In what is a little-known story arc, the battle for Fort Washington was a turning point in the relationship between George Washington and his inexperienced subordinate, Greene.

If what followed had gone differently, the Revolution might not have ended favorably. Fortunately, it didn’t, and years later Greene became the strategist who wore down the British army in the Southern Campaign - setting the stage for the decisive blow at Yorktown.

How those two reached that endpoint offers some of the best leadership lessons from this era of American history. But on a cold fall morning in 1776, Greene was a completely untested leader.

On paper, he was a “major general,” having been promoted just 100 days earlier on the strength of his self-taught historical military knowledge and political connections. The 34-year-old former ironmonger from Rhode Island hadn’t yet led men in combat, however.

And he was about to see the results of the 22 days of effort he’d put into overseeing the fort’s defenses.

Spoiler #1: It did not go well.

Spoiler #2: None of this was covered by Ken Burns.

Greene’s Worst Day

The morning of November 16, 1776, was likely one of the worst of Greene’s life. As he stood on a hill on Manhattan behind the Fort’s second defensive line, he watched as British and Hessian forces drove back the nearly 3,000 men under his command from three directions at once.

In the weeks leading up to the attack, he’d assured Washington the fort’s defenses were progressing well. He’d relied on the garrison commander’s assurances. But that commander, like Greene, was inexperienced. The fort had held off a small British probing force and damaged some passing British ships in the previous ten days, giving the two inexperienced leaders a false sense of security.

In other words, Greene communicated up the chain of command the way many young leaders do when they want the confidence of their boss: “Don’t worry, I’ve got this.”

Washington had been skeptical but had deferred to his subordinates’ assessment.

This was despite Washington knowing the Continental Army lacked the trained engineers needed to complete the fort’s required fortifications. The Army’s only competent engineer, Rufus Putnam, had requested help from the Continental Congress three weeks prior to Greene taking over and was rejected.

Putnam, so frustrated by the response, took another commission back in Massachusetts. He had seen the train wreck coming, and when Congress refused to help him, he had effectively resigned.

Greene was the cleanup crew.

Washington, perhaps impressed by Greene’s encyclopedic military knowledge, might have hoped he could pull off a miracle. Or perhaps he was more concerned about the political implications of running from another fight.

Whatever influenced Washington’s ultimate deferral, it quickly became apparent that the fort, in fact, would not hold. Everyone on the hillside with him on that morning could see it.

Standing next to Greene and Washington on the hill overlooking the battle were Israel Putnam (Rufus’ cousin) and Hugh Mercer. These were four of the most senior officers in the Continental Army, stranded inside a battle they could not affect, as it was becoming painfully clear that the fort’s fortifications were the problem.

But the disposition was already made, and the enemy was advancing. No boats were available to transport the 3,000 Continentals to safety.

Putnam and Mercer urged Washington to leave. Greene offered to stay.

Washington insisted they all leave together. Thirty minutes later, the four generals were back across the Hudson at Fort Lee, watching from the New Jersey shore.

Greene wrote about it the next day in a letter to his closest friend, Henry Knox. “There we all stood in a very awkward situation,” he wrote. Then, a few sentences later, the line that defined the moment: “I am mad, vext, sick, and sorry. Never did I need the consoling voice of a friend more than now.”

He went on: “I was afraid of the fort. The Redou[b]t you and I advised was not done.”

He knew exactly what was wrong and what it would cost.

What We Have Here is A Failure to Communicate…

Fort Washington was not the beginning of this story. It was the second act of a failure that began at Long Island in August 1776, when Greene was the officer who knew the terrain best and wasn’t available when it mattered.

Greene had spent weeks preparing the fortifications in Brooklyn Heights. He knew every pass through the Heights of Guan, every approach the British might use.

Then, on August 15, he fell gravely ill. Washington replaced him, first with John Sullivan, then with Israel Putnam - two officers with more combat experience than Greene but zero familiarity with the ground he had studied for months.

What followed was a disaster. The British found the Jamaica Pass, a little-known route on the far eastern flank, guarded by exactly five militia officers on horseback. Ten thousand British troops walked through it in the night and flanked the entire American position from behind. The result was the largest single American defeat of the war.

Three days later, Greene - still recovering - wrote that he “could have given the commanding general a good deal of necessary information.” The restraint in that sentence barely conceals what he was really saying: I knew where the weakness was. The people who replaced me didn’t.

But Greene had also not communicated any vulnerabilities before he left the field. The knowledge disappeared with him when he went to bed with a fever, and that was his responsibility.

Fort Washington repeated the pattern. Except this time, Greene was present.

He had a private fear about the fort’s incomplete defenses. He and Knox had recommended a specific redoubt that was never built. And yet in every official communication about whether the position could hold, he presented the optimistic case - men in good spirits, situation under control - and kept the engineering fear to himself.

Why? Greene was 34 and likely eager to prove himself in his first real independent command. Illness had stopped his opportunity for command on Long Island.

Fort Washington was his second chance to prove he could both prepare and defend a position. He had publicly, repeatedly staked his professional reputation and honor on holding it.

To reverse course could mean losing further credibility. He leaned into hope - into Colonel Robert Magaw, the garrison’s commander, telling him everything would be fine - because he didn’t yet have the experience to know when to trust his gut and what he had read over the man standing in front of him.

The combined British-Hessian assault force of 8,000 men grossly outnumbered the fort’s 3,000 defenders. Nonetheless, the Americans enjoyed initial success, inflicting heavy casualties and repulsing two Hessian charges.

That success did not last. The tide began to turn when 3,000 men under British General Hugh Percy punched through the outer defensive lines to the fort’s south.

Nearly 3,000 patriots paid dearly for that decision. After taking about 150 casualties, Magaw surrendered 2,800 men to the British in a disastrous defeat.

Washington Leads, Sort of…

Washington’s initial public response - his letter to Congress on November 16 - was carefully framed. He relayed that he had given Greene discretionary authority; Greene had exercised it. The result followed. The letter was technically accurate. But politically protective of his own interests.

His private letter to his brother was more raw: the fort had been held “contrary to my Wishes and opinion,” and its loss was “to my great grief.”

What he didn’t do in his letters to Congress or to his brother was take ownership of fully delegating the decision to Greene, despite Greene’s clear inexperience. Or acknowledge that he didn’t trust or act on his own instincts.

The reality was that Washington was still a bit of a novice himself. More experienced than Greene, certainly. But many years had passed since he was in active service, and even then he wasn’t required to lead men the way he was now.

So while he didn’t quite throw Greene under the bus, he didn’t defend the lack of resources Greene was working with, nor act like a commander in chief.

To his credit, he didn’t relieve Greene either. He just shortened the leash and brought him under his direct command.

Six weeks after Fort Washington, Washington put Greene in command of one of the two columns crossing the Delaware on Christmas night to attack Trenton. Not a rehabilitative sideshow - Washington’s own column. The message to the army was impossible to miss: Fort Washington was a setback, not a verdict.

What followed was a careful calibration that most leaders never manage. Washington gave Greene responsibilities that grew in stages. Trenton. Princeton. Brandywine, where Greene’s division made a desperate four-mile forced march to plug a collapsing line and likely saved the army from destruction. At each stage, a little more rope, a little more independence, a little more trust. The leash grew longer as the judgment proved sound.

When, in the winter of 1777-78, a faction - the Conway Cabal - tried to replace Washington with Horatio Gates, Greene sided with Washington. Publicly, loudly, and at personal cost.

Greene became a political target precisely because of his closeness to the commander-in-chief. He accepted that. The loyalty Washington had invested in Greene, Greene returned when Washington needed it most.

The True Payoff

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Namely, the collective efforts to expand and defend freedom and to deliver on the legal egalitarianism in the Declaration of Independence. It just wouldn’t have fit into his “all sides” narrative.

With that in mind, it’s no surprise certain historical figures weren’t included in the third episode. The series had already breezed past the Declaration without explaining its ideological origins, so there was no reason to tie it to the story of the Crossing of the Delaware.

But that’s one of the reasons this Substack exists – to fill in the blanks.

The Antislavery Virginian at Trenton Who’d Affirm Jefferson’s Intent in the Declaration of Independence During the First Congress

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“Major Gist [and his men] kept the ground, while the rest of the brigade crossed a creek… The major and his party were drove, and I never expected to see them again.”

- Anonymous Marylander in a letter, August 28, 1776

Anyone who has given a passing thought to historical analysis or military service intuitively understands the importance of giving proper credit for what happens on the battlefield.

Determining that credit requires, at a minimum, distinguishing between the officers who give orders and those who carry them out.

Both are important, but they’re not the same. Good leaders and researchers alike give credit where credit is due.

Patrick K. O’Donnell, a historian who embedded with a Marine rifle platoon during the Battle of Fallujah in Iraq to write their story, is that kind of researcher.

His excellent book “Washington’s Immortals: The Untold Story of the Regiment that Changed the Revolution” provides most of the source material for this post, which focuses on the Battle of Brooklyn (also known as the Battle of Long Island). It has the necessary attention to detail and research required to properly assign credit. Highly recommended.

In case that’s not enough to encourage a purchase, I should add it’s also a particularly useful resource for understanding the persistence and sacrifices of the elite Maryland and Delaware Continental Army units, who were Generals Washington and Greene’s most reliable warfighters throughout the Revolution. O’Donnell has brought them to life, and his book was an invaluable resource for the profiles of the Great John Eager Howard, John “Jack” Steward, Otho Holland Williams, and Robert Kirkwood – as well as for Mordecai Gist and Samuel Smith, which this post will cover.

Notably, nearly all those men and their stories are left out of the Burns series.

In Episode 3 specifically, while the battlefield animations once again are an incredibly useful tool, it’s clear that Burns also repeated the mistake of outsourcing his research. This time to Rick Atkinson, who has a prominent speaking role in the episode.

In Burns’ defense, Atkinson has won a Pulitzer Prize, so he’s certainly credentialed. And Atkinson’s latest writing, a three-part series on the Revolution, is entertaining, often mixing in interesting details in the first two volumes I’ve read.

But his coverage of the Battle of Brooklyn was lacking. It seems clear that the omissions are Atkinson’s responsibility, as his book suffers from the exact same surface-level analysis.

No matter. Those already familiar with the Maryland line's actions that day know they were legendary.

And those that don’t will benefit from the brief synopsis in this post.

For the uninitiated, ~270 men led by an inexperienced officer, in his first action, held off a British force of more than 1,500 men, earning the title of the “Maryland 400,” alluding to Sparta’s “300” at the Battle of Thermopylae.

The officer who led the men in battle that day was Mordecai Gist.

Mordecai Gist: the Wealthy Merchant Who Risked His Fortune & Life for Freedom

For students of early American history, “Gist” is potentially a familiar surname. One may already know that a surveyor named Christopher Gist twice saved a young George Washington’s life in the Virginia backcountry.

And yes, these Gists are related. Christopher was Mordecai’s uncle.

Like Christopher, Mordecai’s father was also a surveyor and had helped lay out the streets of Baltimore. It was into that prominent family that Mordecai was born in the 1740s.

By the 1770s, Mordecai had become prosperous in his own right, having earned a small fortune through textile deals. As a leading merchant, potentially subject to unlimited taxation without recourse, Gist was on the front lines of enforcing the colonies’ boycott of British tea.

As tensions ratcheted up, Gist and other men formed the “Baltimore Independent Cadets” militia unit in December 1774. Comprised of 60 men, the Cadets committed “For the better security of our lives, liberties, and Properties… to act in defen[s]e of our Country agreeable to the resolves of the Continental Congress.” His company was the first of its kind in the colony.

Among those joining him was Samuel Smith, then a 23-year-old, well-educated, natural leader. Smith would later organize the defense of Fort Mifflin during the war and earn a sword from Congress for his heroism.

Smith’s story is a thread that Burns could have pulled throughout the series. As is Nathaniel Ramsay’s, whom I quoted at the start of the post. Ramsay was the brother of the Great Dr. David Ramsay, another relatively unknown patriot whose mere existence upends one of Burns’s central themes - more on that in a future post.

Those three - Gist, Smith, and Nathaniel Ramsay - had served and trained together from day one. And they were on the field together at the Battle of Brooklyn on August 27, 1776.

Without attempting to recount the entire battle, which the episode generally conveys accurately, let’s focus on where the episode went awry: it gave full credit to General William Alexander, who was in command of the Maryland brigade.

Alexander, described as “overweight, rheumatic, vain, pompous, gluttonous inebriate,” had convinced others to call him “Lord Stirling,” as a reference to a disputed Scottish peerage he claimed but the Scots refused to recognize (O’Donnell at 61). Other sources have noted that his primary redeeming quality may have been his bravery.

Courage does go a long way. And it certainly was important that day.

But while it’s factually correct that Alexander/Stirling ordered the charge that held off an army nearly 7x the size of the Maryland unit, he didn’t have to execute it.

