It’s a fresh take on history’s giants

Most of us have learned the grand stories of the American revolution — Valley Forge and Bunker Hill and crossing the Delaware and more.
Many of them were epic; most were true. “What I learned in school was not wrong,” David Schmidt said. “It was just incomplete.”
Now the story gets filled out, in depth. PBS’ “The American Revolution” — a sprawling saga, produced by Ken Burns (see previous story),, Sara Botstein and Schmidt — is at 8 p.m. (repeating at 10) for six nights, starting Sunday, Nov. 16.
A few of the school-kid tales are jettisoned here. There’s no mention, Burns says, of “the chopping down a cherry tree and never telling a lie and throwing a dollar coin and don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes’ — all the kind of mythology.”
But often, we get things we’ve heard before, now with extra depth. And that starts at the top.
George Washington was, Burns said, “as we all are, a conflicted and complicated person.”
He had deep character flaws at home (he was a slaveowner) and at war (ordering the “total ruin” of villages built by tribes aligning with the British).
And he had flaws as a strategist. In two major battles (Long Island and Brandywine), he left a flank exposed, with disastrous results.
But Washington was also the consummate leader.
“It’s a combination of personal probity and virtue,” Burns said, “a kind of political savvy to be able to work with Congress, an ability to inspire people in the dead of night to fight.
“It’s also an ability to pick subordinate talent without fear of them overshadowing him. He’s really the one person you can say that about.”
Two scholars who worked on the film, Christopher Brown and Annette Gordon-Reed, feel Washington was essential. “He was the glue that held people together,” Gordon-Reed says in the film. “We would not have had a country without him.”
He was “risking his life all the time,” Burns said. He was “rash, riding out on the battlefield to stop a retreat at Monmouth or to lead people on at Princeton or at Kips Bay … where he could have been killed.”
And persisted. He was, Burns said, “one of the richest people in the country,” yet was basically “in a tent for most of the six-and-a-half years of the war.”
It was a revolutionary war that, at first, wasn’t about revolution at all. At first, Schmidt said, this wasn’t about creating a new nation. The idea was simply “standing up to tyranny, liberating Boston, restoring things to the way they used to be under the British Empire.”
There was room for compromise on both sides, Burns said. “You have this sense that at some point, somebody could have gone, ‘Okay, you’re right. What if we give you this?'”
There were many Americans who were British loyalists or were neutral, open to compromise. There were British leaders who fumed at the price of the war.
“You cannot conquer America,” William Pitt told his Parliament colleagues. “In three campaigns, we have done nothing and suffered much.”
Some other Englishmen agreed, Burns said. There were “great debates going on in Britain. (If) the hard-liners — the king and (his) prime ministers — had chosen to be conciliatory, who knows.”
They didn’t and others — Blacks, Native Americans, French, Germans, more — were pulled in on both sides, Schmidt said. “It’s a civil war. It’s a world war, fought between dozens of nations in North America and in Europe. It’s so many things.”
Each side had a point where it was near a decisive victory, Burns said. Then a fog rolled in, allowing the other to retreat.
So the war lingered, he said. It was a “bloody revolution, superimposed by a bloody civil war, superimposed by a bloody world war. The cast of characters is extraordinary.”
It had all the elements needed for a great documentary … and for creating a really interesting new nation.