Ken Burns' American Revolution

We finished the last episode this evening.  It is an astonishing, mostly makes you proud to be an American piece of work.  There are parts that are ugly and many Americans probably know little or nothing about:

1. The barbarous treatment of Indians allied with the British including intentional extermination of women and children.

2. The pretty ferocious mistreatment of Loyalists by Patriots and vice during the war and afterwards.

 

3. The substantial part that both free blacks, slaves, and Indians played in the American military. 

Many of you know that Lord Dunmore offered freedom to slaves who ran away and fought for the British.   I was surprised to find out how many of these runaways were returned to slavery by their owners at the end of the war.

To Burns' credit it closes by emphasizing how the Founding principles of representative government and liberty became organizing principles of revolution around the world since.

Also surprising was his postscript about the Bill of Rights mentions "the right to keep and bear arms." Not in a militia, not as allowed by public safety, and not even ignored.  I guess this constitutes progress. 

UPDATE: They dropped a "Framers were Deists" claim in the middle of one episode that had no connection to the larger themes.  As I have blogged here, Jefferson and Paine were arguably Deists (although Paine finally went full atheist later in life, leading to a rather strong letter from Franklin admonishing him for this).  As regular readers of my blog know, state constitutions often limited the franchise or elective office to Christians, sometimes specifically Protestants, and continued state establishments of religion well past the Revolution.  I assume this was done to make modern evangelical Christians look ignorant.