'It’s our origin story.' Ken Burns speaks on his new documentary, 'American Revolution'

Credit: PBS

The American Revolution, a new film from Ken Burns, premieres on PBS stations across the country Nov. 16. It's a six-part, 12-hour look at how the American quest for independence from Britain unfolded and how it changed the world. Directors Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt joined GPB's Peter Biello in the GPB studios to talk about their work. 

Peter Biello: And we'll start with you, Ken. Why the American Revolution?

Ken Burns: It's our origin story. All of the films that we've been pursuing over the last nearly 50 years have been asking a deceptively simple question about "Who are we?" Who are those strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans, and what does an investigation of the past tell us about not only where we've been, but where we are, and more importantly than that, where we may be going. What could be more important, particularly in this day when I think there's so much questioning and the fabric of what has brought us together seems a little bit frayed, to go back and look at it. 

Now, we decided to make this film back in December of 2015, so there's no "now" to this moment. We've been working on it for nine-plus years, a deep dive into it, and are excited to be able to share the origin story with people. It's not just guys in Philadelphia signing documents in powdered wigs. It's — it's a very, very complex story which we're excited to add dimension to those boldface names that everybody knows. Complication in some ways. It makes them in many more ways that much more inspiring. [We're excited] also to introduce you to dozens, literally dozens of other characters — that I think most people have not heard of — who contributed, [who] were willing to sacrifice everything for the birth of this country. And all the people that are on the margins of it: the loyalists who aren't willing to start a new country; the French and the Germans who are involved; obviously, the British, their armies, their officers, their kings, their prime ministers; and native people; enslaved Americans. It's a very complex and rich story that I think as you dive deeper into that complexity, it becomes all the more critical, particularly for us today, to understand where we came from.

Peter Biello: Certainly a lot to learn, especially over an eight-, nine-year period when you're writing. 

Ken Burns: This is not homework.

Ken Burns:  Yeah. 

Ken Burns: For us, we're not telling you what we know and want you to know, the last time I checked, then there'll be a test on Tuesday about it. This is sharing with you our process of discovery and it has been exhilarating in the extreme to get into the nooks and crannies. The military story, of course — this is a film called The American Revolution — but also the social and political, the geographic. I mean, in some ways, the main star of our film is the American landscape. This beautiful, beautiful country that everybody wants, whether it's Britain or France or Spain, whether its native peoples want to hang on to it, whether it's colonists who want to flow over the Appalachians and — and take more of it. It's really just a spectacular continent and I think one of our big stars is the live cinematography that we've done over the last several years.

Peter Biello: And across all seasons.

Ken Burns: And across all seasons, and we've also at the same time — because there are of course no photographs or newsreels — we've been obliged to follow extraordinary groups of men and women and children who reenact, not just militias and continental soldiers, but British and French and German and British cavalry and Native American. And you feel we've collected enough footage over those many, many years that we could draw on it. So at moments between paintings and maps and documents and on-camera commentary from just some incredible scholars and writers who've spent their lives, you know, diving deep into this subject, you can have a sense, which we always want, that maybe history is not was, but is. 

Peter Biello: We all grow up thinking we know at least some of this story. But I want to hear from each of you — because you mentioned it was a process of discovery for you all — what you discovered about the Revolutionary War and the American Revolution that most surprised you or intrigued you. And maybe I'll start with you, Sarah, but I'd love to hear all of you on this.

Sarah Botstein: I think I'll speak for myself and maybe for all three of us that, as Ken was just saying, every day was actually filled with revelation and discovery, whether it was a simple fact like the war went on for eight years. I think if you ask most people how long the Revolution was fought, it would take them a while and they definitely don't think it went on for eight years. That it went on over the vast continent — or the 13 colonies of this vast continent — and moved, as Ken was saying, north, middle, and south, that all the colonies were involved. It was not just Massachusetts and Virginia, which I think are part of our popular imagination for all the right reasons, but it also kind of goes out from there. And I think that the ... founding people in the story are much more dimensional and interesting and exciting to learn about. As well as the people that we've brought to life that no one has heard of or very few people have heard of. And the dynamic between the bold-faced names and the people you don't know and how they interact with each other and affect each other is always, in any film we make, I think, the most — one of the more exciting parts of our job. 