That was Mordecai Gist, a 33-year-old major from Baltimore in his first real action, who had organized the Maryland men and had to actually lead them into successive assaults against a fortified British position. Gist and his men were able to make those assaults as they were one of the few Continental units with bayonets - weapons they had supplied for themselves. And on this day, they were essential.

While Gist and his men held their ground, the rest of the unit waded and swam across the Gowanus Creek to the Americans’ position on Brooklyn Heights. Samuel Smith swam back and forth several times, as “he and a sargeant…got two slabs into the water on the ends of which they ferried over all who could not swim.” (at 69).

Eventually, Gist and “a party retreated to the right through the woods, and Captain Ford and myself, with 20 others, to the left, through a marsh; nine only of us got safe in.” (at 70).

Smith summed it up: “The men were surrounded, and almost all killed, for the Hessians gave no quarter that day. The loss of the regiment was about 250; the residue got off, as best they could.” (Id.)

Stirling had been captured earlier. In total, as Burns noted, over 200 Americans were killed and another 1,000 captured. It was a rout.

But the Marylanders had bought time for Washington and the Continentals to fortify Brooklyn Heights, and with darkness approaching, British General William Howe decided against trying to press across the creek to finish off the Americans. If he had, he might have ended the Revolution that day.

The Americans had nowhere to go. But Howe knew his brother was expected to arrive with the British Armada the next day, and he could pin the rebels and extract a surrender without further bloodshed. He and his brother were both somewhat sympathetic to the colonists and aimed for reconciliation.

It turned out to be a drastic miscalculation, as Burns covered. The weather didn’t cooperate, the British ships couldn’t get close to shore, and the Americans narrowly escaped – again.

So the Gist family had likely saved Washington once again. Three times in a lifetime is a lot. Seems like worth a mention.

Conclusion

As previous posts have noted, once someone has a certain perspective, it frames what they focus on.

Burns didn’t approach this series looking for Greatness. Or heroes.

He wanted to see “all sides,” yet failed to differentiate what separates leaders from followers, experts from wannabes, and ultimately winning ideas and actions from those who fail.

No real lessons. Just a lot of “somehow.”

As if it were all inevitable.

That’s the opposite of gratitude.

And it frankly shows a lack of intellectual curiosity unbefitting of one of America’s most influential and important public historians.

“You have bought a fair land, but you will find its settlement dark and bloody.”

-Dragging Canoe, Cherokee Chief, on the 1775 Treaty of Sycamore Shoals

To whom does land “belong”? And how are land rights determined?

These are questions as old as civilization itself.

Yet pop stars and historians alike seemingly remain as confused about the answers to them as ever in 2026.

Since that’s the case, let’s break it down from first principles:

• Human civilizations throughout all recorded time have made claims to the use and enjoyment of land.

• Any claim was always subject to potential challenge by neighboring nations.

• A precursor to a valid agreement on that usage, or ownership - whether written, verbal, or otherwise - is a shared understanding of the terms of that agreement. This is the basis of all contracts, a “meeting of the minds.”

The third bullet is particularly important in the context of land transfer between native and European powers. We’ll come back to it later.

But for now, it’s also important to recognize that land-use or ownership agreements throughout human history are typically intended to enable stability and economic activity, prevent violence, and/or provide remedies when they are violated.

Unless a tribe or nation could defend those claims through physical force, they were out of luck for most of human history. Until individual property rights and independent courts came along. And then international arbiters were developed, which largely didn’t formally exist until after WWII.

It’s also worth noting that native Nations and European powers approached land transfers very differently. Native territorial arrangements were almost without exception based on military dominance. Conquered tribes didn’t receive compensation. Land changed hands through warfare as a matter of course within the native world.

Against that backdrop, the Dutch-Anglo-American insistence on negotiated, compensated transfer in North America is not only distinctive but morally superior by any consistent standard - including the standards that critics of European expansionist powers nominally hold.

There were genuine philosophical commitments by the British - partially rooted partly in natural rights thinking, partly in Crown policy - that native people held real property interests requiring real consent to transfer. Conversely, there is no documented record of Native nations paying compensation for land taken from conquered tribes.

In fact, the dominant tribes often demanded tribute from subordinates, while gift exchanges occurred only among equals.

With that background, let’s now turn to the state of North American land ownership in the years leading up to 1775. This topic, in theory, was a key question for Ken Burns.

Yet despite the quote from Episode One at the start of this post – and many others sprinkled throughout that episode and the series – it wasn’t thoroughly explored.

Instead, several historians with expertise in Native American history repeatedly explicitly or implicitly suggested that the Revolution really was just about land grabs (with a few making it about “whites” only). What’s interesting, to this writer, at least, is that it wasn’t just the Europeans who were doing the grabbing and manipulating.

In fact, every American alive today would benefit from understanding that, in the years prior to the Revolution, the Iroquois and Cherokee Nations, and British officials, acted in concert to sell and purchase shared lands which were also claimed by smaller, less-powerful tribes.

In short, during the Revolutionary era, the Iroquois and Cherokee operated under a hierarchical dominance structure and sold land to the British, on which other, subordinate tribes, including the Shawnee and Delaware, lived. And the British officials involved often knew they were buying land that these previously subordinated tribes needed.

The Nations being permanently pushed off their land often responded with actions that amounted to their own version of the Revolutionary slogan: Live free or die. And first the colonists, and then the Americans, responded in kind.

This dynamic - and the failure of the Native nations to unite, rather than sell out their subordinates - persisted until it was too late, eventually playing a major role in how the Native nations lost their land.

That story, of course, is too broad an arc for just this post. It’s a book that hasn’t been fully written.

But since Ken Burns neglected to mention any of it, the important highlights are covered below. And since these well-documented details (including a timeline and an interactive map) are not widely known, they’re for subscribers only.

The Iroquois Land Claims to Modern Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky

The Iroquois Nation, a confederacy of six tribes, was the dominant Eastern nation in the period leading up to the Revolution. They had militarily defeated and subordinated the Shawnee and Delaware, among other nations, during the Beaver Wars of the 1600s.

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“[H]e was my ancient master, my earliest & best friend; and to him I am indebted for first impressions which have had the most salutary influence on the course of my life.”

Thomas Jefferson, letter, on George Wythe, 1806

It’s hard to understate the importance of mentorship.

Anyone who has experienced some level of success can typically point to a parent, teacher, coach, or business leader who helped shape their values, thinking, and actions.

Great mentors set the standard. Through their words and actions, they define what is right.

How to succeed. How to treat others. How to effectively lead.

What matters. And how to think critically.

The Greats are also often in tune with universal truths.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that the lead authors of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution - Thomas Jefferson and James Madison - had excellent mentors.

George Wythe, George Mason, and John Witherspoon were those men. And they’re most responsible for shaping Jefferson and Madison’s intellectual views.

In so doing, they exerted an outsized influence in shaping the nation. Put simply, it was largely their passed-down principles that laid the foundation of this nation.

So, who were they?

And how was it that they helped Jefferson and Madison bring forward lessons from antiquity and merge them with Enlightenment thinking?

One would think Ken Burns would find those questions of interest.

I regret to inform you, once again, dear reader, he did not.

None of the relationships between these three Greats and their more famous understudies were even mentioned in his 12-hour documentary. Calling that whiff a “missed opportunity” would be an understatement.

The fact that the nation’s highest profile documentary filmmaker - one tasked with covering the American Revolution during the nation’s 250^th anniversary – almost completely neglected discussing how it was that Jefferson and Madison came up with ideas that changed the world certainly seems rather negligent, at best. Particularly since this nation is currently struggling to understand what it stands for.

On the other hand, it’s understandable.

We’re in a moment in time where there’s a crisis of confidence. A lack of confidence about what America stands for. Has stood for.

And what it must do going forward to live up to those principles.

We’ve been here before. Leaders have stepped up. We can do it again.

Burns doesn’t care about these questions?

No bother. You find these questions interesting.

You’re reading this. You’re intellectually curious.

You understand that a nation that doesn’t know its own history - its own foundations - can’t last long.

Which means the Republic needs YOU now, more than ever.

So let us, together, once more pick up the baton Burns dropped.

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Jefferson and Wythe: The Roots of the Declaration of Independence, Pt. 1

Jefferson’s father, Peter, passed when Thomas was 14 years old. As Thomas reflected to his grandson in his 60s: “When I consider that at fourteen years of age the whole care and direction of myself was thrown on myself entirely, without a relative or a friend qualified to advise or guide me... I am astonished that I did not turn off with some of them.”

Fortunately for young Thomas, Peter was financially well-off enough to hire private tutors, who kept him largely away from the “horse racers, card players, [and] fox hunters” and helped prepare him for college. At age 17, Thomas was admitted to the College of William and Mary and was, shortly thereafter, introduced to Professor Wythe through his first teacher at the school, Dr. William Small.

Small’s tutelage was formative for Jefferson’s interest in science, but within a year, Jefferson began studying law under Wythe, forming a close mentorship that would last nearly six years. That mentorship would turn into a friendship and an intellectual partnership that spanned their lifetimes and changed the course of world history.

It was from Wythe that Jefferson honed his understanding of John Locke.

It was from Wythe that Jefferson understood equality under the law was the essential principle.

We also now know that it was from Wythe that Jefferson learned of an ancient egalitarian principle understood by the Greeks and passed down through the ages, which was only recently uncovered through a close study of the history of philosophy - previously covered here (available for subscribers). Among those related influences was Wythe’s famous anti-slavery Quaker great-grandfather (more in the post). It was these ideas that made him “unequivocal” on the issue of slavery, in Jefferson’s words.

They were also the ideas that informed the Declaration of Independence’s legal egalitarian language.

The son of a wealthy enslaver, Jefferson was likely getting his hair blown back in ways he didn’t expect. It’s highly unlikely Jefferson would have gained the moral compass and egalitarian backbone to unequivocally declare that “all men are created equal,” endowed with “certain unalienable rights” at a time when the majority of Virginia’s population was enslaved, and his own wealth depended on enslaved labor without Wythe’s influence.

For these reasons and others, Jefferson simply noted that Wythe was “one of the greatest men of the age.”

But Jefferson wasn’t just working from what he learned from Wythe when he sat down to draft the Declaration.

He was under a time crunch. No time or need to create the language in the Declaration whole cloth.

Like any good former legislator, he was working from previously drafted text. He had George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights to work from, passed into law on June 12, 1776, about three weeks prior.

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Jefferson and Mason: The Roots of the Declaration of Independence, Pt. 2

As Julian Boyd, a Princeton historian and editor of Jefferson’s papers, documented in 1950, “a primary influence in the drafting of the Declaration [of Independence] is George Mason’s Declaration of Rights, which Jefferson saw in the Pennsylvania Evening Post for June 6.”

It was well-known at the time that Mason had a nearly unmatched understanding of the historical development of rights. Although not a trained lawyer, he had grown up with access to the second-largest library in Virginia as the adopted son of a leading lawyer, John Mercer.

Mercer had married Mason’s older sister, Catherine. And when Mason’s father died when George was just nine years old, he moved in with his sister and brother-in-law.

Mercer’s library provided Mason with a thorough grounding in the works of the Enlightenment, history, politics, and law. In writing the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Mason drew on those lessons. He pulled from a long tradition of statements of rights and liberty from English law, including the Magna Carta (1215), the English Petition of Right (1628), the Habeas Corpus Act (1679), the English Bill of Rights (1689), and John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690).

The documents weren’t merely precedents; they were records of repeated, hard-won confrontations between subjects and overreaching power. The Magna Carta was forced from King John, the Petition of Right placed checks on Charles I, the Bill of Rights resulted from the Glorious Revolution. Each represented a moment when Englishmen had fought to explicitly reassert rights that power had tried to extinguish.

Mason knew it codifying these rights in the new Republic was essential; otherwise, those in power would quickly find reasons to take them away. And it was with that knowledge that he was very precise and prescriptive about which rights needed protecting.

More interestingly – and highly relevant for the Burns documentary, as well as anyone with a passing interest in the core principles of America – was the difference between Mason’s Declaration and Jefferson’s. The final text read of the Virginia Declaration (emphasis added):

“all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society…”

That caveat was added by Virginia legislators, specifically Edmund Pendleton, to ward off potential claims that the Virginia Declaration could apply to those enslaved. Mason kept an original “first D[r]aught” without that caveat, likely understanding that history would not look kindly on the final version.

Jefferson’s Declaration, of course, omitted it. As a classically trained lawyer and former Virginia legislator who had drafted plenty of legislative language previously, he knew exactly what he was doing.

Jefferson was working with a committee of antislavery lawyers, including John Adams, Roger Sherman, and the cagy but egalitarian-leaning Benjamin Franklin. Mason had a Tidewater elite of slaveholders to deal with, himself included, and no real plans for what emancipation would entail (either financially or otherwise).

And so while Jefferson took the opportunity to translate his learnings from Wythe and Mason into a clear principle – without immediate consequences - in what became perhaps the nation’s most important founding document, he wasn’t finished. In a few short years, he’d become an important mentor in his own right for James Madison and other future leaders.

