Hi, this is Kevin Diaz from Delmarva Public Media. I'm talking today with American filmmaker Ken Burns, noted for his award-winning documentary works on public television about jazz baseball, the Civil War, and other topics in American history and culture. His next project premiering November 16th on PBS is a six part 12 hour documentary about the American Revolution, our country's founding struggle for independence. It's also a book by Ken Burns and historian Geoffrey Ward. Mr. Burns has graciously agreed to chat with us about the project and maybe even talk a little bit about the Eastern shore. So Ken, welcome to Delmarva Public Media.
Ken Burns:
It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Kevin Diaz:
So obviously much has been written and dissected about the American Revolution in the last 250 years. Did you find any little fact noise or themes in your research that surprised you? Anything that made you see the whole episode differently?
Ken Burns:
I'm a storyteller, so I choose a subject because I'm drawn to it. I don't want to tell people what they should know. I'd rather share with them the process of discovery. So every day of the nearly 10 years of working on this, we began this when Barack Obama still had 13 months to go in his presidency. So a lot of water under the bridge, and it's been allowed us to work with scholars, not just on camera but behind the scenes to be able to refine the story, to tell multiple perspectives on it. We have wives of German officers who become characters. We have little girls 10 years old when the revolution begin. We have a Patriot soldiers 14, 15 years old. We have kings, we have prime ministers, we have British generals, we have the whole cast of characters in Philadelphia. We have Washington, we have native people within the colonies and on the border colonies. We have free and enslaved African-Americans. All of them give you a perspective on this war, which we tend to think of as our own struggle, and it's in fact the third or the fourth global war for the great prize of North America that will involve more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American.
Kevin Diaz:
Sometimes I believe you and others have referred to this not only as a revolutionary war but a civil war
Since most of our listeners live around the Chesapeake Bay, the eastern shore of Maryland or the Delmarva Peninsula. I want to get regional here. We all know in important ways, the Chesapeake Bay region was the cradle of American colonization from the lost Roanoke colony to Jamestown. So there's this plantation economy that grows up in the region that has favorite families with strong connections to English nobility like the Calverts and Lord Baltimore. So I believe were pretty much completely replaced after the war. Did your investigations or the stories that you found uncover any evidence of a particularly strong loyalist sentiment in this region?
Ken Burns:
Every place was region. You're absolutely right. This is a civil war. In fact, our civil war is a sectional war, and civil wars usually involve great deaths of civilian populations in addition to whatever the armies are doing. And in the case of our American Civil War from 1861 to 65, there are very few civilian deaths outside of Missouri and eastern Kansas. For example, the greatest battle ever fought in North America, the biggest battle is Gettysburg and there are two, maybe one dead civilians, and even the siege of Atlanta popularized in Gone With the Wind has maybe 20 people across the civilians. But in our American revolution is a civil war. They're loyalists among, their loyalists are killing patriots. Patriots are killing loyalists. There are disaffected people who are trying to stay out of harm's way who are suspect by both sides. There are some battles, particularly in the southern regions in which you might have a British officer leading the loyalists, but every casualty besides that person is an American killing other Americans.
And that's a part of our story, which I think we've ignored. We've sort of tended to wrap the revolution in sort of bloodless gallant myth as if the barnacles of sentimentality were enough, maybe because we're afraid that some of those big ideas happening in Philadelphia will be diminished. I found the exact opposite to be true when you lift the lid off and make these people who we don't have any photographs or news reels. So it's all the cartooniness of paintings when you become familiar with them. And we have a beautiful cast of the greatest actors in the world reading off camera, the voices and the journals and the diaries and the militaries batches of every from Washington and Adams and Franklin and Jefferson to these so-called ordinary people. And it brings alive this story and it makes the new ideas of the revolution even that much more powerful, even that much more compelling. And I believe every single person within the sound of my voice will have something to hang onto. It'll be something new going, wow, I didn't know that. And that's a portal into our origin story and to know that story is more important now than it's ever been in our history.
Kevin Diaz:
It sounds like there's a lot of the focus is giving a sense of the people. I'm wondering how much of a sense of place is there particularly for a region like ours, which is very distinct, the Chesapeake Bay region. There were no great battles here unless you count Yorktown along the New York River, which feeds into the Bay, but the Bay was also,
Ken Burns:
It's so central. The main character of our film is the Beauty of the North American continent. And we've been filming for years and years and years filming Reenactors going about their business. But of course, the Chesapeake Bay is central. It is a Howe's army that comes up the Chesapeake and lands at Head of Elk and wins the battle of Brandywine because of another mistake. Washington has made tactical mistake as a battle and ends up in disaster, Germantown, all the while Philadelphia has fallen. It is that route that Washington will return with Rochambeau from Westchester County where they've convened Rochambeau coming from Newport, Rhode Island, Washington, sort of trying to figure out a way to attack New York, but realizing that the French fleet, which is only going to be there for a little bit, is going to block the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay to the British.
