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Ken Burns
I’m not sure I’d agree that it has fallen out of favor. But that said, I’m not particularly interested in historiographic fads. I’m interested in experiences and stories, in all of their diversity. I think you can tell a full story — and often a hard, contradictory story — and still highlight what speaks to us in a singular voice across time. I’ve said, and continue to believe, that the American Revolution was the most important event in history since the birth of Christ. It changed how we think about government and rights and had a tremendous impact on the world.
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Ed Rampell
Your new film covers the role of the indigenous and black people in the thirteen colonies during the War for Independence. Let’s start with the native nations. Your film notes the British-decreed “Proclamation Line of 1763,” which prohibited Anglo colonizers from moving West of the Appalachian Mountains. But speculators secured land there for Washington and other founders. How much was the desire for what became known as “Manifest Destiny” a driving force for the war against the British?
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Ken Burns
We say in the opening lines of the film that “the American Revolution was not just a clash between Englishmen over Indian land, taxes, and representation but a bloody struggle that would engage more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American, that also somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.” So yes, the war was very much fought over westward expansion. But I think you can explain that and still acknowledge the meaning of liberty, again with all of the contradictions involved.
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Ed Rampell
Many founders, including [George] Washington and [Thomas] Jefferson, owned enslaved people. On the one hand, according to your film, free blacks were welcomed into the Continental Army, which was more integrated than any US military force until [Harry S.] Truman desegregated the armed forces after World War II. On the other hand, years before [Abraham] Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration, Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 granted freedom to black Americans willing to fight for the British.
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Ken Burns
The Dunmore Proclamation sought, as you know, to exploit slavery to the advantage of the British, even when many of the British officers involved, including Lord Dunmore, were slaveowners themselves. What’s of interest here, all the more given the complexity of this war and the ideas around it, was how people on all sides were expressing their agency and looking to navigate the conflict in ways that were hopefully most beneficial to them.
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Ed Rampell
By the late 1770s, did the British focus their military efforts in the South because of the much larger population of blacks there, hoping they would join them to fight the Patriots?
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Ken Burns
It’s not as cut-and-dry as that. The British were never offering blanket emancipation, since they didn’t want to alienate slave-owning Loyalists throughout their empire. The southern colonies had deep commercial and cultural ties to Britain’s valuable Caribbean colonies, and the thought was even if we lose the northern colonies to the rebels, maybe we can keep the South to help preserve the empire in the Caribbean.
Much of the wealth in South Carolina was in the lowland region near Charleston and close to the sea. The planters in that region tended to be Patriots who enslaved a majority black population, so this was an opportunity for Britain to open a new front in a war that had become a stalemate in the North. They planned to bring an overwhelming force south, take Savannah, take Charleston, and in the process offer freedom to the enslaved people there, which would destroy the southern economy.
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Ed Rampell
Did enslaved people defect from Jefferson’s Monticello and Washington’s Mount Vernon to join the British?
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Ken Burns
Yes, many did. Harry Washington is a famous example. He fled Mount Vernon in 1776 and joined Lord Dunmore’s army in Virginia. He later served in the Black Pioneers, laborers with the British Army during the war. When peace came, he evacuated with other Loyalists to Nova Scotia, and like many other black refugees from the Revolutionary War, he ultimately chose to return to Africa and found a new British colony in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
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Ed Rampell
Your film introduces audiences to black Americans who have long been neglected. Who were Phillis Wheatley and John Forten?
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Ken Burns
Phillis Wheatley was a wonderful writer and the first African American writer to publish a book. Although she was an enslaved person and faced many challenges, her writing gained notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic and we’re fortunate to hear her words read in our film by the poet Amanda Gorman.
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James Forten is an incredible story and voiced in our film by Morgan Freeman. Forten was born free in Philadelphia and heard the Declaration read to a crowd at the Pennsylvania state House as a young boy. He didn’t for a second doubt that those “self-evident truths” applied to him as well. He became a privateer, later captured by the British and imprisoned on the notorious British prison ship in the East River, then after his release, he walked home from New York to Philadelphia. Following the war, Forten built a great fortune and used those earnings to fund the abolitionist movement.
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Ed Rampell
A documentary about the revolution poses creative problems for filmmakers. Not only is there no archival footage, there’s no photography. Visually, you rely largely on paintings, drawings, and sketches. Were these all preexisting images?
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Ken Burns
It was a challenge to not have photographs and news reels, but an exciting challenge for our team. Paintings, maps, and even letters became our primary visual language. In some cases, we also commissioned artwork, these beautiful watercolors, and worked with reenactors to create an impressionistic sense of the look and feel of the revolution.
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Ed Rampell
You use lots of presumably original scenic shots and reenactments. And you have a stellar cast to give voice to letters and other texts by historical personages. Tell us about some of your A-list actors and which real life figures they depict?
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Ken Burns
We have one of the best casts ever assembled, from Meryl Streep (Mercy Otis Warren) to Samuel L. Jackson (Lemuel Haynes), Claire Danes (Abigail Adams) to Tom Hanks (various roles). Josh Brolin voices George Washington, of course a central figure in the war and our film. But we also follow a variety of people from all backgrounds, like Betsy Ambler, a young woman from Yorktown, Virginia, whose family is displaced by the war, and she’s voiced by Maya Hawke. The voice actors bring these historical figures to life so effectively, and we’re grateful to have worked with many of them for years, like Mandy Patinkin (Benjamin Franklin) and Paul Giamatti (John Adams).
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Ed Rampell
Your film includes onscreen commentary in original interviews with many historians and authors, including Annette Gordon-Reed. Could you tell us about some of them?
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Ken Burns
Our film builds on three generations of scholarship from the late Bernard Bailyn and Bill Leuchtenburg to Alan Taylor to Annette Gordon-Reed, Jane Kamensky, and Christopher Brown. Each brings their own expertise, like Kathleen DuVal’s scholarship on the indigenous history of this country or Maggie Blackhawk as a constitutional and legal expert, and each is an invaluable advisor in every step of the process.
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Ed Rampell
Who is your favorite American revolutionary?
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Ken Burns
I’m not a fan of favorites. People are too complicated and everyone is interesting in a variety of ways. George Washington stands out here because he was so inscrutable and difficult to understand but also because, as the historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Christopher Brown both say in the film: “No Washington, no us.”
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Ed Rampell
You close your film with a quote from founder Benjamin Rush, who said in 1787: “The American war is over: but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed.” What is your interpretation of that?
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Ken Burns
As we approach our nation’s two hundred fiftieth anniversary, it’s essential for each of us to reflect on our past but equally to consider our future. Benjamin Rush’s quote reminds us that the struggle for democracy, freedom, and many of our constitutional principles is not contained to the past. It’s ongoing and requires our active participation.
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Ed Rampell
Also in 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Do you think we’ll ever have another American Revolution
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Ken Burns
It’s a hard question because I’m not sure about the meaning of revolution today and how that takes place. There have been so many changes — some revolutionary I would say — that have taken place since the American Revolution itself. I am hopeful that we can continue to change as a country and improve and that we can achieve progress through the political process.
Ken Burns is an American documentary filmmaker known for such films as Huey Long, The Civil War, Baseball, and The Dust Bowl.
Ed Rampell is an LA-based film historian/critic and the author of Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States.
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