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Madison and Witherspoon; Madison and Jefferson: The Roots of the US Constitution

Like Jefferson, Madison was born in Tidewater, Virginia, about 30 miles from the Jefferson family plantations. And like Jefferson, Madison’s family could afford private tutors for his early education. One of those tutors was Reverend Thomas Martin, a graduate of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton).

At Martin’s encouragement, and in part due to the negative effects of Virginia’s weather on young Madison’s health, young James chose to attend the College of New Jersey, which was already known as a hotbed of Whiggish and revolutionary principles. Going to an out-of-state college was relatively rare at the time, particularly given the poor condition of most roads and the time it took to travel long distances by horse and carriage. Yet Madison was determined to get the best education.

Once there, Madison immediately began studying under College President John Witherspoon. From 1769 to 1772, Witherspoon was Madison’s primary instructor, with the help of three tutors. Madison even stayed an extra year after graduation to continue his studies.

Witherspoon had only arrived from Scotland one year before Madison’s enrollment, but in that time had “remade the college into a major outpost of the Scottish enlightenment.” His aim was simple: to imbue a “spirit of liberty and independence.”

Among Witherspoon’s lectures was one focused on how government could address the inevitable conflicts between different interest groups. As he wrote,

“Hence, it appears that every good form of government must be complex, so that the one principle may check the other. It is of consequence to have as much virtue among the particular members of a community as possible; but it is folly to expect that a state should be upheld by integrity in all who have a share in managing it. They must be so balanced, that when one draws to his own interest or inclination, there may be an over poise upon the whole.”

It’s highly likely that this discussion was a formative experience that would later shape Madison’s efforts to both devise the U.S. Constitution and to explain it to the public through the Federalist Papers. Federalist 51 is particularly focused on checks and balances, noting that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” and laying out the structural logic of the separation of powers most systematically.

Notably, the theme of the importance of checks and balances runs throughout many of the Federalist Papers, including Federalist 10, which establishes Madison’s core premise about human nature - that men are not angels and that institutional design must account for self-interest - and serves as the philosophical foundation for everything else. And while Madison was much more reticent about praising his intellectual influences (he frankly never credited anyone), the intellectual lineage of his thought is clear.

But years before attempting to ratify the Constitution, Madison first had to gain the knowledge necessary to draft it. For that task, he turned to Jefferson, who had become his second significant mentor after they developed a friendship in the late 1770s.

In March 1784, Madison asked Jefferson to ship him books on the history of ancient systems of government, especially confederations. As he wrote,

“I must leave to your discretion the occasional purchase of rare & valuable books, disregarding the risk of duplicates. You know tolerably well the objects of my curiosity. I will only particularize my wish of whatever may throw light on the general Constitution & droit public of the several confederacies which have existed.”

One year later, Madison made a second request of Jefferson, asking for “treatises on the antient or modern federal republics - on the law of Nations – and the history natural & political of the New World; to which I will add such of the Greek & Roman authors where they can be got very cheap…” Jefferson responded by shipping about 200 volumes to his protégé and inviting him to use his personal library at Monticello.

Madison would navigate these volumes and produce the “Virginia Plan” for the US Constitution, along with significant input from Mason and Wythe. Notably, in the federal debates over the US Constitution, Mason shows up again in an important way - breaking ranks with his fellow Virginia delegates on one key issue, the need for a “Bill of Rights.”

Consistent with his views in crafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Mason was firm in his belief that without codifying individual rights in the Constitution, federal power would usurp them. So on September 12, 1787, near the very end of the Constitutional Convention, the weary delegates were ready to conclude their work when Mason arose.

Mason again noted that he wished the Constitution had been prefaced by a Bill of Rights, adding that using the state bills of rights as models, “a bill might be prepared in a few hours,” and that it “would give great quiet to the people.”

Not a single state delegation voted in favor of Mason’s motion.

Madison recorded that Mason said “that he would sooner chop off his right hand than put it to the Constitution as it now stands.” He left Philadelphia, as Madison noted, “in an exceeding ill humour indeed” and went home “with a fixed disposition to prevent the adoption of the plan if possible.”

Only Edmund Randolph (VA) and Elbridge Gerry (MA) joined Mason in voting no.

Eventually, Madison would acknowledge Mason’s correct position and go back to the drafting table.

But that’s a full story in itself, for another time.

Conclusion

Jefferson and Madison became Great by effectively navigating the politics of the day to enact the principles they were taught by Wythe, Mason, and Witherspoon. And while their mentors were not quite as politically adept, they are equally, if not more important, to America’s story. Despite what Ken Burns thinks.

Now YOU know the truth. Hope you share it with others.

Until next time.

Thanks for following and thanks for your interest in Great Americans.

“[U]nder Our Own observation, We declare that a Negro Man, called Salem Poor, of Col. Fryes regiment, Capt. Ames’ company, in the late Battle at Charlestown, behaved like an Experienced officer, as well as an Excellent Soldier“

- Colonels William Prescott, Jonathan Brewer, and 12 other Continental officers, Letter, 1775

The second episode of Ken Burns’ American Revolution was better than the first. Despite the improvement, it still omits essential context that would provide a better understanding of the leading colonists’ values and what aspects of America are worth celebrating today.

Before getting into those details, however, a quick digression.

We’ll likely never know exactly why Burns made the choices he did. But a logical inference is possible. After he established the following broad theme in episode one:

(1) The colonists are primarily driven by material interests and are not-so-good;

(2) The British are only slightly worse (or perhaps not that bad at all!); and

(3) The Native Americans are simply picking sides to try to keep their land;

he needed to keep it going throughout the series for narrative consistency.[1] This is how storytelling works both on an individual level and a societal level. Once a theme is set, it usually dictates which facts are featured and how they’re framed.

With the Burns theme locked in, there was little space to consider aspects of the revolutionary era that reveal the true uniqueness of America, several of which previous posts (#1, #2, #3, #4, and #5) have already covered.

Embedded in those posts – as well as additional aspects I’ll discuss in this series on episode two – is what’s always existed in this country, why it’s special, and why we need to keep the flames that created those conditions alive - particularly since they’ve been buried or misunderstood by contemporary audiences.

It’s also perhaps worth noting that none of these critiques are intended to suggest that this series isn’t worth watching – it is. But it’s far from a complete or accurate story and is mainly framed in a way that’s particularly unhelpful in our current political climate. In the interest of fairness, however, a brief recap of what he did well in the episode is also in order.

The Good

The series is at its best when covering specific battles. The animated graphics and detailed topology maps bring them to life in a way not seen before. They’re top-notch, as far as this relatively layperson can detect (although I’d welcome additional thoughts from others with more expertise in military history).

The depth of coverage of the Battle of Bunker Hill, including John Stark’s efforts, was particularly interesting. Stark, a lesser-known American hero, reappears in the series later and plays a critical role at the Battle of Bennington. New Hampshire’s state motto: “Live free or die; Death is not the worst of evils,” notably comes from a letter he wrote to his men after the war.

Similarly, the animation of Benedict Arnold’s ill-fated Quebec expedition and assault on the city helps viewers immediately understand why it failed. And the coverage of Major General Richard Montgomery’s death was also valuable, as he was one of the more experienced officers in the Continental Army, and his loss was significant.

The episode also did an excellent job covering the plight of enslaved Americans, many of whom sought freedom behind British lines after Royal Governor Lord Dunmore’s proclamation in the fall of 1775 that “all indentured Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His Majesty’s Troops as soon as may be.”

This event has become a flash point for many revised interpretations of this critical period in American history, and Burns covers it well.

More specifically, by including:

(1) the ambiguity in the proclamation and the resulting chaos (there was no way to tell if a person was owned by or indentured to a “Rebel” or loyalist); and

(2) the death that it later caused (only ~2,000 of the tens of thousands who fled actually achieved freedom by the end of the war),

Burns fairly demonstrated that Dunmore and the British were not benevolent but rather took every possible step to quash the colonists’ rebellion. And he also rightfully highlighted the risks those enslaved or indentured were willing to take just for a chance at freedom. Like Stark, they understood that “death was not the worst of evils.”

He also skipped, however, the full extent to which the British used and abused those allies, which I’ll cover in the third post on this episode. But first, on to the heroes he skipped over, and the dynamics underlying their actions.

The Forgotten Heroes

Bunker Hill: Salem Poor

While Bunker Hill was generally covered well, Burns omitted a prominent hero, Salem Poor. A free black man, Poor’s service during the Battle was publicly praised by Colonel Prescott and other officers as noted in the quote kicking off this post.

Given Burns’s clear efforts throughout the series to integrate the perspectives and contributions of blacks, natives, women, and “ordinary” men, one would have thought he’d include Poor. Recounting Poor’s heroism would have provided an example of a significant, lesser-known contribution and demonstrated the potential equality of fighting ability, if opportunity was provided. It also would have shown that some colonial officers would publicly commend meritorious conduct regardless of race, even at a time when slavery existed in all 13 colonies.

But including Poor would have made sense from a thematic perspective only if Burns wanted to show an America that’s always had a propensity (even if flawed and imperfect) toward meritocratic, race-neutral values. This omission - combined with others later - is revealing (more to come on this point).

It’s also of note that the episode misstated the uniqueness of the racially integrated lines at Bunker Hill. Burns’s claim that this level of integration was not seen again “for almost two centuries” is directly rebutted by the existence of John Glover’s Marblehead Mariner unit. Glover’s racially integrated regiment repeatedly ferried the Continental Army to safety in adverse conditions at key points throughout the War, including at Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware to attack Trenton and in the Continentals’ escape after the Battle of Brooklyn. This is well documented in historian Patrick K. O’Donnell’s excellent book, available here.

Native allies and black Americans aided the war effort in the War of 1812 as well, helping Andrew Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans. Black Americans also served in the Navy during the war, including on Commodore Isaac Hull’s USS Constitution. Hull specifically noted their efforts during his victory over the British warship the Guerriere.

And, of course, less than 100 years later, there were famously integrated units in the Civil War. I’d be remiss not to note that the leadership of those units was limited to white officers. Still, progress in all things is stubbornly incremental – a fact as disappointing now as it has been throughout human history.

The Siege of Boston: Silas Royal and the Stockbridge Natives

Burns also missed opportunities to discuss Silas Royal’s service and the Stockbridge Tribe’s contributions during the Siege of Boston. Rather than carrying the story of fifer John Greenwood and teenage soldier Joseph Plumb Martin throughout the series, he could have instead used their examples as part of the complex and evolving discussions around race, friendship, and the impact of Christian missionary work that occurred prior to and during the Revolution.

This short post can’t do full justice to the stories of Royal or the Stockbridge tribes, but by way of a short summary:

• Royal was a former slave, manumitted by the Varnum family upon reaching adulthood. When fighting broke out, he volunteered to serve under his childhood friend, James Mitchell Varnum. Royal marched with “Varnum’s Regiment” to Roxbury, Massachusetts, in June 1775, where it took part in the siege of Boston. At Varnum’s urging, that regiment would later become the 1^st Rhode Island regiment, comprised of formerly enslaved black men fighting for their freedom. That regiment, as I’ll discuss in later posts, inspired similar efforts by John “Jack” Steward and John Laurens to enable enslaved men to gain freedom through military service. After the war, the Varnum brothers (James Mitchell and Joseph Bradley) came to Royal’s physical and legal defense when he was the victim of an attempted kidnapping by men seeking to sell him back into slavery. They managed to free Royal and helped him prosecute his attempted kidnappers, earning him damages in addition to ensuring his freedom. Joseph Bradley would later serve in Congress and lead the drafting of legislation to finally ban the international slave trade in 1805, two years before the earliest date permitted by the US Constitution.

• The Stockbridge Indians were the remnants of several Nations, bound together after years of disease and fighting had decimated their populations. Their chief warrior, Daniel Nimham, the last sachem of the Wappinger people, had pledged their services to the patriot cause. Daniel was commissioned as a captain in the Continental Army, and his son, Abraham Nimham, ably led a 60-man unit in service with the Continental Army at the Siege of Boston, Valcour Island, Ticonderoga, Saratoga, and Monmouth Courthouse. Daniel and his son were both later killed in action at the Battle of Kingsbridge by men commanded by British Lieutenant Colonel John Graves Simcoe. The Wappinger people had become integrated into the Stockbridge, Massachusetts, community following the Peach War of 1655, and many had become Christian after missionary efforts by the Yale-educated missionary, John Sargent, in 1734.

Neither of these stories was critical to Revolution’s overall success. But the stories of Greenwood, Martin, or others Burns decided to focus on weren’t either – often they were box-checking editorial choices.

Taken in context, what the lives of Royal, and the Varnum and Nimham families do show is that although many throughout Massachusetts and the colonies were outwardly racist or prejudiced during the Revolutionary era, certain outliers were already making concerted efforts at assimilation and integration of blacks and natives into the colonial and American community.

Whether they were fully aware of it or not, they were participating in the birth of a nation where race-neutral meritocracy would eventually become possible. Where cultural backgrounds would become blended into something new and unique.