They move out and fight a battle out there, and it's sort of a draw, but the British have to withdraw. It's allowed time for big, heavy French guns to come on ships and slip by into the Chesapeake Bay. The battle of the capes is arguably the most important naval battle in American history. And then of course, these big guns sail up the York River, I mean up the James River and are there and move from Williamsburg to Yorktown. That is going to be the final de Gras in the British efforts to hang on to their colonies. It's just central Marylanders are fighting in the largest battle of the revolution and Virginians as well in the Battle of Long Island, which many people don't realize that what is now Brooklyn was the side of the largest battle. Also another disastrous tactical mistake by Washington who nonetheless emerges without a doubt as the most important person to the success of our country. You can go on and on and on. And so the waterways, the rivers, the Delaware, the Chesapeake Bay, the Lake Champlain, the Hudson, the Cooper, the Ashley, the York, all of these are the highways of the armies of that time, even though they are moving down the Great Wagon Road sometimes, sometimes moving as Washington and Cebo did overland and also by sea to get to Williamsburg. And that sea would be of course the Chesapeake.
Kevin Diaz:
And when you're talking about the role of the Maryland soldiers in the Battle of Long Island or Brooklyn, that's the famous Maryland 400. Correct. They basically did a rear guard action. It was suicidal and they allowed a Dunkirk type evacuation for Washington's troops.
Ken Burns:
It's about as bad as you could imagine. They are the extreme right of the American lines, the British. That's where the battle begins then it seems to move to the center. And because Washington has left his left flank open through the Jamaica Pass, comes a big army that surrounds the army in the Middle General Sullivan of New Hampshire. There's surrenders of armies including Alexander's where the Marylanders are, but at some point they have to retreat across the swamp. Many people die to get back to Brooklyn Heights. Many people drown. Many people are sitting ducks, but it's the Marylanders who really hold off to give a chance for a large part of Washington's right flank to sort of reconvene behind the ramparts of Brooklyn Heights where it is assume the British will wrap them up and for some reason they hold off. A rain comes then a fog and Washington's able to evacuate to New York miraculously and live to fight another day.
Kevin Diaz:
As I understand that, I believe one of the first flashes, a lot of people think of Lexington, Concord rather Massachusetts, but I believe it was in Annapolis about 10 years before the war started where there were tax revolts and people chasing away tax collectors.
Ken Burns:
Yeah, they're everywhere. From Georgia to New Hampshire. There are skirmishes. You've got the central area of rebellion is Boston. And that's why Gage sends and accompanies regiments of troops that are there not to protect Boston, but to police it. And that's the standing army that is at the heart of our civil liberties, that you don't have a standing army. And so what you have coming out of that is first the Boston Massacre and then later the Boston Tea Party, and then finally this attempt to round up the rebel leaders and get their ammunition and is an expedition from Boston across the Cambridge, across opening the Cambridge marshes, the opening of the Charles River to Lexington where the battle begins and then onto Concord where the battle turns and it becomes a route the British barely escape back to Boston where they're locked in for many, many months.
But there are places all the way through in the intervening years where people are tar and feathering customs, people running off tax collectors doing that. And every state is participating. And a lot of it has to do with the committees of correspondence with the Sons of Liberty, these people who are in connection with each other for the first time, the adversity of being denied the ability to cross the Appalachians and steal Indian land and taxes without representation. The British have won the French and Indian War, what is called by everyone else, the seven years War, another global war, but they're bankrupt. And so what they're doing is they're passing on the expense of protection to the colonies who just don't want it. They want their own elected representatives to decide what they're going to do. They have no representation in parliament. And so the taxes and representation added to the Indian land becomes the motivating force, whether in Georgia or New Hampshire.
Kevin Diaz:
I was going to ask you if you delve into what happened at the end of the struggle, I mean in Annapolis, that's where the fledgling confederation government basically took its seat and Washington famously resigned his commission there. Although yeah, the [peace] treaty was signed in Paris, but it seems like the action was right there in Annapolis. It seems like Annapolis has a certain centrality in this whole story.
