- Hi, I'm Shirley Min.

Tonight we're excited to bring you a special conversation between Terry Gross and one of America's most celebrated documentary filmmakers, Ken Burns, about his new six-part PBS series, The American Revolution.

This program features highlights from their live interview recorded at the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden, New Jersey.

Let's dive in.

[APPLAUSE] Pretty great, right?

I have to tell you, Ken, that this series was like a revelation for me.

I never studied the Revolutionary War in depth.

I knew bits and pieces.

And it was really a revelation.

So my first question to you is, what really surprised you?

Like, tell us one thing that really surprised you in doing the research, because you uncovered so much and had so much source material.

We've worked for nearly 10 years with our writer, Jeff Ward, and an extraordinarily good team of people figuring out maps and figuring out archives and figuring out how to shoot reenactments without it feeling like reenactments.

I don't think there was a day, Terry, when we weren't stunned by something we'd learned new.

That this was not just a revolution that takes place of ideas in Philadelphia, but a real revolution, a bloody one, a late 18th century war in which people die by muskets and bayonets and have canning taking off things.

And that it's a civil war.

Americans are killing other Americans.

That there's a huge population here in Philadelphia and other places that are loyalist.

And we're calling balls and strikes.

We're not saying this is wrong.

If you're a loyalist, you're a conservative.

You think the British constitutional monarchy is why change it?

And then that it's a world war.

And that was the stunning thing.

That Britain had not just 13 colonies, but 26.

The other 13 were in the Caribbean, and they're by far the most profitable, a great engine of wealth for this far-flung British empire because it's based almost entirely on slave labor and that the prize of North America has been contested by the Dutch, by the Spanish, by the French, by the English for centuries, and that our revolution, which is our little fight with the mother country, is in fact the fourth global war over the prize of North America.

One of the things that really surprised me, we always talk, especially now, about how divided our nation is.

In my mind, that goes back to the Civil War.

But now I think, oh, that goes back to the founding.

That goes back to the revolution.

We've always been divided.

I think, I don't know if you can take comfort from it given the current state of affairs, but I do believe that the historian's perspective is one that permits you to understand as Ecclesiastes says, "There's nothing new under the sun, that human nature superimposes itself over the random chaos of events."

And we perceive these patterns, these themes, these echoes, these rhymes, Mark Twain might say.

And so for me, understanding, I mean, we made a series on the Vietnam War, out of which I decided to do the revolution, and that was a hugely divided time, hundreds of bombings taking place.

So I think we can understand, the historian Maya Jasanoff says, that we're born in violence.

The United States comes out of violence, she says, and that's an important thing that we have to understand.

There's certainly big ideas over there, and those big ideas, I have to say, are not diminished by telling the truth about how complicated and how violent the struggle is and how diverse the group of people participating in it are.

Yeah, so let's talk about the divided, the divisive nature of the Revolutionary War and the colonies.

Tell us briefly some of the arguments for being a loyalist, being loyal to Britain, and for being a revolutionary and fighting for independence from Britain and the king.

Well, loyalists are, it's completely understandable, as I said.

They think that their prosperity, the fact that they own land, their health, their literacy, all of it has come from the British constitutional monarchy.

Why rock the boat for some strange, crazy, cockamamie ideas?

The patriots are a kind of an amalgam of concerns.

The most, the central one, we're not taught this in school, it's taxes and representation, which is super important, but it's Indian land.

It's Indian land in an intimate, personal way for an ordinary person who wants to get 150 acres of land and wants to spill over the Appalachians where the British won't let us go because they can't afford, having won the previous war, the previous world war, the Seven Years War, which we call the French and Indian War, they can't afford to defend us.

And so please don't go over.

And it's enraging people like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, who are speculators in tens of thousands of acres of land in the Ohio Valley where people want to go.

So it's about Indian land, and then it's about a funny thing that takes over, this kind of gravitation from an argument between British people over English law and property and things like that into natural laws.