They were the pioneers of concepts not yet fully codified in law but enacted in their own lives. They were serving as the tip of the spear of incremental progress, which is always necessary.

It was their efforts, and others like them, that were truly revolutionary for their time. They were the men whom Thomas Paine, the son of a Quaker, was talking about when he wrote that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” And Ken Burns missed it.

Quebec: Return Jonathan Meigs, Sr., and Christopher Greene

There is only so much one can cover in a history series. And the attack on Quebec received a very fair retelling. Yet two men who were part of Benedict Arnold’s failed expedition would later have significant impacts on the war effort – as well as the freedom of black and native peoples – were overlooked entirely.

Once again, if one knows the stories of Return Jonathan Meigs, Sr., and Christopher Greene, they would assume Burns would include them if he were interested in fairly portraying the true revolution of the mind taking place in America.

But as noted in an earlier post, he simply summarized the dramatic advancement in the egalitarian application of the rule of law that was the American Revolution by claiming that it “somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.” In other words, Burns asked the essential question but failed to answer it.

Hopefully, you’ve come to this series of posts to learn about that “somehow.”

Meigs, Sr., Advances Global Diplomatic Standards with the Cherokee

Meigs, Sr., and Greene’s story began together, as they were among those captured in the failed Quebec expedition. Meigs was held as a prisoner for about six months, and Greene for about 20, with both eventually released through prisoner exchanges.

It’s notable that Meigs likely received an earlier release due to his humane actions during the initial assault on the city. While serving as one of Arnold’s two battalion commanders, Meigs was in charge of several hundred men and led house-to-house street fighting. In those battles, Meigs captured the British Commander Carleton’s chief engineer, Captain Law. Although the exact circumstances of the capture weren’t recorded, Meigs’ journal notes that he “made a prisoner” of Law rather than killing him.

When the patriot assault collapsed only a few hours later, Meigs and his men were captured. But his kindness was reciprocated, as Law assisted Meigs in obtaining improved housing during his captivity and a relatively early release.

Meigs would go on to lead a successful nighttime assault on Sag Harbor just four months after his official exchange, killing six Loyalists and capturing 90 while the Americans suffered no casualties. The Second Continental Congress awarded him “an elegant sword” for his success. He’d also lead a column during Anthony Wayne’s heroic assault on Stony Point and, after the war, became the U.S. Indian Agent to the Cherokee Nation.

Although the presentism of many contemporary historians doesn’t enable them to recognize it, the early American government’s approach to relations with Native nations was novel.

With access to foreign trade for weapons and eventually domestic manufacturing, America undoubtedly had superior military technology to the Native Nations. And as is true throughout nearly all human history, those with superior technology tend to win.

This was the case with the Cherokee. As Cherokee Indian Agent, Meigs was “generally sympathetic” and “devoted himself to promoting the well-being of the Cherokees” with “a deep sympathy for their problems.” He was described as “sensible, just, firm, and above desire for personal gain.”

He also isolated certain Cherokee chiefs and paid them to sell lands when he couldn’t reach a consensus with all the tribal leaders. Interpreted through a “modern” lens, many historians are apt to classify these land concessions negatively.

Yet in practice, Meigs and the Americans more broadly were advancing a novel concept in world history. At the time, the “right of conquest” was traditionally accepted in international law, with the principle being that a conquering force stronger than the government it replaced was more likely to secure peace and stability.

Instead of replacing the conquered Cherokee leaders with the American government, accommodations were being made to purchase the conquered land and allow the conquered Nation to continue, albeit often on different land. The Americans were paying for land they could have taken to reduce further bloodshed.

In the context of early 19^th-century norms, the fact that the U.S. paid anything at all, rather than simply conquering Cherokee lands, does represent a constraint on pure military power. An imperfect solution, undoubtedly, but progress for its time.

This is an underexplored topic, which I’ll discuss in greater detail in future posts in this series on Episode Two. For now, it’s enough to know that Meigs was on the vanguard of this effort as well, positioning America as a global leader in diplomatic solutions rather than military conquest. These actions were part of a pattern of establishing a new global norm that constrained raw military power with moral and legal principles that consent (even coerced consent) and compensation mattered.

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Greene Leads Men to Freedom

Let’s now briefly pivot to Christopher Greene’s contributions to advancing freedom. While Burns does mention the 1^st Rhode Island Regiment - which was primarily comprised of more than 130 enslaved black men serving in the military for their freedom in a later episode - he doesn’t fully discuss their excellent battlefield performances, mentioning only the Battle of Rhode Island and skipping the Battle of Red Banks. And he completely ignores their commanding officer, Christopher Greene.

Greene was a distant cousin of the much better-known Major General Nathanael Greene. After release from the British prison, he took over command of the 1^st Rhode Island Regiment in 1778. He immediately set out to improve their training, as very few of the formerly enslaved men had experience with muskets or other weapons. After only six weeks, the regiment joined American and French troops to drive the British out of Newport at the Battle of Rhode Island.

They performed exceptionally well in the Battle, as later noted by Samuel Greene Arnold in his History of Rhode Island:

“It was in repelling these furious onsets that the newly raised black regiment, under Col. Greene, distinguished itself by deeds of desperate valor. Posted behind a thicket in the valley, they three times drove back the Hessians who charged repeatedly down the hill to dislodge them.”

The unit went on to deliver one of the most lopsided patriot victories at the Battle of Red Banks, before Greene was killed in action at Pines Bridge.

Without attempting to cover all the heroism of Greene and his men in this post, the key takeaway is this: Varnum, with his suggestion, and Greene, with his execution, were also at the vanguard of a small but significant step forward – an opportunity for freedom through military service. Grossly insufficient through a presentist lens, but the incremental progress that was possible in the moment.

But another example of an important leader that Burns could have foreshadowed for greater discussion in future episodes, yet passed over.

Conclusion

With that, I’ll close out this post. In the next column in this series, I’ll feature three mentors - George Mason, George Wythe, and John Witherspoon – also neglected by Burns, but the intellectual sparks that enabled Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and James Madison’s U.S. Constitution.

Three more important, missing pieces to the foundations of America.

[1] For those who watched the series and didn’t quite notice that subtlety in the episode, I direct your attention to the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence, where historian Alan Taylor is interviewed about the document and states (1 hr. 50 min mark), “It is a list of crimes, allegedly committed by the King.” Taylor and Burns list some of the “allegations” but don’t discuss the specifics, so they hang out there as if they might be disputable – they are not. I won’t go charge-by-charge in this post, but you can view the original text here and, by applying details from this series (and perhaps some of your own pre-existing knowledge), conclude that these “allegations” are based in facts.

“W[e] fervently warn all in profession with us, that they be careful to avoid being any Way concerned in reaping the unrighteous Profit arising from that iniquitous Practice of Dealing in Negroes and other Slaves… in direct violation of the Gospel-Rule which teacheth every one to do as they would be done by, and to do Good unto All.”

- Anthony Benezet, 1758, Pennsylvania

Antislavery Before the Revolution

People like simple stories.

In 2020s America, there’s a simple story that “slavery was bad” (of course) and therefore any Founder associated with slavery is also “bad.”

It’s a story that’s easy to understand. It’s also easy to repeat, particularly on social media.

The full story of slavery and antislavery at America’s founding, however, is much more complicated.

As a starting point, it’s important to note the scholarly distinction between antislavery and abolition. The antislavery camp advocated for various forms of gradual emancipation or steps to reduce slavery.

Abolitionists, in contrast, sought an immediate end to the practice. That was a position relatively few held until much later in American and world history (1830s on).

The antislavery movement, however, represents a significant aspect of colonial history that happened before the Revolution. It’s far more comprehensive than the 34 pamphlets, speeches, and legislative actions that I detail in this post.

Prominent early American leaders consistently attacked and debated the institution in public from the 1750s up to the time of the Declaration of Independence.

Given the competing narrative that has dominated the NY Times and MSNBC over the past decade, Burns could have used the American Revolution series to explore this truth.

I regret to inform you, dear readers, he did not.

It’s unfortunate for a variety of reasons, as the accurate, more complex story helps revive the founding from the ravenous online hordes who find it easier to demonize the nation as having an unforgivable “original sin” rather than educate with nuance.

C’est la vie. This Substack exists for the latter purpose, and perhaps someday it will get similar social media attention. Hope springs eternal!

Onto the details.

The Broad Public Debate on the Application of the Golden Rule & Natural Rights

As a starting point, the antislavery movement was not limited to the Northern colonies. Anthony Benezet disseminated his Christian antislavery message from the 1758 PA Quaker meeting house to other colonies and across the Atlantic, helping to influence similar activities in England and France. William Wilberforce and French abolitionists would later echo his arguments in their own antislavery debates. The story of how that happened is its own book, one which you can purchase from Dr. Maurice Jackson, a professor at Georgetown.

In short, the American Quakers’ antislavery positions and Benezet’s network of contacts, including Abbe Raynal, Granville Sharpe, and John Wesley, helped spark an international reevaluation of a practice that had existed in some form since antiquity.

The American Quakers' broader history of antislavery predates the period (1754-1775) covered in the first episode of Burns’ series by more than 50 years, and their contributions to the Revolution are so significant that they warrant a more comprehensive post, which I’ll undertake at a later date.

For now, it’s enough to know that their strict textual application of the “golden rule” - driven by Benezet’s advocacy from the 1750s onward - was a spark for antislavery in the colonies and beyond.

However, natural law and the Enlightenment also provided kindling.

James Otis’s fiery pamphlet in 1764 was the first to make that case. It was widely read throughout the colonies, including in South Carolina and Georgia.

And while Arthur Lee’s anonymous tract was blocked from republication in his home state, it was reprinted in PA. Less than two weeks after its publication, Lee’s brother, Richard Henry Lee, introduced a bill in the VA House of Burgesses to impose a heavy duty on imported slaves to discourage the trade.

It wasn’t just those four.

John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Rush, Richard Bland, and a suite of prominent preachers all made similar, very public arguments in the years leading up to the Revolution.

None of this is to suggest that a goal of the Revolution was to end slavery. That certainly wasn’t on the table at any point. Still, the very nature of arguing from the position of natural rights for several decades leading up to the fighting had forced colonial leaders to evaluate their intellectual and moral consistency.

In publicly exercising their reasoning, prominent, educated colonists were compelled - for the purposes of intellectual consistency, at a minimum - to question the core beliefs of the society in which they were born and in which they participated.

Did they genuinely believe the Enlightenment principles they were arguing from? Did the deists really adhere to the atomism that inspired the silent (and not so-silent) followers of Epicurean philosophy? Did all Christians really believe in the “Golden Rule” as strongly as the Quakers?

How far would the “leveling” of the Revolution actually go?

These were the very big, very unsettling questions they had to face. And its clear that many took significant steps toward those principles, despite: (1) their fears of the retribution they knew was deserved for violating Nature’s God; (2) unclear financial mechanisms to end the practice or a different economic system to replace it with; and (3) a complete lack of public education system to help provide a viable future for a population which had been largely excluded from such basic freedoms as learning to read.

That’s what they were wrestling with.

It wasn’t the “main show” of the Revolution, but it was certainly part of the discussion. And while Burns did note that the Continental Congress placed a ban on the slave trade in 1774 (seemingly out of nowhere, in his retelling), the backstory of how that was a logical step might have been useful to his audience.

Particularly one that likely swims in the online milieu previously noted.

Setting that misstep aside, Burns also missed another key feature of the Revolutionary culture that came about as a result of the unique consequences of having two generations of educated men studying the origins of their rights - a unique preoccupation with virtue.

“Virtue” as the Measure of Public Man

I’ve previously written about this topic here and made a somewhat viral video here, as the first video of the Project. They generally cover the topic in sufficient detail.

But if there’s one takeaway not included in either of those options, it’s this: There’s perhaps no period in American history where leaders were more focused on talking about ancient, universal virtues than the years leading up to the Revolution.

The patriot leaders needed to distinguish themselves from their loyalist counterparts and the corruption they saw in the actions of colonial officers. Antiquity offered the model. And they were quick to understand that emulating heroes from the past could provide inspiration for those they were leading in the present.

The examples of the Romans and Greeks provided a direct link to the ideals and government they wanted. They tied the application of these virtues to achieving the future they wanted.

As the video clip notes, Patrick Henry used his final words to the public, in a letter with his will, to intone:

"Practice virtue thyself and encourage it in others.”

Similarly, John Adams noted that the Constitution which he and the Founding generation had created was:

“[M]ade only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government for any other.”

The revolution was all of these components:

• A history and virtue-obsessed elite,

• A brewing antislavery sentiment based on first principles,

• An individualistic religious culture,

• Two generations of men that had engaged in public constitutional debates, and

• More than five generations of men with experience in representative government and religious bodies.

Many interests and motivations were converging. And it was these elements which combined to create the unique conditions for a sustained battle against a far superior military force.

These were not men simply motivated by the prospect of native land and low taxes, as Burns would have the viewers believe. These are higher callings.

Religious and honor-bound duties to oneself, one’s ancestors and progeny.