Ken Burns:
Well, that moment may be one of the finest in all of world history. He does this twice, George Washington, which makes him, as George III said. George the III is not the buffoon, the madman that he's painted out and sort of superficial and popular cultural sort of ways. When he heard that Washington had not only resigned his military commission, which he does in Annapolis, when he could have been, and anybody would've been happy to have him be the general in charge of this UTA that had overthrown the British. He retired and then when he was brought back to help lend his name and his credence to the constitutional convention in the summer of 1787 back in Philadelphia, he helps forge the compromises. Some of them, we have to say tragic and some of them just brilliant and then agrees as he elected unanimously to serve as president of the United States and then gives that up after two terms.
So twice, he gave us this example of the fact that the office was more important than the individual, that it wasn't, this is what kings do. They set themselves up in sort of perpetual succession, something Thomas Payne had argued so beautifully in common sense against. And Washington took that at the heart. And even though he was one of the richest people in the country, the equivalent of a billionaire many times over, even though he had amassed all this personal and political and military power, he gave it up. And there's some example in the American story of giving up power that is at the heart of it, that the system, the ideas, the laws are more important than any other person. And of course the beginning gesture of that happens in Annapolis when he resigned.
Kevin Diaz:
Are there any particular characters, I know your style is to look at people and talk about their backgrounds and then draw them into the history. Are there any particular characters that come to mind for you that might represent this particular region that we're talking about?
Ken Burns:
Well, I think the closest to it would be Betsy Ambler from Yorktown, a wing of Chesapeake, just a little ways up the York River. She's 10 years old when the war begins. It's so beautiful that you asked that because her family were refugees. They were moving around the whole time trying to escape the British. The father had been a customs collector, lost that job had been well to do. So they had some options. They could go to different plantations. They were always escaping. The mother had a frail health mentally and also gave birth to a baby who Betsy's father said was his only independent girl because she had been born, Lucy was her name after the declaration. But we follow her through every episode and never really gets to, comes back to Yorktown, then has to leave again as the main battle is heating up and never goes back afterwards.
But it was interesting that a few years later after the revolution, her sister Lucy said, I don't remember anything about it. And so Betsy sat down and wrote the most beautiful memoir about what it was like. And so we've distributed that along with dozens of other characters, some of whom you've heard of before, like Nathaniel Green, the ex Quaker pacifist from Rhode Island or Benedict Arnold, who's one of our best generals until he isn't. And I think people will be interested in understanding the whole full story. And of course, George Washington at the center of it, Adams and the extraordinary correspondence with his wife Abigail. But then there's John Greenwood, a 14-year-old Pfeiffer who joins up right after Lexington in Concord and serves for many years. Or Joseph Plum Martin, who's 15 from a Connecticut regiment who follows it all the way through all of these collectively, the wife of a German general who is bringing her three small children across the Atlantic to join her husband in what will be the triumph for Burgos army at Saratoga.
And it doesn't happen. And it's his defeat that causes the French to come in with their bill equivalent of billions of dollars of aid and navies and armies that permits the ultimate victory of the United States. But it's so interesting. There's a dynamic going on in the Caribbean. The British have 26 colonies. The poorest, the least profitable, not poorest, the least profitable for them are the 13 colonies. Only Virginia and South Carolina are profitable. And you can figure out why, because their entire foreign economy depends on slave labor. And it's maybe half the population, maybe not quite in South Carolina are enslaved human beings. But in Jamaica it's 90% Barbados, it's 90%. And so this is the great engine of the British economy. And so you have this colonies because they produce and they're their population's growing. They've got a dynamism to them. And so the British talk about the domino theory just as we do in Vietnam.
They talk about pacifying provinces just as we do in Vietnam. It didn't work out then, didn't work out with Vietnam. And so what you have, we did a film on Vietnam and we kept people, the soldiers, the journalists, they kept saying, this is like the American Revolution. We're going, what a son writes home, he signed up to fight in Vietnam. And he says to his mom, boy, if I were a Vietnamese, I'd be fighting on the side of the vie Vietnam when an American soldier, Phil Caputo, later to become a celebrated journalist, went through a village and everybody was glaring at them. He said, this is what it must've been when the British were occupying Massachusetts. So you have all of these funny little parallels and portals to different moments in time, wormholes, I think they call it in science fiction that would connect us. But to me, it was making this come alive, not just from the top down, which is very important, but also from the bottom up and introducing literally to you scores of people that most of our audience has never heard of before.