And so these ideas of freedom and liberty and independence come, and it begins to grow steadily so that by the time the Declaration is signed in the summer of 1776 and it's disseminated, there's a palpable sense that people have agency.

There's a new thing going on.

We are listed, one man said at Ticonderoga, among the nations of the world, as if suddenly new identity had come.

A lot of that has to do with the 3,000 miles that separate them.

But I would go back to you.

Every schoolchild knows that the colonists who dumped the tea into Boston Harbor in 1773 were dressed as Native Americans.

And if you ask why, those school kids have said to me as I've traveled around the country, "Oh, to deflect the blame."

No, as the scholar Phil Deloria says, it's to say, to make a statement, and it's so ironic given the 150 years that's preceded that moment of the dispossession of Native peoples of their lands and the next 150 years that will follow that will do the same thing for the rest of the continent that we wish to say that we're aboriginal, we are not of the motherland.

And so all of a sudden new events like the Boston Massacre or the Tea Party are invested with new understandings if you can have the patience to see out all the complexity and hold in contradiction lots of stuff that the simple easy story of our revolution never wants to tell.

Yeah, and I was amazed that America was so divided during the Revolutionary War that Ben Franklin's son was a loyalist.

He was siding with the British.

And Abigail Adams, John Adams' wife, the first vice president's wife, she initially thought like you are really underestimating the amount of anarchy and violence this is going to lead to.

This is not going to be an easy thing.

And she was so right.

But by the time the revolution was over, she was fully behind independence and revolution.

And it's not even that one person is a loyalist and another person's a patriot and their positions are-- they're people who change.

So in terms of the intramural fighting, in terms of like brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, we're talking about like freelance fighting.

I mean, we're not talking about militias.

I mean, we're talking about militias, too.

But in addition to the militias, in addition to the actual armies, you also have just individuals attacking each other, burning each other's houses, seeking revenge.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

It's, it's, I think, nor did we.

I don't think we understood.

There are some battles, one in North Carolina that comes to mind, Kings Mountain, where the leader of the Loyalist troops, and they're not British troops, he's a British officer, a Scotsman named Ferguson, but everybody else involved in this battle, which is a battle, are Americans killing other Americans.

But then there are all these other things that are happening at this intimate level that revenge killings, that when the British are dominant, the loyalists are taking revenge on their patriot neighbors, and when the reverse happens, the patriots are doing the same, and, you know, prisoners don't survive their arrest.

It is -- they are like human beings and like us.

And I think because there are no photographs to prove that, just paintings, and they have buckles on their feet and stockings and waistcoats and powdered wigs that we think somehow they're just utterly different from us and they're not.

And this is a very down and dirty war and also a war at that huge macro level of geopolitics that is taking place in the courts of Europe and in the nations that dot the West.

And we treat those native nations not as them, not as merciless savages, but individual countries with their own distinct identity, the way Virginia might have an identity, or more importantly, France or Belgium might have an identity.

And when you can place things in those geopolitical positions, and these native nations have had relationships on the world stage in trade and in warfare for hundreds of years, you've then given a situation in which you can see the American Revolution through an entirely different lens, and I think be even more inspired by what actually takes place.

One of the things I love about your series is it talks about the revolution, not just from the founding fathers, you get to the women, you get to the enslaved and the free black people, you get to the Native Americans.

So let's start with the enslaved and the free black people.

They were fighting in the army on both sides.

So what were they promised on each side?

So the war is big and global, as I said, but it's also intimate down to a family or an individual's decision.

There are about 20% of the population of two and a half to three million people included in the colonies, excluding native peoples, are enslaved and free black people and they've got decisions to make.

Many, we think 20,000 fought, 15,000 for the British who had cynically promised freedom for those slaves of rebelling people, not of slaves of loyalists, they had to remain slaves.