A duty to live free.

It’s a message which would inspire not just the white male colonists of that era, but all peoples who have since heard it. And that is what makes America special.

“Government is instituted to protect property of every sort... This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”

- James Madison, Property, 1792

It’s hard to overstate the importance of private property rights. The defense of those rights has long served as the driving force behind the development of representative government.

Starting with the Magna Carta in 1215, which transformed property from a royal favor into a legal right, demands for secure property rights enabled:

1. the development of “due process of law” for all men (1354);

2. the right to a trial by jury through jurist Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England (1642); and

3. the supremacy of Parliament (as representatives of the people) in crafting new laws with the Glorious Revolution (1688) and the resulting English Bill of Rights (1689).

As these rights were expanded and strengthened, they also created checks on executive and judicial power. The very concept of the rule of law (not the “divine” right of kings) developed from the legal scaffolding that protected the right to private property.

In other words, property rights are the master right upon which the entire Western legal system was built.

Given that history, it’s rather surprising that Ken Burns skipped over the dramatic British encroachment on the colonists’ property rights in the years leading up to the Revolution. But as previously noted (posts one, two, and three), these issues arise when historians with narrow expertise are the primary interviewees for a documentary.

Without further belaboring the point, let’s delve into the events that led to James Otis Jr. delivering his historic oral argument as described by John Adams in the quote above.

James Otis, Jr. and the Writs of Assistance

The year is 1760, and the British and colonists have teamed up to win the French and Indian War. They’re in the process of forcing the French to withdraw from North America.

As the Burns’ documentary noted, there is a massive bill to pay. Nearly half of the British government’s annual budget is now going toward paying interest on the war debt.

In August, King George appointed Francis Bernard as the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s new Governor with a mandate to raise revenue to pay down the war debt by collecting taxes on imports.

However, from the late 1600s until then, the British semi-official policy on tax collection was one of “salutary neglect” (i.e., turning a blind eye). British officials believed that if the colonies grew wealthy through “illicit” trade, they would ultimately purchase more British-manufactured goods, benefiting the Empire.

This resulted in a generation of merchants, including John Hancock, who viewed “free trade” as an English right rather than a crime. In other words, smuggling was rampant.

James Otis, Jr., is the Bay Colony’s Advocate General and lead prosecutor for the British government in matters regarding maritime law and trade at the time. His job is to defend the legality of “writs of assistance,” which had been sparingly issued until now to allow searches and seizures of potentially smuggled goods.

A lawyer from a prominent Boston family, he’s widely regarded as the preeminent legal mind in the Colony. His father is also the Speaker of the Colony’s House of Representatives and poised to join the state’s Supreme Court, taking on a role promised to him by the outgoing Royal Governor Pownall.

All of that was about to rapidly change.

In November, the new Governor, Francis Bernard, appoints Thomas Hutchinson as Chief Justice of the Colony’s Supreme Court, passing over the senior Otis. Bernard needed someone he could count on to execute his revenue-raising plans, and although Otis Sr. had worked well with his predecessor, Bernard wanted to make sure he had someone completely loyal.

That decision would set off an unanticipated chain of events, which further kindled the growing flame of resistance to British authority.

Otis, Jr. immediately resigns his position in protest, as Hutchinson was already the Colony’s Lieutenant Governor, a Judge of Probate, and a member of the Governor’s Council, which is a top legislative advisory role.

More specifically, in colonial Massachusetts, the legislature consisted of two houses: the House of Representatives (elected by the people) and the Council (elected by the House but subject to the Governor's veto). Hutchinson often used his role on the Council to kill or soften legislation coming out of the House of Representatives.

Because the Council had to approve all laws before they reached the Governor, Hutchinson could coordinate his "Junto" (allies and relatives on the Council) to block bills that challenged Crown authority or his own personal interests.

With his new role as Chief Justice of the state’s Supreme Court secured, Hutchinson was now holding offices that gave him significant sway over executive, legislative, and judicial outcomes. Perhaps more importantly, he was not a lawyer and had no formal legal training - particularly egregious as he was now charged with adjudicating cases on the state’s highest court.

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“This radical Change in the Principles, Opinions Sentiments and Affection of the People, was the real American Revolution.”

- John Adams, February 13, 1818

As discussed in the previous post, how a society tells its origin story not only defines its principles - it also influences its future actions.

This remains as true in 2025 as it was during the Revolutionary era.

Which is why it’s particularly regrettable that the Burns documentary offered a simplified, secular, and materialistic explanation of the conflicts leading to the American Revolution. Land, taxes, and representation were the only aspects that mattered in his retelling.

The colonists’ own story - the one they told themselves about themselves - was largely missing. Instead, much of the narrative in the first episode was covered by historians with expertise on Native American and British history.

Mentioning those perspectives isn’t a problem. But the weight they were given relative to colonists’ views creates, at best, an incomplete picture. At worst, it’s a false narrative.

This post will provide a partial remedy for that significant oversight.

The Untold History of America’s Religious Dissenters

So, who were the colonists in their own minds? What rights did they expect as English subjects, and what were the rights and obligations they understood were divinely ordained?

There isn’t a single answer.

But for many, the divinely ordained rights were the ones they had come to the “new world” to protect. For most men, now and then, embedded in that defense is a sense of personal honor, encompassing duties to themselves, their families, ancestors, progeny, and God.

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States after the Revolution, he famously noted, “the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention, and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences.” And as the leading 20^th-century historian and Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington summarized in his seminal book, Who Are We, “18^th-century Americans and their leaders saw the Revolution in religious and largely biblical terms.”

Although scholarly debate continues over the extent to which Reformed Protestant arguments for resistance to tyranny fused with Scottish Enlightenment and Lockean principles (or didn’t), no serious historian would ignore these ideas. The preaching, pamphlets, and teaching throughout the colonies in the 1750s and beyond came to define the Revolutionary culture.

As Ambrose Serle, secretary to British General Howe, wrote to the British Secretary of State in 1776, the American Revolution was, at least in part, a religious war.

Similarly, on the floor of Parliament, Sir Edmund Burke gave an extensive account of how the Americans’ Protestantism motivated the war. Even King George III and other highly placed Britons would refer to the colonists’ rebellion as a “Presbyterian War.”

John Adams would concur, writing in 1815 that the religious element of the conflict was “a fact as certain as any in the history of North America.”

Thus, understanding the causes of the Revolution requires examining the religious views and underlying tensions in the two colonies where the most vigorous opposition to British rule began - Massachusetts and Virginia.

More importantly for the purposes of this post, it’s well-documented that religious and political dissent was alive and well in Massachusetts and Virginia long before the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, which is where the Burns tale essentially begins, despite its claim of covering May 1754 – May 1775.

Religious dissent and the divine duty to defend individual rights against tyranny – both ecclesiastical and political - had echoed throughout Boston pulpits and newspapers since before 1750. The prime agitator in that movement was Dr. Jonathan Mayhew, pastor of Boston’s West Church.

Jonathan Mayhew: Religious Dissent, Individualism, and Radical Whig Philosophy

Descended from Puritan missionaries who founded Martha’s Vineyard, Mayhew was “considered by some as the best preacher in New England.” Educated at Harvard, he had been imbued with the ideas of “Plato, Demosthenes, Cicero and other renowned persons among the ancients,” as well as modern political thought, “such as Sydney and Milton, Locke and Hoadly.”

After graduating in 1744, Mayhew studied for an additional three years under a local theologian before taking to the West Church pulpit. Once there, he quickly established himself as one of the leading thinkers in the city, interpreting the Bible predominantly through the lens of natural law and reason, as well as drawing from classical and English Whig influences.

Mayhew’s earliest work to gain significant attention was the Seven Sermons series he preached in 1748, which was compiled and published the following year. Those sermons laid the groundwork for an individualistic philosophy that would eventually spread throughout the Bay Colony. Embedded in them were two core arguments:

(1) Reason is a divine gift, and that “the natural abilities of men” were sufficient to discern right from wrong. To blindly follow a priest or a king was to bury God-given talent; and

(2) Freedom of conscience was paramount, famously stating that no person or assembly of men and no church or state has any right to dictate to another what he shall believe.

In other words, nothing could usurp an individual’s right of private judgment in religious and moral matters. At his core, Mayhew was a radical individualist. He argued that even if 99% of a community believed something, the 1% had the absolute right and duty to disagree if their reason led them elsewhere.

Anglicans Encroach on Religious Liberty, Mayhew Responds

In August of the same year that Mayhew first delivered his sermons, the Church of England (“Anglican” or “Episcopal”) laid a cornerstone for a more permanent stone version of their King’s Chapel in Boston, with the intention of replacing a wooden structure built in 1686. That step - combined with Bishop Thomas Sherlock petitioning the King’s Privy Council to appoint a bishop for the colonies - quickly heightened fears that the Crown was planning to impose its religious rule on the city.

For Boston’s Puritans, this was an all-too-familiar development. Puritanism originated in England as a moral and ecclesiastical reform movement within the Anglican Church, aimed at returning it to its biblical roots by eliminating all remaining vestiges of Catholicism. The term “Puritan” was initially applied by Anglicans against the group as a pejorative slur.

Facing persecution under Charles I and Bishop Laud, 20,000 Puritans had traveled across an ocean in the “Great Migration” to establish their “City Upon a Hill,” the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which eventually became Boston.

This was in stark contrast to the other large colonies, such as Virginia and South Carolina, where the Church of England was the de facto state church. In these colonies, taxation directly supported the religious establishment, and elected Anglican vestrymen held significant civil and administrative power within the community.

So, when the 29-year-old Mayhew stepped to the pulpit on January 30, 1750, to deliver a new sermon in response, his audience was primed for what they were about to hear.

That sermon, “Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission...” was one for the ages.

Delivered on the 100th anniversary of the execution of Charles I during the English Civil War it was a direct rebuttal to the Anglican doctrine of “passive obedience.” That doctrine held that subjects must never resist their monarch, even if the monarch is a tyrant, because the Monarch’s authority comes directly from God.

John Adams called it a “catechism” for his education and sent a copy to Jefferson late in his life, noting the sermon was one which he read until “the Substance of it was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory.”

What exactly did Mayhew argue that so influenced the young Adams?

He called Charles I a “lawless tyrant” and argued that a ruler who violates the law is no different than a “common robber” or a “pirate.”

Put simply, Mayhew made clear that resistance to tyranny is a Christian duty.

In the years leading up to his sermon, some Anglican clergy in the colonies had used the anniversary of Charles’ death to preach the doctrine.

Mayhew found the combination of this doctrine and the Church’s recent actions particularly dangerous, and his response blended traditional Christian doctrine with instructions for the exigencies of the moment.

Using an extended exposition of Romans 13, he explained that Paul’s primary audience were those in the first-century Roman church who did not show proper respect to civil authority and were of a “licentious opinion and character.”

Applying his own reasoning, Mayhew argued that Romans 13 could not conceivably require submission to all rulers, only to those who were “good.” In his view, rulers who “attend continually upon the gratification of their own lust and pride and ambition, to the destruction of the public welfare,” were not worthy of a Christian’s submission.

In other words, Mayhew was echoing a tradition - dating back to the Scottish Protestant reformer John Knox - that people may rightfully defy a ruler who betrays their trust through tyrannical action, as they cease to be a minister of God. His sermon was directly speaking to the lived experiences of many of his fellow Bostonians, whose ancestors had suffered persecution and cruelty under the reigns of the two King Georges, the Stuarts, the two Jameses, and the two Charleses.

Mayhew’s audience knew the story, having already transmitted it themselves in writing and through tradition for generations. It was “their story,” retold and revived against a new threat of tyranny.

His parishioners and eventually the whole city were now on high alert.

As Adams also noted,

“[Mayhew’s sermon] made a greater Sensation in New England than [Patrick] Henry’s [speech] against the Parsons did in Virginia. It made a Noise in Great Britain where it was reprinted.”

In a separate letter, Adams claimed, “It was read by every Body, celebrated by Friends, and abused by Enemies.”

After the speech, rumors continued to circulate that the British Crown intended to appoint a Bishop for America. New Englanders feared this would lead to a formal “establishment” of Anglicanism, which would threaten everything they had sacrificed for and built.

While some in the colonies denounced Mayhew’s doctrines as heresy, they quickly garnered him international acclaim. The Scottish “New Light” thinkers and Whig historians recognized a kindred spirit, and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland awarded him an honorary Doctor of Divinity in 1751.

To the Church of England hierarchy, the award wasn’t just a degree; it was a “hostile act” in an ongoing religious war. Anglican clergy in America began to write panicked letters back to London, claiming that if the Crown didn’t send a Bishop to America immediately, Mayhew and his “Dissenting” allies would use their newfound intellectual prestige to lead the colonies into a full-scale revolt.

The attacks on Mayhew backfired immediately, however. The Anglican clergy had accidentally confirmed Mayhew’s “Conspiracy Theory.”

He argued that if the church was this upset over a simple degree from a Scottish university, imagine how much they’d try to control the people if they actually sent a Bishop to Boston.