Peter Biello: Mm-hmm. And David, what do you think? 

David Schmidt: So for me, I grew up in Williamsburg, Va., and I worked in Colonial Williamsburg as a kid, and I thought I knew a thing or two about the Revolution. And it turns out I did, but I only knew a thing or two about the Revolution. Every day was a moment of discovery, and I would just say that there's a million things I could say that surprised me, but I would say the thing that is most important that surprised me is: What wasn't on the table at the start of the revolution, and what it came to be about, was not the goal of any of the colonists, or at least few of the colonists at the start, which is independence, nation-making, and the union of the states. None of those were the war aims when the first shots were fired, but quickly they became necessary in order to win the war. They had to bring the country together in order have this coalition that could rival the British. They had to have some — some reason for unity, which became independence, and they also needed the support of the French and independence offered that. And then in order to bring along all aspects of the population, they had to make these promises for more inclusion in the democracy as they went and that opened the door to so much more after the Revolution. But none of that was even on the table when they started. I just think they didn't have any idea how this would all come out. They all took a gamble on it and that's just so cool and surprising to me. 

Peter Biello: And how about you, Ken? Was there something particularly surprising? 

Ken Burns: It was, as both Sarah and David said, a kind of daily revelation. You think you know, but really if you think about it with regard to the Revolution, you know about Lexington and Concord, which was 250 years ago as we record this. Then it's Trenton, and then it's Yorktown. And we want to suggest that there is a lot of stuff between all of those signposts, and that there's so many different groups and factions involved that's important to tell. So every day, you get surprised when you understand.

We introduce Benedict Arnold in the opening seconds of our second of six episodes. And it isn't until about a third of the way through the sixth and last episode that the reason why he is a hated figure in American history is revealed. Up to this point, he is one of the best generals Washington has, and Washington dispatches him to places where he needs a great general, and he is a great general. He's also a lot of other things, and those complications come through. So I think that adding, as Sarah was saying, the dimension to familiar people is the thing for us to learn. I mean, we don't have a country without George Washington. But if you poll people, their idea of George Washington is so superficial and so simplistic as almost to make him disappear because of, y'know, the tropes about him. And so it's nice to get a dimensional portrait of the guy who is more responsible for why we're sitting and talking here than anybody else. And it's also exciting, in an age when we look forward to canceling or throwing out the apparent leaders and replacing them with a new set, that you never have to do that. And we've always hewed to that in all of our films for the last nearly 50 years, which we can create an environment into which everybody coexists because everybody was a dynamic part of the story. And so while you can point out complications and flaws and underdo to heroes, they don't disappear because of them. They become more sympathetic, perhaps, but also you can begin to appreciate at a much greater dimension who they are and what they mean. 

Caption

From left: "The American Revolution" directors David Schmidt, Sarah Botstein, Ken Burns

Credit: PBS

Peter Biello: Sarah, did you want to—? 

Sarah Botstein: I was going to say, I think in all the films that we've worked on together, the heroes, to my mind — and I think I speak for Ken and I hope, David — that heroes become more heroic when they're flawed. They're more human and it makes what they do, in my opinion, more heroic when they are not just one-dimensional. 

Ken Burns: There's a dynamic, a narrative dynamic, that happens when the bottom-up stories meet the top-down stories and it's a really wonderful narrative explosion that takes place. That you can, as Sarah's suggesting, understand the humanness of the more familiar people that we've heretofore put on pedestals and exist merely as statues or portraits on coinage. But then there are people: a 15-year-old from Connecticut, who joins the Army a few days after the Declaration of Independence; a 14-year-old fifer from Boston who's in it for a long time; a 10-year-old girl in Yorktown who spends the whole war more or less as a refugee escaping the vulnerability of that town; and lots of other people in between that I think that we've, in the sort of shorthand that history often becomes for us — or, in some ways, the weapon that history becomes — you lose the dimensions to it. And we're very excited and we've been working for so long in the archives, reading the diaries, talking to scholars who've spent their life trying to understand certain dynamics of that to tell what is one hell of a good story. 

Peter Biello: I didn't see this part in a preview, but I am curious, given what we've said about creating three-dimensional characters out of our historical figures: How did you handle Thomas Jefferson? Given that he was a slaveholder and he left a lot to be desired about how he treated the people he enslaved. 