The man who issued this proclamation, Dunmore, himself owned other human beings and didn't think that that was inconsistent.

And many black Americans flooded there and had a taste of freedom for the first time and fought alongside British regiments.

The remaining 5,000 were patriots who fought, like James Forton, who you just met, and other people that are unbelievably central to the story of the American Revolution.

And they're making decisions about what's good for their family at that moment.

Like is this the way?

And when Dunmore says in Virginia, he's the deposed royal governor of Virginia, who's floating out in the Chesapeake Bay, maybe my rank can be increased if I say that.

Many black people fled to him, but it's a disaster.

The military stuff doesn't work out.

They're subject to diseases.

Many of them die.

They're, of course, the least taken care of.

But many people do end up staying with the British.

And by the time of evacuation day in 1883, there is these anguish moments at the docks of New York where the patriots and the British have two sets of rolls, the list of Negroes, it's called.

And they're checking off who can stay and who can go, who George Washington wanted every slave, former slave, brought back.

But the British said, no, we have promised them freedom, and we are people of the air.

But you had to prove a certain time with a loyalist or a British officer, which meant that somebody, Judith Jackson, could go from Virginia, but her daughter couldn't and would be separated.

So the British promised that enslaved people, if they fought with the Brits, would be freed.

Did the Americans make the same promise?

No, except in Rhode Island and a few other northern states, particularly Rhode Island, in which those black regiments that were made up of both free and enslaved were promised their freedom.

But it was also indicated that Rhode Island would compensate the owners for the loss of their property.

And Washington didn't want, when he saw black people in the army, he didn't want in the militia, he didn't want them there.

He arrives, a Virginian and a very wealthy man and an owner, like Jefferson, of hundreds of human beings over the course of his lifetime.

And he arrives in Boston and discovers that the army that he is assembling, this new continental army that's created in the spring of 1776, has black soldiers who have fought in Lexington and Concord and have served bravely at Bunkers Hill, which takes place mostly on Breeds Hill, another one of the things that you discover in the course of that.

And he doesn't want to recruit anymore, and he sort of insists on that.

And then finally, and this distinguishes George Washington from many other people of his time, he suddenly realizes this has been a mistake.

And what's so incredible about Washington, I think, and why he's so endlessly interesting, despite these flaws, despite his military mistakes, is how he is singularly the one person responsible for the United States.

And a lot of it is his fluidity and his ability to say, "Oh, okay, you make good soldiers.

That's okay."

So he changes his mind and he grows in a way that is impressive.

And I think by the end he's freeing his slaves and he understands of his life.

Was there anybody speaking up during the revolution about ensuring rights for women or Native Americans or enslaved people?

Everywhere.

All the time.

It's going on.

Abigail Adams, during the revolution, Abigail Adams is saying, you know, we have this phrase that comes down to us and we leave it.

Remember the ladies, it sounds dainty and we leave it alone.

But she says all husbands would be tyrants if they want to.

And then goes on to say that if we don't get some sort of representation, we're likely to foment a rebellion.

And so there are people, and there are people who are already patently anti-slavery speaking about this at the time.

And by the time the Constitutional Convention is over and our government is starting, Benjamin Franklin himself, who had owned human beings in his own household, a handful of people, is submitting to Congress a bill that goes, of course, nowhere to free, to end slavery in the United States.

You can even hear it in Jefferson's almost desperate thing that he suggests in the Declaration that somehow the king is responsible for the Atlantic slave trade and that, you know, this is a bad thing.

And of course, everybody says, Tom, you know, don't say that.

Be quiet.

But there are people arguing for the rights of Native Americans.

arguing for women's rights, there are people arguing for the rights of enslaved people.

It is an incredibly fluid and fascinating dynamic.

Let's talk about Native Americans and the revolution.

The British had fought the French and Indian War.

The Indians were, Native Americans were siding with the French at that time.

Some of them.

Some of them were with the British, some were with the French.