The flame of rebellion in New England was now fully lit.

Mayhew’s message would eventually spread through the Massachusetts countryside, including to Lexington, MA, and minister Jonas Clark. Clark and many other rural preachers would echo Mayhew’s message in sermons throughout the 1760s. The fusion of Whig and Christian principles had taken hold.

And on the night of Paul Revere’s ride in 1775, it was Clark’s parsonage in Lexington where John Hancock and Sam Adams hid from British troops. When news arrived that the British regulars were marching toward the town, leaders asked Clark if the people would fight.

Clark famously replied, “I have trained them for this very hour.” This wasn’t bravado; he was stating the truth.

Clark had been preaching Mayhew’s doctrine for over a decade: when a ruler becomes a tyrant, “resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

The time to act had arrived. The first shots of the Revolution were fired just eight hours later.

Patrick Henry and the Parsons Cause

While Jonathan Mayhew’s message was providing the intellectual and emotional ammunition for revolution in New England, another controversy between the Anglican Church and a dissenting religion - this time in Virginia - provided an opportunity for a young Patrick Henry to make his mark.

The year was 1758, and a severe drought had caused Virginia’s tobacco crops to fail. Prices had skyrocketed from 2 cents to 6 cents per pound. With no gold or silver standard in the state at the time, tobacco served as a form of currency.

Taxes were also assessed in pounds of tobacco, and public officials, including the clergy, were paid in tobacco. To prevent a massive tax increase, the Virginia legislature passed the Two-Penny Act, which allowed taxpayers to pay their debts (including the ministers’ salaries) in paper money at a fixed rate of 2 cents per pound, regardless of the high market price of tobacco.

The ministers felt cheated and appealed to the King. Agreeing with the ministers, the King vetoed the Two-Penny Act, leading Patrick Henry to take up the case in Hanover County, Virginia – a hotbed of “New Light” Presbyterians.

The Scots-Irish Presbyterian Journey

Like the Puritans, many Scots-Irish Presbyterians came to the colonies seeking religious and political freedom, as well as economic opportunity. Their journey was long and had involved an intermediate stop, as they had first emigrated from Scotland to Ulster, Ireland, in the 1600s. They faced religious discrimination and economic hardship there too.

Banned from holding office and forced to pay tithes to Anglicans, they persisted until multiple crop failures in the 1720s and 1740s pushed them to the breaking point. Many packed their bags and traveled across the Atlantic to the colonies, just over 100 years after the Puritan “Great Migration.”

Although some landed in Boston, most Presbyterians came to Philadelphia. They quickly found that the coastal land had already been taken by English Quakers and Germans.

True to their nature, they headed for the “backcountry” or the frontier and moved south along the Appalachian Mountains, following the Great Wagon Road. Many eventually settled in the valleys of Virginia and the Carolinas before pushing over the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee.

Among the Presbyterians who moved to Virginia, none had a greater impact than Samuel Davies.

Samuel Davies and the Southern Fusion of Religious Dissent and Whig Principles

Presbyterianism, similar to Puritanism, offered a direct, personal relationship with God, without the need for an intermediary Bishop. Also structured in a more democratic, participatory model than the Anglican Church, the Presbyterian governance structure differed from the Puritans in that it was characterized by representative assemblies of elected elders (presbyters) rather than independent bodies of Puritan congregations.

The “New Light” Presbyterians were an offshoot influenced by the “Great Awakening” and focused on combining rigorous academic scholarship with passionate, emotional preaching – much like Mayhew.

Samuel Davies was a product of that “New Light” system, educated at a famous school in Fagg’s Manor, Pennsylvania. Like Mayhew, his training had focused on integrating Whig political philosophy, Enlightenment science, and religious piety.

When he arrived in Hanover County, Virginia, in April 1747, he was answering the request of people led by a bricklayer named Samuel Morris, who had begun meeting in “reading houses” to study the works of Martin Luther and George Whitefield and wanted a permanent minister.

At just 23 years old, this bold, rising star went straight to the General Court in Williamsburg. Despite fierce opposition from the Anglican Attorney General, Peyton Randolph, Davies successfully argued that the 1689 English Act of Toleration (applied to Virginia. He was granted a license to preach at four specific locations in Hanover County.

This was a watershed moment in Southern history, as Davies became the first non-Anglican minister to obtain a license to preach in Virginia.

Soon after, a woman named Sarah Winston Henry showed up at one of Davies’ services with her young son, Patrick. On their carriage rides home, Sarah would have Patrick repeat back what he had heard to her, practicing not only the words but also his cadence and emotions. And just as Jonathan Mayhew had influenced others in the North, Davies was teaching the young Henry that “resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.”

More specifically, for Davies, liberty was not a grant from a monarch that could be taken away; it was a talent lent by God. To allow a tyrant to take your liberty was, in his eyes, a sin and a failure to protect what God had entrusted to you.

When the Virginia frontier was under attack during the French and Indian War, Davies used the opportunity to mobilize his listeners. His 1758 sermon, The Curse of Cowardice, confirmed for the Virginia militia that they were fighting for “the liberty of their country” and the “purity of their religion.”

Going one step farther than Mayhew, he had now merged the Whig idea of a citizen-soldier into a religious calling.

Henry’s early exposure to Davies’ fiery, emotional, and deeply democratic oratory was life-changing. His mimicry of Davies’ “plain-speak” style and those early years of informal training with his mother would help him meet the moment when he set out to argue the Parsons Cause in 1763.

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The Parsons Cause

With the King’s veto of the Two-Penny Act in hand, James Maury, an Anglican minister, filed a case against the collector of parish taxes for the difference between the 2 cents paid to him and the 6-cent market value of the tobacco. Thinking he’d have better chances of winning in Hanover County than filing in Louisa County, where the tax collector lived, Maury’s attorney won the first round when the presiding judge accepted the King’s veto and ordered a jury to determine the amount owed to Maury.

That judge was John Henry, Patrick’s father. It was also the first time a colonial court had ruled in favor of the clergy.

The tax collector’s attorney then resigned, and Patrick took over the case. Although that seems like a clear conflict of interest today, it wasn’t unusual at the time.

Henry knew his audience, a jury drawn from the local Presbyterian community, and went to work, channeling Davies. While there’s no contemporary record of oral argument, U.S. Attorney General William Wirt would later interview those in attendance and attempt to piece together what was said.

In Wirt’s recounting, just like Davies and Mayhew before him, Henry went right to the divine obligation for resistance:

“A King by disallowing acts of this salutary nature, from being the father of his people, degenerated into a tyrant and forfeits all right his subjects’ obedience.”

Maury’s attorney is reported to have claimed, “Treason!” But the jury didn’t see it that way. They had an obligation to award some damages, but after only five minutes the jury came back to award Maury a single penny.

It was an intended insult. And the Church of England was again on notice.

Virginians would not submit. Not to parliamentary or ecclesiastical overreach.

Henry was a new folk hero.

The pre-Revolutionary flame rose higher.

Conclusion

These were the sparks that kindled the flame of Revolution that grew over the next decade. It spread – not around the world, as Burns claimed, that was much later – but in the hearts and minds of the colonists. Davies would go on to have a brief but transformative stint as the President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton).

He fundamentally reshaped the college from a regional seminary into a place where statesmen were trained, setting the stage for John Witherspoon to build on his legacy and inspire a generation of revolutionary leaders - including James Madison. I’ll cover that in more detail in a later post.

Similarly, Mayhew’s influence directly impacted what came next in Boston. A friend and collaborator with James Otis, Jr., he also inspired countless other revolutionary leaders including the Adams cousins, Robert Treat Paine, Paul Revere, and Dr. Joseph Warren. But that’s also for another post…

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Author’s note: this is perhaps the most personal article I’ve written, as my 2x grandmother is Olive Mayhew, descended from the same common ancestor as Jonathan, the American progenitor of the line, Governor Thomas Mayhew. And while this is partially my story, it’s really the story of ALL Americans, as like Jonathan, I’m simply compiling the principles that inspired the action to create this great experiment in self-governance that we all now enjoy. Thank you for reading. And thank you for considering a subscription to support this work.

“The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of 15 years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.”
- John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1815.

How the Story is Told Matters

At the risk of stating what’s intuitive to many, storytelling shapes our perception of reality. It’s also an activity each of us engages in daily, whether we’re aware of it or not.

For individuals, key events and the meaning assigned to them create a personal narrative. Similarly, the historical events a nation focuses on, and their framing, become its story.

That story influences how one perceives not only the past, but what is possible for the future.

Thus, it’s hard to overstate the importance of getting America’s story right.

More specifically, if our nation’s unique characteristics - including its first principles - are misconstrued or underdeveloped, how is the public to know to vehemently defend them when they are threatened, either today or in the future?

That’s why I was compelled to write this series of posts. And it’s part of the reason why this entire Project exists.

The Missing Story from Episode One

The quotes leading off this post highlight the focus that Burns’ first episode lacks.

My contention, backed by many leading historians, is that it’s the ideological origins of the Revolution and the colonists’ more than one hundred years of experience with self-governance that made our origin story both possible and unique in its outcome.

Indeed, the story regarding how leading colonists wrote and spoke about themselves, in their time – even if it’s not the whole truth – should matter if one wants to understand their intentions and the culture that was being shaped. Their thoughts and words helped drive their own actions and inspired others to join them.

It’s this narrative that should take precedence (over foreign perspectives) in any series that is focused on the Revolution.

Selectively excluding this broad topic is also, frankly, revisionist history.

Yet the first episode dutifully ignores nearly all of the over 400 American pamphlets published between 1750 and 1776, the period which it ostensibly covers. It also skips right over the cultural and legal preconditions that generate the “multitude of grievances” which Burns only mentions in passing.

As a counterweight, this post will explain those origins, each of which also challenges the prominence of one of Burns’ central themes. More specifically, this set of posts on Episode One (broken into three mini-parts, as there is so much to fill in and correct) will focus on:

• The constitutional crises resulting from colonial legislatures seeking autonomy from, and/or equal footing with, the British House of Commons. These included demands to uphold:

  • Religious freedom

  • Rule of law and secure an independent judiciary and judicial system

  • Virtue, both among the “common” people and the elected leaders, as an essential check on power necessary to secure freedom, as informed by history
    

• The timeline of the British violation of rights, which began during, rather than after, the French and Indian War (as the documentary seemingly suggests)

Before getting into those details, perhaps a brief overview of where the series could have started is in order. Relaying this overview seems essential to help set the stage for why Americans today should care about our country’s origins 250 years on.

Put simply, America is unique. Unique in many ways.

The first nation to declare the “self-evident” “truths” that “all men are created equal” and endowed with “certain unalienable rights” in its founding document.

The first modern country founded on a written constitution. And the first to submit that constitution to its people for approval.

Also the first nation to militarily defeat the British, the leading global superpower of its time.

Despite our written constitution being the first, it’s also now the world’s oldest. It’s checks and balances, expertly designed through a comprehensive study of ancient governments, and influenced by the lived experience in the British constitutional monarchy, has stood the test of time. In an era where few accomplishments impress - and all seems disposable or replaceable - this longevity is notable.

Perhaps most importantly, the primary reason the patriots took up arms was to protect and expand the freedoms they viewed as birthrights as British subjects. This subset of colonists fought for, and was willing to die for, their liberty and the promise of what this “new world” could hold. And they succeeded against a far superior force.

All of these events were novel, world-changing developments. And they’re our collective heritage.

But they’re also facts that average Americans rarely, if ever, hear or think about anymore. Burns did not do them justice.

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The Burns Tale Begins

Burns alludes to these details in the first episode, even partially mentioning some of the above about eight minutes in. But that’s not his primary focus, as two minutes prior, in a bit of foreshadowing of what he was not going to cover, he notes that “[the Revolution] somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.”

Instead of seeking to elaborate on that “somehow” in Episode One or throughout the series, Burns instead often zooms out to highlight the native, British, and international perspectives [FN1]. In fact, he kicks off the documentary with a quote from Thomas Paine, one that is even more abstract and internationally focused than the one I started this column with.

The quote states, in part, that America sparked “a flame” that “progress[ed] from nation to nation…and that, in order ‘to be free, it is sufficient that [man] wills it.’”

It’s undoubtedly true that the American Revolution helped spark revolutions and freedom-seeking around the world, and that’s an important legacy of its success. However, the second half of the quote – Paine’s prediction of the future – was quickly proven false, an important fact the documentary omits along with any other relevant context for the quote.

To remedy that issue, here’s a starting point: the quote is from Paine’s Rights of Man, published in 1791, which is three years after the U.S. Constitution was ratified and eight years after the Revolutionary War ended with the Treaty of Paris.

In other words, Burns began this series at the end of the Revolution with a quote that seemingly suggests that not only was the outcome inevitable, it was just a matter of will.

Paine guessed wrong. Overly optimistic from the success of the American effort, he didn’t know what the near future held in store for the rest of the world.

