing as humility, in fact masked Burns’ grandiosity. There is no story of the past that is told without a concept of historiography. Whatever you write, you are taking a stance on your subject and on the practice of history itself. The suggestion that other historians are not also interested in “show[ing] what happened” is, at best, careless.

But the advantage of Burns’ crowd-pleasing approach was plain: unrivaled reach. Even in this era of nasty fights over school curricula, his films have remained above the fra

n his denouncement of Trump at Stanford, he said, “I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known truth. History is a mysterious and malleable thing, constantly changing, not just as new information emerges, but as our own interests, emotions and inclinations change. Each generation rediscovers and reexamines that part of its past that gives its present new meaning, new possibility and new power.”

But the nature of that responsibility was precisely the big idea that was lost in the movie — for facts don’t speak for themselves. If they did, the facts of the revolution would not have inspired people as disparate as Confederate rebels and Martin Luther King, Jr.

for facts don’t speak for themselves.

Vignettes and battle dates won’t offer the American people what they need to think through the toughest questions raised by the country’s founders: What is true liberty and when is it time to give up on politics and take more drastic measures to secure it?

utphin, a Black man, was born into enslavement on January 1, 1747, in the New Jersey county of Hunterdon,1 according to his master Guisbert Bogart’s2 Bible.3

That trial by jury is the inherent and invaluable right of every British subject in these colonies.

But his majesty has no right to land a single armed man on our shores, and those whom he sends here are liable to our laws made for the suppression and punishment of riots, routs, and unlawful assemblies; or are hostile bodies, invading us in defiance of law.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us

sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people,

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us

The next day, Washington’s general orders spoke of the urgent need for “Subordination & Discipline (the Life and Soul of an Army) which next under providence, is to make us formidable to our enemies, honorable in ourselves, and respected in the world.

—the humble prayer book still serves as a key intellectual artifact of revolution.

The laity’s handwritten edits in prayer book margins—scraping off “King of Kings” and pasting over rote prayers for the royal family—operated as cultural cues for political change. At critical moments in the war, as colonists endured sieges and made sacrifices, they edited their prayer books to endorse turns in popular thought at the local level

The poor Wretches, fingering their Beads, chanting Latin, not a Word of which they understood, their Pater Nosters and Ave Maria’s. Their holy Water—their Crossing themselves perpetually—their Bowing to the Name of Jesus, wherever they hear it—their Bowings, and Kneelings, and Genuflections before the Altar. The Dress of the Priest was rich with Lace—his Pulpit was Velvet and Gold. The Altar Piece was very rich—little Images and Crucifixes about—Wax Candles lighted up. But how shall I describe the Picture of our Saviour in a Frame of Marble over the Altar at full Length upon the Cross, in the Agonies, and the Blood dropping and streaming from his Wounds.

The poor Wretches, fingering their Beads, chanting Latin, not a Word of which they understood, their Pater Nosters and Ave Maria’s. Their holy Water—their Crossing themselves perpetually—their Bowing to the Name of Jesus, wherever they hear it—their Bowings, and Kneelings, and Genuflections before the Altar. The Dress of the Priest was rich with Lace—his Pulpit was Velvet and Gold. The Altar Piece was very rich—little Images and Crucifixes about—Wax Candles lighted up. But how shall I describe the Picture of our Saviour in a Frame of Marble over the Altar at full Length upon the Cross, in the Agonies, and the Blood dropping and streaming from his Wounds.

I am wearied to Death with the Life I lead. The Business of the Congress is tedious, beyond Expression. This Assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every Man in it is a great Man—an orator, a Critick, a statesman, and therefore every Man upon every Question must shew his oratory, his Criticism and his Political Abilities.

“It was formerly a custom on these anniversaries for ye lower class of people to celebrate the evening in a manner peculiar to themselves,

I think with you, that nothing is of more importance for the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue. Wise and good men are, in my opinion, the strength of a state: much more so than riches or arms, which, under the management of Ignorance and Wickedness, often draw on destruction, instead of providing for the safety of a people. And though the culture bestowed on many should be successful only with a few, yet the influence of those few and the service in their power, may be very great.

Your objection about the politeness of Philadelphia, and your imagined rusticity, is mere compliment; and your diffidence of yourself absolutely groundless.

one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves.

There is no evidence in 1776 of a rising movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, as the 1619 Project erroneously asserts, nor is there any evidence the British government was eager to do so

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety

once a slave reached British lines anywhere in North America, his or her status as property ended; no one could claim that he or she belonged to someone else. Also, former slaves did not have to fight in the army to gain freedom; they could do whatever they chose to do. And as British commander-in-chief in America, Clinton's order applied to the entire country as official policy.

In 1783, as peace talks neared their conclusion, Sir Guy Carleton, Clinton's successor as commander-in-chief, established, with the full support of the British government in London, the policy that all former slaves who reached the British lines before November 30, 1782 (when an initial peace agreement was signed) were free and therefore could not be considered as property under the terms of any peace treaty. Carleton restated the policy directly to George Washington in a meeting on May 6, 1783, telling the Virginia plantation owner that he had no intention of returning any black who had gained freedom behind British lines and, in fact, was already in the process of evacuating them to "Nova Scotia or wherever else he [or she] may think proper." Almost 4,000 former slaves left New York with the British in 1783. Furthermore, loyalists could not claim any compensation for slaves as property left behind or seized by patriots.

Since the publication of Bernard Bailyn’s introduction to Pamphlets of the American Revolution in 1965, we have known that colonists expressed fears of a British conspiracy to enslave them.[4] Yet we have paid little attention to Native American fears that colonists intended to annihilate them. How widespread were these fears?