Peter Biello: So I made a biography in the 1990s on Thomas Jefferson, and we certainly went all the way there. Thomas Jefferson is — makes several appearances in this film, and most notably in the section on the writing of the Declaration [of Independence]. He knew slavery was wrong. It was also extremely profitable. So there's a kind of a choice for people. In the northern states, it's less prevalent and less profitable. In the southern states, it's more prevalent and more profitable. So people make these decisions. He still distilled a century of enlightenment thinking into the second most remarkable sentence after "I love you" in the English or American language that I know and that's a really important contribution. So he exists with all of those represented there and — and we're not going to toss him out, as I said, but we're also not gonna let him off the hook. But we're not there to chastise, we're there— we're umpires. We call balls and strikes. So if you're doing a scene on the Declaration, you have to understand where he comes from. I mean, another moment, he's so frustrated, as everyone is, that the Articles of Convention are not going along, that they adjourn the Congress, and he goes back to Virginia worried about his sick wife, but also going back to the place he calls "his country," meaning he hasn't yet accepted the idea that the 13 colonies are the country and the state — former colony — are not. And so he becomes the governor of Virginia. He's there when the British are attacking in Virginia and they're fleeing the capital of Williamsburg and setting up a new one in Richmond and then fleeing to Charlottesville. He's around. It's — he's a dynamic part of it, but I think we've done him with greater dimension in other films because he was the central character in that. And now he's one of a huge hundreds of cast of characters here. 

David Schmidt: I think approaching familiar names like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington in a moment where they're entirely uncertain about how this is all going to play out — and also, yes, they are big, bold names to us now, but Thomas Jefferson's a lawyer back then. He's relatively ordinary, if you really think about it. He became bold-faced Thomas Jefferson, but so even for him — and then again, there's 3 million more people than him that inhabit what became the United States, the original 13 former colonies that became the United States. All of those people have stories that you can begin to see yourself in and realize that if we don't look at them as just gilded statues of marbled men, well, then there's something that I can do in my own time, potentially, or at least "What would I have done in that time?" And you can put yourself in the shoes of those people and begin to become a better citizen than you might otherwise be if you just see them as completely unapproachable, almost marble gods. They're not; they're people, they're flesh and blood. 

Peter Biello: I wanted to ask you about starting the film with Native Americans, a little bit about the people who were here on this continent. What led you to that decision? 

Ken Burns: It was a sort of an artistic desire, more than one that had some sort of historical import to it. This story of Benjamin Franklin's sort of being impressed with what the Iroquois Confederacy, which was a collection of first five and then six independent native nations, put together a thing that they call the Haudenosaunee, a democracy that had flourished for centuries. And he thought maybe we should do this as we begin to have a kind of common, you know, sense of ourselves as the new Americans, the British colonists here, and tries to model something on that. And that was elsewhere in our first episode, not that far, but into it. When I realized that maybe — and David and I had made a film on Benjamin Franklin a few years ago and had covered the same subject — that maybe had a centrality that we're dealing, if you reduce it. You ask the school kid or the adult why it happened, it's usually "taxation and representation." It's a really good answer. It's really true, but it's also about land. And that land is principally inhabited by people. This is not an empty continent. It's 300 separate nations, at least. And so many with different languages. Many of them in villages with clabbered houses and panes of glass and have been trading with Europeans, mostly French and British, but also Spanish in other parts of the United States. And they've got a big voice. And so I think it was a way to understand that we're not first on the land. And the idea is a human idea. And it's gonna, I mean, what Franklin tries, nobody was interested in. The colonies are like "No way we're giving up any of our autonomy." Georgia is as different from New Hampshire as, y'know, Poland is from England. I mean, we don't kind of appreciate that at the beginning, which makes what David said, this kind of contingency. They don't know how it's going to turn out. And the chances of its success at the beginning at Lexington Green are zero. And so they're up against the biggest navy on Earth, the most powerful navy on earth, and the most far-flung empire on earth. So, wouldn't it be nice to add the dimension that most people are actually seeking a place to escape some of the vagaries of Europe, including being dependent, working someone else's land for thousands of years, and all of a sudden, you've got a plot of land that you own and you could turn something into. And then there's a big kind of "oops," because often that land is, not often, it is always, in every case, other people's land. So it makes for a very complex dynamic about the American Revolution, and it doesn't become just a disagreement between Englishmen, but a global war that's going to involve lots of nations, European and Native Americans'. 