Just two years from his writing, Tom would have a front row seat to the frenzied, bloody, French “Reign of Terror” that killed more by execution and imprisonment in just one year than died during the entire eight-year Revolution on the American side. He’d wind up in jail and nearly executed himself, barely escaping the guillotine due to the efforts of James Monroe.

The French would need another revolution nearly 40 years later, in 1830 - following the fall of the dictator Bonaparte and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy - to achieve a similar level of success in stable, representative government that the Americans achieved on their first attempt.

C’est la vie, Burns? Or perhaps worth a mention?

Seemingly nonplussed with that loose framing, Burns then pivots to a voiceover quote from the Iroquois Confederacy that the Revolution was primarily a conflict over native land - a perspective notably carried throughout the series as a central thesis. This theme is reinforced several times in the first episode, including by historian Katherine DuVal at the 25-minute mark, as she emotes, “…preserving, promoting that liberty for white Americans means taking native land – there is no other answer!”

A short time later, Phillip Deloria, another historian who has focused his career on native American history, announces, “I think the American Revolution was all about land.” Deloria is the fifth historian or writer introduced in the first thirty minutes of the series (out of nine), focused on the native’s perspective.

This is the soft radicalism of the Burns series and represents a framing choice I’ll generously classify as “interesting,” with a longer rebuttal to follow.

For now, it’s worth noting that:

• That Iroquois quote is similarly sourced from outside (1742) the labeled scope of the series and episode (1754-1775); and

• The Iroquois Nation had been battling the Huron, Susquehannock, Algonquin, Mahican, Shawnee, and Erie Nations for land for hundreds of years before the arrival of French and British colonists, as all nations have struggled to protect and expand their land holdings throughout all of recorded human history.

The episode then pivots to seemingly suggesting the Iroquois influenced Benjamin Franklin’s Albany Plan for a union of the colonies. As William Hogeland, also featured in the series, has recently discussed at length, there’s no logical sequence of historical events to support that claim.

Thus, in just the first few minutes, Burns has managed to chart his own unique path in retelling America’s story: (a) America is not unique (other nations have their own revolutions/obtain their own freedom; native peoples also have “democracies”); and (b) the perspectives of other nations are, if not more important, at least equally important to the motivations of our American ancestors.

Whose side are we on? All sides!

This makes for quite an auspicious start, particularly given the mountains of evidence of other revolutionary causes that Burns decided to leave out of the remaining hour and a half of the episode, along with the additional world history that would have demonstrated how special our founding was.

Ignoring “Evidence Mountain:” The Ideological Origins of the Revolution

The good news for you, as the reader, and me, as the writer, is that we don’t have to research the ideological origins of the Revolution. That book was already written, in 1967, by Bernard Bailyn. It won the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes.

Burns is clearly aware of its existence, as he features Bailyn for the first time in the episode at the ~36 min mark for a few brief seconds.

But as Burns’ narrator explains at the 6:30 mark, his primary focus is different. He’s interested in telling the story of the American Revolution through three lenses:

(1) “a clash between Englishmen over Indian land;”
(2) [too much] “tax[ation];” and
(3) [lack of] “representation.”

Again, these are “interesting” choices. Although three causes are articulated, the last two are, of course, related, as the colonists claimed from some of their earliest protests that their taxation was contingent upon representation.

Notably absent from Burns’s list is freedom from warrantless searches. Or religious freedom.

Or any substantive discussion of the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers and judicial independence. Or the right to end the slave trade.

Or the corruption of the constitutional principles of the Glorious Revolution and the English Bill of Rights of 1689.

Perhaps these are included in the “multitude of grievances” that Burns references around the 7:30 mark. If it is, we’ll never know because he doesn’t cover them.

Is that motivation not important? Given current events, its important to this writer.

And it certainly was to James Otis, Jr. and Patrick Henry. As well as to Richard Henry Lee, Paine, Jefferson, and the Adams cousins. And many thousands of other Americans who took up the patriot cause.

Instead, we get extra time spent on Phyllis Wheatley’s thoughts. And British-aligned Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant, and many excerpts from the diary of a fifer, John Greenwood. Again, a scattered focus that seeks diversity of viewpoint over clarity. Box checking over exceptionalism.

But what Burns truly missed in oversimplifying his story is a core American cultural characteristic: Americans need a strong “why.” We need plausible reasons. We don’t just follow orders; the colonists expected certain rights resulting from their heritage as British subjects operating under British law.

That expectation, combined with an egalitarian culture developed from the “leveling” that occurred during the hundred-plus years of experience in self-governance, separated by an ocean from the monarchy. It led to more individualism and self-reliance than the already liberty-obsessed British culture had ever known. And it came crashing into an aggressive British government, unsure how to apply its mixed constitutional principles to its far-flung colonies but certain the physical repression was needed.

As noted above and suggested in the subheader, I’m breaking out the discussion of the first episode into three mini posts. In the next post, I’ll cover:

• Jonathan Mayhew and Patrick Henry: the Fusion of Religious Liberty, Individualism & Whig Principles

• James Otis, Jr. and the Writs of Assistance: the Preeminence of Property Rights

• The Quakers, Antislavery, and Personal Virtue

Until next time, thanks again for your support of the Great Americans Project.

[FN1]While this is a useful storytelling device for the Civil War - i.e., understanding all sides is important to reconciliation, Americans don’t need to reconcile with the British in 2025 and the native perspective is approached with a bias I’ll unpack in future posts.

“The essential pre-requisite of a rational patriotism is an intelligent acquaintance with the history of one’s country.” – Justice Arthur S. Tompkins, 1902

Ken Burns had a monumental task in taking on the American Revolution. Condensing such a complex subject into just 12 hours wasn’t easy and wouldn’t have been even if he could have produced it exactly how he wanted.

But that was likely never an option. This was always a group project. A production at this scale in 2025 required many donors, a diverse set of historians, and a need to reconcile “new” thematic narratives and previously lesser-known stories.

In other words, he had many masters to serve.

I do not have those challenges.

Like Burns, I’m an amateur historian. Unlike Burns, my day job requires understanding the law, public affairs strategy, and politics. In practice, that means identifying what truly matters and weaving it into a narrative the public can digest.

Which makes me relatively well-positioned to supplement each of the six episodes with the most important information that likely ended up on the cutting room floor. This supplement will have a particular focus on details which:

(a) either challenge his central thesis (the Revolution was primarily a war to enable westward expansion and avoid taxes); or

(b) provide additional, more precise context to other themes he weaved in (e.g. the roles of women, natives, and average colonists; as well as the British perspective).

Before digging in, a quick summary of my overall impressions.

What the Series Did Well

The series generally does a good job of explaining many of the most important moments leading up to and during the revolutionary period. The battlefield animations were particularly helpful in understanding how the utilization of terrain was crucial. It also thoroughly explained the British perspective (potentially to the consternation of many viewers).

In so doing, the series synthesizes a broad range of views by covering the social, political, and military aspects of the revolution in a narrative not necessarily achieved before in one place. It’s an ambitious approach, but also one that cuts two ways.

By covering all those varying perspectives, clarity on many of the most important aspects was lost. In other words, a lot of what was, and is, most important from this period was missed or underdeveloped.

What Was Missing

What truly matters for Americans today is how the rights we enjoy were developed, who influenced them, and what their motivations were. Without those foundations, it’s impossible not to take them for granted, and it's less likely we’ll have a population willing to defend them.

Here’s why: One can only appreciate gifts if one understands the work and sacrifices made to obtain them. Americans born in the last 50 years or so have been gifted greater freedoms than any civilization in recorded human history.

That wasn’t a theme Burns carried throughout. In fact, the only thematic consistency was that there were “bad actors” on all sides and the events meant many different things to different people. Which is, of course, true of any period in history.

Instead of that muddled perspective, I’d alternatively offer the following: The Revolution was ultimately a fight to protect and expand freedom. The most important of those freedoms was self-governance and taxation only with representation.

The British had taken those rights and were not offering real remedies. Put simply, the patriots understood they had to fight to keep the rights they had inherited as British subjects.

Understanding the specifics of how those rights were defended is critical.

Who led, who died, and who turned the tide was conveyed. But many important details were missing. Particularly on the heroism exhibited in the Southern Campaign and the founding documents.

Moreover, in the years leading up to the fighting, the colonists expended significant effort articulating the philosophical and legal principles on which their rights were founded. Pamphlets, protests, and speeches were the preferred form of protest.

In that process, the colonists were inherently challenging the existing order. Not just their relationship with England, but also amongst the very hierarchical structures (relative to today) within the colonies. How far the principles of freedom would get expanded was defined by the leading men during and after the revolution.

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Most serious historians understand that the founding of a nation with written rights (which now form the world’s oldest constitution) and a north star of equality under the law was novel in the context of world history. They also recognize that a “rabble” of militia and relatively untrained regular army leaders defeating the strongest military in the world was rather incredible. Neither of those outcomes was inevitable, even if the series sometimes seemed to treat them as such.

The rest is, frankly, just noise.

With that in mind, a short summary of the most important events that Burns should have expanded on:

• Several key events leading up to the Revolution, all of which challenge his central theme;

• Several of the most important battles, including the battlefield leaders who enabled those victories (and thus our rights);

• The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. As the nation’s founding, defining documents, they are critical in helping to understand the “American Creed,” which is what makes the American experiment particularly unique and incredible.

Also, Burns’ focus on native populations, women, and black Americans was important to round out the full context of what colonists were experiencing. How it was executed, however, was a bit haphazard due to the lack of a strong central theme. For example:

• The patriots had several important allegiances with native nations throughout the war, including the Oneidas, Wappingers, and Catawbas. The first two were covered, but only briefly. And with not enough context on why they joined the rebel colonists over the British, who had the allegiance of most other non-neutral nations.

• Mercy Otis Warren was part of the anti-Federalists who helped push Madison back to the drafting table for a Bill of Rights, and produced an interesting history of the revolution, which was particularly critical of her friend John Adams. All of that was skipped, and instead, the discussion focused on her plays, which had little importance in pushing the revolutionary fervor.

• Black Americans played important roles on and off the battlefield for the patriots, and while some of their stories were conveyed, others were skipped. Salem Poor’s heroism at Breed’s Hill and James Armistead Lafyette are two important examples that were not mentioned. Moreover, the efforts of James Mitchell Varnum, Christopher Greene, John “Jack” Steward, and Dr. David Ramsay to create opportunities for enslaved Americans to serve in the military were an important aspect of the struggle for freedom, which was underdeveloped.

For all these reasons, I’ve decided to pause on my series on the Declaration of Independence and write supplements to each of the Burns episodes, covering the important details left out or glossed over.

I’m planning on keeping five posts of the seven-part series free for all, as it’s too important to limit to just subscribers. Hope you’ll follow along and share with others.

“…this was the object of the Declaration of Independ[e]nce. [N]ot to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; [in?] terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independ[e]nt stand we [were?] compelled to take. [N]either aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”

- Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, May 8, 1825

The year is 1825. Thomas Jefferson is 83 years old, and although he doesn’t know when, he can undoubtedly sense his end is near.

After years of correspondence with John Adams discussing the meaning of the Revolution, he knows there’s one crucial final task remaining: clarifying for all time the intent of the Declaration of Independence. So he writes to his friend, Revolutionary War hero and fellow Virginian, Henry Light-Horse Harry Lee.

And while Jefferson’s letter is clearly reflecting on the Declaration’s overall intent, there’s also historical evidence that strongly supports its application to the five all-important words this series of posts focuses on. Put simply, the question of whether Christian morality and Enlightenment principles required equality for all under the law was alive and well throughout the colonies, leading up to 1776.

It rang out in Boston’s newspapers and pulpits, as well as the state legislature.

It was the subject of sermons in Connecticut.

It was a lively debate in the Pennsylvania Quaker meeting houses and the state’s political arenas.

Even Virginian newspapers and the state’s House of Burgesses echoed with debate on what would become humanity’s essential question.

Prominent religious and political leaders in these states at the time answered in the affirmative, condemning slavery in various ways and articulating egalitarian and Lockean principles. It’s likely not a coincidence that John Adams (MA), Roger Sherman (CT), and Benjamin Franklin (PA) represented those states alongside Jefferson on the Declaration’s drafting committee.

However, it’s also important to understand that the antislavery perspective did not represent a consensus view. Many prominent colonists disagreed.

The plantation economies of South Carolina and Georgia were nearly entirely dependent on enslaved labor at the time of the Declaration. Little to no debate over the legal or moral legitimacy of slavery was possible.

In fact, even a proposal to free less than 5% of those enslaved in the two states to fight in the Revolution just three years later - promoted by South Carolinian John Laurens and passed by the 1779 Continental Congress - was viewed as a “dangerous and impolitic Step” by SC’s leaders.

There were also plenty of defenders of the institution in the north, particularly in New York.

So, although Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal” were an accurate and accepted truth for those on the Declaration’s drafting committee and many of the colonists those men represented, the statement advanced a revolutionary principle for those in the Deep South, many in the northern and Mid-Atlantic colonies, and nearly all of the world. Indeed, America became the first nation in world history to have this principle of radical legal egalitarianism embedded in one of its founding documents.