And remember, the colonies are superimposed over many tribal lands and so there's coexistence and even assimilation of Native peoples among the colonists.

And then you have all of these separate nations at the west who are fearing the encroachment of the settlers and early on figure that maybe they should go with the British who beat the French and because the British seem to be trying to restrain their own people, their own upstarts and a lot of native tribes are waiting and seeing and a lot are also fighting on the American side.

Rebecca Tanner, a Mohegan woman, therefore I presume to be from Connecticut, lost five sons fighting for the Patriots.

It's just an extraordinary loss.

I can't imagine being a mother losing five sons.

And the intimacy of that is throughout.

And they're changing.

They're trying to figure out-- the Haudenosaunee, the group that we open our film with, the Iroquois Confederacy that Franklin decides could be the model for the United States, a union, and 20 years before the Revolution, that gets destroyed by our American Revolution, because the eastern branches of the tribes, mostly the Oneida side with the Americans, and the westerns, the Seneca's and Mohawks are siding with the British, and the entire beautiful democracy that had existed for centuries, that Franklin was trying to model this idea for the colonies on-- - Recordation.

- The Haudenosaunee falls apart as a result of the American Revolution.

- So one of the grievances, the Declaration of Independence starts with all the idealism-- - Poetry, yeah.

- And then gets to all the grievances against the king.

And one of the grievances is that the British have kind of unleashed the Native Americans against the colonists.

So what is that about?

It's, we call it, when they gather here in Philadelphia, they don't call it the Eastern Seaboard Congress.

And when they name Washington the head of the army, they don't call it the Eastern Seaboard Army, they call it the Continental Army.

Everybody knows which direction everybody wants to go, which is west.

And so in that last usurpation, they're angry at the fact that native peoples have been allied with the British and that's been encouraged by the British governor of now British Canada, which is Catholic because it had been French Canada.

And that more importantly, Lord Dunmore, who I mentioned before, has sort of incited domestic insurrections.

But the main force of this is the merciless Indian savages.

As Jefferson says in the Declaration of Independence, who are waging war, and they're only, you know, they're a terrible thing against every male, every sex and condition, and it is a stunning statement in the middle of the poetry that we take as our catechism.

They want Jefferson and Washington, they want all Native people out of the territory to the Mississippi so far.

Yeah, and the landowners who most of the founding fathers or all of the founding fathers were landowners, they wanted to keep expanding into Native American land.

That's why we say in the beginning of the film that this is not just a clash between Englishmen over Indian land taxes and representation.

These are the causes of the war, but this is an ongoing part of the dynamic of the American Revolution.

And Washington owned tens of thousands of acres of Native American land.

How did he get them?

So you survey it, you speculate, I mean you take kind of the English idea, I mean Jefferson could have said life, liberty, and property, which is what John Locke said, but he said pursuit of happiness, and that's distracted us for a long time, but these are men of property, and while many of the recent immigrants and colonists are hoping to flow over the Appalachians and take over Indian land, you know, 125 acres to own land for the first time maybe in your life because you've been in Wales or Scotland or Ireland and your family has worked as dependents on somebody else's land for a thousand years.

You've got new land, so there's tension at the sort of lower levels of society.

And then at the higher levels, both in the north and the south, you have the planters and you have successful businessmen like Benjamin Franklin who are speculating in tens of thousands of lands which they've just identified that they want and they're hoping to get the blessings of the king or the governor to grant them that land.

But these are native lands and they are presuming that native people do not have the same relationship to property as they do, which is true, but that therefore they then have some right, which we'll call in the next century Manifest Destiny, to oarspread the whole thing.

That's the thing.

A lot of the wealthy landowners who start off fighting for independence, they end up going home, and then it's the relatively poor people, the people who don't own land, and teenagers and felons, you say, who become the army.

And it's kind of remarkable that they succeeded.

They had no training.