Kevin Diaz:
It sounds like it's going to be a very sobering film.
Ken Burns:
Well, it's sobering. It's exhilarating. It's funny at times. It's dramatic. I mean, I remember having a screening early on for magazine of our Battle of Long Island. It wasn't even finished. It wasn't mixed, it wasn't whatever. And the guy said, my heart is pounding. And it's not just because I live now in Brooklyn where this took place. I know what these references are when you say Gowanus or Bedford or Jamaica or King's Highway or Cobble Hill, Coney Island, red Hook or Brooklyn Heights. I know these, but my heart is pounding out of my chest because I think we just don't know these stories. And I hope that the way we've told it, we'll engage everyone to go back and see the origin story. And as I suggest reinvigorate our commitment to the ideals that created the greatest country ever. I do think the revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ.
Kevin Diaz:
So the film coincides not only with the 250th anniversary of the revolution, but also at the time when many people today are asking questions about the resilience of democracy. What do you hope viewers will take away from your film? In what ways might it contribute to the national conversation? Does it help looking back? Remind us who we are?
Ken Burns:
If you don't know where you've been, you can't possibly know where you are and more importantly, where you're going. We don't design this as lessons. We, of course, because it's public broadcasting. We spent many of the last, a good deal of the last few years reaching out to schools and figuring out what materials they need at both elementary and middle and high school level and college level. So we'll do that. But as a storyteller, I don't want to tell you how to feel. I just think it's super important, particularly in these fraught days back and remind us, I've had the great privilege of making films about the us but I've also made films about us. That is to say the lowercase two letter, plural, pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the us and that we just call balls and strikes.
And I think it will be important to everyone no matter where they find themselves on this political spectrum, to go back and just regather all of the stories. This origin story is really important, and it's been cloaked, as I suggested in mythology. And it's important to sort of let that fall away and to see what really happened and understand the complexity of it in all that glory. And I think it, as I said, it doesn't diminish the big ideas. It only makes them even more inspiring and impressive and maybe helps us reinvigorate our own commitment to democratic ideals. Small D,
Kevin Diaz:
And this may be a hard question to answer, but you've said the American Revolution is one of the most important events in human history, inspiring centuries of democratic movements around the world. Can you even imagine what the world might look like today if the 13 American colonies had remained docile and loyal to Britain?
Ken Burns:
Well, that's it. I've said I think this is the most important event in world history since the Birth of Christ. And it is in the Bible, the Old Testament, that ZTEs that said, what has been will be again, what has been done will be done thing new under the sun, suggesting correctly that human nature doesn't change. And you'll find in our story, just as you'll find in a TV show, say succession, the same degree of venality and virtue of generosity and greed that people exhibit. But I think what happened there was something new for a second, which is this idea that heretofore everyone had been a subject and now all of a sudden there are a few people clinging to the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States who were citizens, not subjects. The pursuit of happiness that every founder would agree with me was not the pursuit of objects in a marketplace of thing, but things but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.
And they felt, you can read this in the anxiety of John Adams writing particularly, they just felt that you had to be virtuous. You had to be continuingly involved in educating yourself in order to earn this respect of a citizen. And it just spread a wildfire over all the first in Europe and then in South America and Africa and Asia for 200 years. It's been reverberating and it's a fantastic story and we're at the heart of it. It's our origin story, but it's also the origin story. When you think about that sentence, we hold these truths to be self-evident. There's nothing self-evident about this new idea.
That's nothing self-evident about it. But now these complaints and arguments between Englishmen have been broken out into natural laws. They're no longer complaints about parliament and this, they're like, hold these. Choose to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Besides, I love you, there is no better sentence in the English language. And that was born, that's our idea. We distilled a century of enlightenment thinking into a remarkable sentence. And a little bit later, a few phrases on Jefferson said, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. It sounds like it's dense and impenetrable. It's very simple. He means everybody here to four has sort of put up, as your question suggested kind of went, we're just going to go along with whatever the monarchy said. We're going to stick with this authoritarian rule. And so he knew that human beings were sort of conditioned to be that way, and that this was going to require an extraordinary energy. And as we approach our two 50th, we realize we have the ability to repair, to reinvigorate, to restore, to reconcile ourselves with the great promise of our founding
Kevin Diaz:
Ken Burns. Thank you very much. We look forward to seeing your film on the American Revolution premiering in November on PBS.
Ken Burns:
Thank you so much.
