Titled after a memorable passage from Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis, “The Times that Try Men’s Souls” opens with first-person narration of wartime hardships, and less than two minutes in the historian Maya Jasanoff tells us bluntly that “the United States came out of violence.” The remainder of the episode does not spare the gory details. Drawing on the work of scholars like Jasanoff, who in the last twenty-five years have fleshed out the experiences of the Revolution’s “losers,” the film depicts in vivid quotations and haunting images the suffering of loyalist refugees, prisoners of war, and civilians plundered and abused by marauding armies.[1] The words of the Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe anchor a segment on conflict between Natives and settlers on the borders of the southern colonies, and the film also relates how Revolutionary rhetoric and the chaos of an imperial civil war sparked rebellion amongst enslaved people and unrest amongst enslavers not just in North America but also in Britain’s West Indian provinces. By the time the credits roll, the truth of Jasanoff’s statement should be evident even to the most skeptical viewer.
The meaning of that violence, however, remains frustratingly elusive. For all the bloody tales on offer, the documentary—in this episode and elsewhere—struggles to connect incidents of violence that occurred outside the battlefield to the larger narrative that frames the film as a whole. The bulk of episode 3, like the majority of the series, is devoted to the trials and tribulations of the Continental Army and the Continental Congress. Spanning the second half of 1776, the film dwells especially on the Battles of Long Island and Manhattan, the establishment of state constitutions, and the Continental defense of Lake Champlain before concluding with Washington’s triumphant withdrawal from Princeton in January 1777. With these dramatic—and familiar—events serving as the “main” storyline, incidents such as the Cherokee War, the Great Fire of New York, and the Jamaican slave conspiracy are folded in where chronologically appropriate but largely stand apart from the rest of the narrative. Much like the pink and blue boxes that began appearing in history textbooks during the 1980s and 1990s to meet the demand for a more inclusive curriculum, these stories intersect Burns’s primary narrative but rarely affect the film’s overall interpretation of events. And just as the multi-colored textbooks of the late twentieth century relegated histories of women, African Americans, and other groups to the (sometimes literal) margins despite the best intentions of their authors, the interpretation on offer in The American Revolution robs the victims of Revolutionary violence of their role in the American founding.[2]