There's zero chance that they're going to succeed at Lexington Green on April 19, 1775.

And this is a war that has been proposed and sort of undertaken by property owners, from militiamen who are farmers to businessmen and merchants and big planters and rich people.

But in order to actually succeed, it has to be, as you say, those teenagers and those felons and those ne'er-do-wells and those second and third sons without a chance of inheritance and recent immigrants who have nothing.

And so by the end of the war, the war is being fought in large measure by people who have little or no property, that it started out as a war to protect the rights of property owners.

And so the interesting thing is our textbooks say, you know, the American Revolution was about bringing democracy.

Democracy is not an object of the American Revolution, it's a consequence of it.

Because those people, as Washington himself said so movingly, it is a standing miracle that that army stayed together and did it.

And that's what impresses the French, and that's what impresses the world, is that.

And in Johann Ewald, who we follow in, it says, "Who would have thought a century ago that out of this multitude of rabble," he's dismissive of them, "could come a people who could defy kings."

And what you have to do is reward those people.

And the first rewarding happens in Pennsylvania when the Pennsylvania State Convention, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, extends to all men, 21 years or age, the right to vote.

They don't have to own property.

They can be in debt.

And that's where the door gets opened.

And we can say we're taking the tentative steps of democracy.

Are you saying that all men are created equal, that beautiful phrases like that, are because of gratitude to the people who fought?

No.

Or promise that they made to get them to stay in the army?

That's early in the war.

And I don't think they've fully come to the idea.

When he said all men are created equal, he meant all white men are property, free of debt.

And we don't mean that anymore.

And a lot of that anymore happens over the course of the revolution as it changes.

And what happens is when you have a clash between British people that suddenly becomes about natural rights, this is the Enlightenment, you're suddenly talking about big ideas that the people who are serving the meals here and understand, the native people at the borders understand, the women in the household understand that if you are going to take your argument with Britain and turn it into this big, huge human affairs, really, as Thomas Paine says, "Not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to change things."

You're going to write sentences that are vague enough that you can drive a truck through.

And that's what everybody else who was initially disenfranchised did.

And by the way, that's the story of America.

It's a process word.

Democracy is not a thing.

It's kind of an active verb.

You're in pursuit of happiness.

You're after a more perfect union.

And a lot of it has to do with both the poetry and the vagueness of the words that permit everyone else to find meaning and hope in it.

And so as the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk says in our film, the Declaration of Independence is deeply significant to people at the margins.

Not because they think for a second that they're immediately going to be granted those rights, but it says that those rights are theirs.

And as James Forten said, where does it that God says that white people are better than black people?

And I can tell you God never says that.

So in some ways... [applause] In some ways I've been focusing a lot of my quest... well, let me put it this way.

When I was preparing the interview, I found myself focusing a lot on Washington's flaws, like his hypocrisy about slavery, and what happened to the Native Americans, and the enslaved and free black people who fought in the war, and the women.

Because those stories haven't been told in the same way that the founding fathers and the poetic language of the founding documents.

That's part of what really interested me in your series.

So I don't mean to just like focus on the negatives but these are like the untold or lesser told parts of the story.

I was wondering if you were showing this in a Smithsonian Museum or instead of outside on a night in New Jersey, in Camden, if you were showing it in a national park, would you be cancelled?

Because it's so DEI, if I may say, you know, because you're focusing on the people whose stories haven't sufficiently been told.

I've always thought of another way of saying DEI is E Pluribus Unum.

We, part of the dilemma, the trap, the mistake of argument is that we become so dialectically preoccupied.

One side or the other, we see things in simple binaries that don't exist.

And so Richard Powers, the novelist, said, "The best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view.

The only thing that can do that is a good story."

Ken Burns, it's time for us to end.

I thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for this series.

Like I said, it was a revelation.

And congratulations to you and your team and your co-directors and co-producers.

- Thank you, Terry, thank you.

[audience applauding] ♪