I’ve been watching Ken Burns’ “American Revolution” documentary, and, if you missed it, I strongly recommend it when it comes back in reruns.
I know. The documentary has been criticized as a politically correct commentary. If you didn’t know better, it could easily lead you to conclude that the success of the Revolutionary War was due to slaves, Native-Americans, women, and immigrants. The white men in the story were out primarily to protect the institution of slavery and to steal the land of the Native Americans who lived between the Appalachian mountains and the Mississippi River, a region referred to at the time as the Northwest Territory. One of the biggest land speculators was George Washington.
Nothing can excuse the dismal treatment of Native Americans in our history, but the Ken Burns picture is only part of the story. Only About 45,000 native Americans lived in this huge territory of 300,000 square miles, comprising Ohio Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. At the time, these states housed about 45,000 native Americans. Today they house more than 50 million people, including 750,000 Native Americans. Over time, these states have grown into one of the best developed regions on earth, providing their people with universal public education, health care facilities, widespread public parks and recreation areas, world class medical treatment centers, and an economy that thrives most of the time. Although widely discriminated against, today’s Native Americans do share in these things. It’s a fair question to ask how many of these things would be at their disposal if the Old Northwest Territory had been kept free of European-American settlers.
Another feature made clear by Ken Burns was the adamant hatred of Native Americans. The Declaration of Independence itself refers to “merciless Indian savages.” General John Sullivan waged a scorched earth campaign against Iroquois tribes of New York State, completely burning 40 villages, destroying their crops and send 5,000 people to the safety of a British fort near Niagara Falls
In 1780, Virginia Governor Thomas Jefferson ordered Gen John Rogers Clark to put an end to Shawnee raids on settlers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Ky. He called for the “exterminatin” of the Ohio tribes.
Need to note that many Indian tribes had joined with the British.
Tribes favoring British
Iroquuis Confederacy (4 of the six nations) 2 who favored colonists were Oneida and Tuscarora
In the South
Cherokee and Creek
Catawba, Lenape, and Chickasaw favored Americans
The Ken Burns view and the contemporary view doesn’t do justice to the view at the time. Many of the NA tribes had joined the British said and made war against the colonists. They were viewed as foreign states and excluded from the Peace Treaty and their lands forfeited. Much as the conquerors divided up the loser’s land after WWI, WWII, Napoleonic wars, and the Seven Years War.
A, and there is some merit to that charge. It goes to great lengths to prove it is inclusive. The early episodes overplay the shortcomings of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And a condescending elite-type voice even proclaims that America was born in violence. In a technical sense that is true, but it’s doubtful that the American Revolution was any more violent than the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, or most of the others that have occurred in the past century.
Nonetheless, I urge you to watch as much of this series as you can when you get the chance. It freshened up a lot of things I’d forgotten, and I learned many things I didn’t know. For example, of the estimated 25,000 deaths during the war, only about 5,000 came from combat. The vast majority came from diseases such as small pox, typhus, and dysentery. A small pox epidemic raged throughout the colonies during much of the war, and perhaps one of the most successful actions of George Washington was his mandate that the Continental Army inoculated its soldiers against the disease.
Since photography hadn’t been invented yet, the series lacks the photographic wealth that characterize other Ken Burns films. But that is more than made up forth with the use of portraits, paintings, and cleverly created maps.
Only a handful of us in America can trace our biological origins to somebody who fought in the revolution. But we all trace our political roots back to then, as well as a good deal of our cultural heritage. And whether you’re a citizen by birth or naturalization, Ken Burns makes clear that we all share a common bond to that moment in history.
This is a series well worth seeing.