Peter Biello: Our Georgia audience would love to hear a little bit about Savannah and the the battles that took place there and its significance in the war. I think we're looking at you, David, for this one.

David Schmidt: No problem. So the British thought early on that the war was going to be something that they could settle in New England. Turns out all of the 13 colonies that became the United States rallied to Boston's cause. They saw that as precedent-setting. "We can't let them blockade the port of Boston. We can't let them do this." So all of states are beginning to send people north— they are not states yet. All of the colonies are beginning to send people north to become part of the Continental Army. So Georgia is invested from the beginning. So I just want to state that out front. Later in the war, after they failed in New England and in the Middle Colonies, the British decide — and I think it might have made sense to do this sooner — that they might have been able to pick off Georgia and South Carolina, maybe North Carolina, and the important ports, particularly of Savannah and Charleston, which had real ties to the Caribbean economy, if they bring a big force south. And the first place they try that is at Savannah. And they take it in the very, very tail end of 1778 — I think, even after Christmas. Savannah falls. Shortly thereafter, in January of 1779, they go up the Savannah River and take Augusta. The commander says after he takes Augusta, because those are the two cities of any size in Georgia at the time, that he has ripped one star and one stripe from the rebel flag. That won't stay the case for too long, but Savannah will stay in the possession of the British until well after Yorktown. After Yorktown, there's three cities that are occupied by the British. There's Savannah, Charleston, and New York. And Savannah has two pretty major battles that happen there. Both are losses for the United States. So Georgia is important all the way through, but there are two major battles that take place at Savannah. 

Ken Burns: The presumption is about Georgia that because they have their backs to native territory, that they are going to be more loyalist because they are more dependent on the British army to protect them. And so there is the presumption in nearly every case that all you need to do is land a force, whether it's Massachusetts or New York or New Jersey or Georgia, and the population will come over to you because of this defense against native attack. And so it is initially true in Georgia, and they do capture those cities, but it's always, in all the states, a complicated dynamic because you end up essentially enforcing a martial military rule, which is the wrong direction to be going with these people who have experienced 150 years of essentially laissez faire attitude on the part of the British about how they conduct their lives. And they've come to incubate within over generations this sense of freedom and liberty. And the distance of 3,000 miles of the ocean is a big reason why this happens — not just the time it takes for information to get [there] but the sense that "We've been doing it and we know how to do it. Why are we suddenly being told how to do it?"

Peter Biello: We're up against the clock, so I just want to end on this one last question, which is, in a time when, by some measures, American democracy is weakening, how do you hope the audience receives your film? 

Ken Burns: Well, we don't make a film, we're storytellers. We don't make it with a sort of sense of what you should take away. 

Peter Biello: But do you have hopes? Is there anything— 

Ken Burns: Absolutely, I think this is an inspiring story. I don't think it's diminishing. I just think it is, as Jefferson understood, all experience has shown, he wrote in the Declaration, "that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable." That means that everybody's been under a tyrant. Everybody's been a subject after this point. They've been superstitious peasants. And we're going to create a new thing, which are citizens. And to be a citizen is to be educated. And to be virtuous, and to participate in lifelong learning. They called it "the pursuit of happiness." It wasn't a material thing they were after. They were talking about lifelong learning. So I think the reinvigoration of those initial concepts ought to give people energy to realize what the values were, what the sacrifices of a 14- and 15-year-old are going to be making; the willingness, as David said, to ask that question: Which side would I be on? Would I be willing to die for an idea, right? To give my life up for something that's totally new in human history? These are big, big concepts and we invented them. And it's to our credit and I think it gives the possibility for all of us. We don't make this film for one particular group, we make it for everybody. And as I said before, we're umpires calling balls and strikes, so it's all there. The good, the bad, the ugly, and you know, the strikeouts and the home runs. So it's there and it's an incredibly inspiring topic. We — Sarah, David, and I will not work on a more important film than this one.