This post will provide the details on the public sentiment in the states represented by those on the drafting Committee in the years leading up to the Declaration. Links to original sources are provided throughout. The post concludes by compiling the actions and events in an easy-to-reference chronological timeline not found anywhere else.

This summary is needed now more than ever, as certain historians with political agendas continue to peddle myopic, revisionist versions of American history that have misled an entire generation. In so doing, they’ve contributed to undermining the principles this nation was founded on.

It’s time to set the record straight.

Given its breadth, condensed nature, and uniqueness, this post is only for paid subscribers.

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But before doing so, it’s important to acknowledge the contradictions in Jefferson’s private life: as most know, he inherited many enslaved black Americans and sold and traded for others.

And it’s likely he had an intimate relationship with his enslaved servant, Sally Hemings, resulting in children (although certain scholars dispute that conclusion). Setting aside that controversy - which is important, but only to the extent it determines whether he personally lived up to the principle embedded in the nation’s founding document - once one understands Jefferson’s:

(1) primary intellectual influences;

(2) public antislavery actions taken prior to drafting the Declaration;

(3) original Declaration text; and

(4) edits to George Mason’s similar phrasing in the Virginia Declaration of Rights

…No doubt can remain regarding his intent.

And that’s without even discussing the many additional categories of evidence, which this series of posts will also eventually cover in detail. For now, let’s tackle his primary intellectual influences and the events leading up to the Declaration.

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“All honor to Jefferson - to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

- Abraham Lincoln, letter, April 6, 1859

As we noted in our profile of Thomas Jefferson, his five simple, revolutionary words in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” became the north star that future American leaders would return to throughout history in eventually expanding equal rights under the law to all.

But how can one be sure Jefferson meant exactly what he wrote? Not everyone agrees today. Nor did they agree throughout U.S. history.

Some Southern political leaders argued up until the Civil War that Jefferson was simply wrong, particularly as it related to black Americans.

And perhaps today’s most prominent public historian, who has over 2 million subscribers on this platform, inaccurately suggested on the 249^th anniversary of Independence Day that when Congress adopted the Declaration they defined “men” as “white men.”

Another well-known scholar argued in recent years that Jefferson meant “the American colonists as a people,” rather than referencing individual rights.

These arguments seemingly do not account for the full, relevant historical record, which unequivocally supports the plain text interpretation of Jefferson’s writing.

Jefferson, a classically trained lawyer, would have assumed the plain text interpretation of his words would hold. As would the antislavery lawyers John Adams and Roger Sherman, who joined him on the Declaration’s drafting committee.

But since a plain text interpretation isn’t sufficient for some, I’ve compiled the relevant context prior to, and in the years after, the Declaration’s adoption. This series of posts will also cover the relevant debate over the Declaration’s final language before getting into a full examination of the historical record.

As the posts will explain, the language of Jefferson’s original Declaration draft makes clear that “MEN” meant all men, women, and children - enslaved black Americans in particular - and demonstrated his desire to see the nation clearly articulate a deep moral aversion to slavery at its founding. And while the section that made this point was ultimately cut from the final version, it’s existence makes it impossible to logically argue that “men” was intended as limited to “white men.”

Moreover, thoroughly examining the historical record also shows it was a well-understood fact - acknowledged by well-known white and black Americans during Jefferson’s lifetime - that he had committed the new nation to the egalitarian principle.

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In sum, this series of posts will cover 11 different categories of proof points, in order of their occurrence. These include:

1) His intellectual influences. Jefferson’s four primary intellectual influences shared his views. This includes his two personal mentors and the two philosophical influences he merged in the relevant section of the Declaration.

2) His antislavery actions prior to penning the Declaration. Jefferson wrote about the barbarity of slavery as a student. In private practice as a lawyer, he took on six “freedom suits” pro bono prior to getting elected to the Virginia (VA) House of Burgesses. And upon arrival in the legislature, one of his first acts was to co-sponsor a bill to allow enslavers to free their slaves without approval from the royal governor or courts – an important first step toward full emancipation. He later sent a very clear statement on slavery to the Virginia delegation as they headed to the first Continental Congress.

3) Antislavery statements by prominent colonial legal and moral authorities. Prominent public figures in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Jefferson’s home state of Virginia had all expressed strong antislavery statements consistent with his language in the years leading up to the Declaration. Collectively they created the culture which Jefferson captured as part of the “expression of the American mind.”

4) Antislavery actions by England, which impacted the colonies. The Somerset case in England and Virginia’s Colonial Governor Lord Dunmore’s offer of freedom to those enslaved willing to fight for the Crown had significant impacts on the colonists, as English subjects, and their thinking.

5) His primary text source for the all-important phrase. The VA Declaration of Rights, adopted just weeks before the U.S. Declaration, was on Jefferson’s desk as he worked. The U.S. Declaration’s now-famous phrase tracks almost exactly with the VA Declaration. Understanding the difference between the two documents firmly clarifies Jefferson’s intent.

6) The non-binding nature of the language on “free and independent states.” The states were not formally united until the Articles of Confederation were adopted by the Continental Congress more than a year after the Declaration. Thus, the language in the Declaration didn’t create binding obligations on the states to free those enslaved. Both pro- and antislavery advocates agree on this point throughout U.S. history.

7) Subsequent use and interpretation of nearly identical language in legally binding documents. The Massachusetts (MA) state constitution contains language nearly identical to Jefferson’s. The MA state supreme court’s interpretation of that language in 1783 confirmed the common understanding of the phrasing.

8) Subsequent use of the language by black leaders, affirming the Declaration’s promise. Boston’s Prince Hall is perhaps the first to publicly use the language of the Declaration to assert the rights of his fellow black Americans in 1777. But other notable black leaders of Jefferson’s era would also use his language to make similar assertions.

9) A subsequent statement in the first Congress by a fellow Virginian representative and enslaver. A floor speech by a lesser-known Virginia representative clarifies the intent of the Declaration in unequivocal terms. James Madison, a Jefferson protégé and the lead author of the U.S. Constitution, quickly rose to support the statement.

10) Jefferson’s antislavery actions throughout the rest of his life. Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” published in 1780, his contributions to the Northwest Ordinance of 1784, and his condemnation of slavery to another antislavery leader in 1814 all provide ample support that he never changed his views.

11) A subsequent “White Declaration of Independence.” This document, like the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, made clear that the originals they mirrored needed significant amendments if they were to become the versions that the proslavery advocates had always claimed they were.

That’s just the top-line summary. The next post will dig into the details, including citations, on each of these topics.

And since this synthesis is not compiled in any book or journal article (to my knowledge), subsequent posts in the series will be behind a paywall.

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Image credit: Christina Ulsh/KERA

This is why - regardless of one’s inherent attributes - challenging life experiences are always required to shape anyone’s potential into a Great leader.

That formula for success (inherited traits + challenges) becomes clear when closely examining the lives of the Great Americans from the Founding generation. Few seemed destined to change the course of world history based on where they started.

Some had physical disabilities. Many lacked formal education.

But each confronted their unique challenges in ways that sharpened their minds, fortified their bodies, and enhanced their leadership. And in so doing, they collectively formed the fabric of a first-of-its kind nation and created a unique culture.

Early leaders such as George Washington, Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, Francis "Swamp Fox" Marion, James Madison, John Barry, Thomas Paine, Richard Allen, and James Forten particularly exemplify the shared set of qualities discussed in this post.

Lessons from their lives remain instructive for today's leaders and those who want to eventually lead. Even if one does not possess a natural inclination toward leadership, striving to embody the traits they exhibited can yield profound benefits.

Not just for oneself, but also for friends, family, and colleagues.

With that background in mind, here's our top five set of traits that most, if not all, Great leaders share:

1. Humility

2. Courage

3. Putting the mission first

4. Leading by example

5. Persistence
   

1) Humility

Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee couldn’t have known how true his words would still ring more than 220 years later, as Washington is still ranked as among the top Presidents by most historians.

Washington succeeded in guiding America through its infancy by developing a unique skillset. By the end of his life he embodied all five traits discussed in this series of posts, combining them with a physical prowess, organizing ability, and political acumen unmatched among his peers.

But no trait was as crucial to his successes as the humility he gained through his experiences.

Drawn and engraved by A.H. Ritchie (1870)

It was central to his most sound decisions in war and as President, as often the best ideas came from subordinates’ suggestions or their rejections of his first inclinations. By taking their feedback into account and reaching the “best” answer - rather than trying to protect his own ego - he was able to successfully navigate a variety of unprecedented challenges. What to do as the first President of a Constitutional Republic, how to build a national economy and national unity, how to navigate foreign allegiances as a young nation, etc.

The sum of these actions provide a model for all leaders who followed him, one still relevant today.

Put simply, by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, Washington was not the same man who began the Revolution, physically or in temperament. He was even farther removed from the young man who entered the wilderness in the 1750s and inadvertently started the French and Indian War. And it was all because he remained humble enough to keep learning and checked his own ego at critical junctures.

Young Washington

The young Washington was “selfish, egotistical, vain, thin-skinned, ungracious, whiney, petulant, and brazenly ambitious,” according to one biographer. But he was also imbued with a healthy dose of self-awareness, courage, and persistence bordering on obstinacy.

Most importantly, challenging, humbling experiences in George’s youth had unleashed an inner drive for perpetual self-improvement. His father had died when he was only 11. Although his family was relatively well-off, they were not among Virginia’s elite tobacco planter class.

That meant Washington would not have an opportunity for the college education in England that his two older brothers had enjoyed, as his family lacked the funds to send him by the time he was of age. Without a formal education or a significant family inheritance (relative to his peers), Washington knew he’d have to pursue an alternate path to success.

The core of his strategy was relentless self-improvement. He undertook this through practical study and courageously pursuing challenging life experiences.

As a young man, he focused his reading on etiquette, farming, and military tactics. He paid particular attention to Seneca’s Morals by Way of Abstract. Among many maxims, Seneca recommended adopting a role model and, preferring Romans to ancient Greeks, wrote to “Choose therefore a Cato.”

Washington applied the advice very literally. As previously noted, Joseph Addison’s play on the Roman Stateman was his favorite – so much so that he had it performed for the Continental Army during the winter at Valley Forge. The example Cato set was of the self-disciplined patriot prepared to give his life for the cause of liberty. It was the model Washington would largely follow throughout his life.

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An Early Failure & Redemption

With college off the table, Washington set out to prove himself in the military. His career had a rather inauspicious start, however. After a disastrous foray into the wilderness as a young lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia provided the spark for a global conflict, Washington redeemed himself on his next assignment, by rallying retreating soldiers at the Battle of the Monongahela after his commanding general’s death.

On the retreat, the 23-year-old Washington spent time caring for and comforting fellow staff officers who were carried from the battle on horse-litters. Of the 1,459 men in the expedition, 977 were wounded or killed, including 63 officers.

Washington’s leadership had helped avert complete annihilation, but Eisenhower’s quote encapsulates how the event embedded humility in his character and would further entrench it during the American Revolutionary War.

Taking the Helm

Although Washington had left military service for farming and state politics in the years leading up to the Revolution, he didn’t stop learning. Even on the way to the Second Continental Congress, he continued his efforts at self-improvement by picking up a book on military discipline, even though his goal of attending was to position himself as the commander-in-chief of the newly formed Continental Army.

At 43 years old, auditioning for what would become perhaps the most important role in world history, he was self-aware and humble enough to know he still had much to learn. As he told Congress in accepting his command,

“yet I feel great distress from a consciousness that my abilities and Military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important Trust: However, as the Congress desires I will enter upon the momentous duty, and exert every power I Possess In their Service for the Support of the glorious Cause.”

Washington knew this statement demonstrated an appropriate deference for the moment and the complex undertaking ahead of him. But it was also genuine.

Eight years later, as the War wore down in 1783, Washington had lived through years of death, disease, and destruction. He had weathered desertions and natural disasters. He had personal failures and many moments of doubt and indecision. And even betrayals by some of those closest to him.

But his drive to learn continued, particularly from those in his trusted inner circle. His humility was also informed by mistakes made, lessons learned, and new perspectives gained by watching his subordinates deliver – often against incredible odds. He grew into greatness, in part, by restraining his worst impulses and training his best.

By the end of the War, he’d become a leader who respected subordinates, actively listened, and made thoughtful decisions. And he’d found a balance between the overly confident and aggressive inclinations of his youth and the occasional indecision that beset him during the early years of the Revolution, which led some to question his leadership.

Much ink has been spilled detailing Washington’s full life (900 biographies, according to one 2019 count, including one book specifically focused on his leadership), so we’ll close this brief discussion with one specific example of how his humility was put into practice when it mattered the most. In the weeks leading up to the decisive Siege of Yorktown, Virginia, Washington deferred on the ultimate strategy to the judgment of the commander of the allied French forces, Comte de Rochambeau.

Washington eventually came to that deference after having long sought to end the War in a single blow and spending years of political capital seeking to take back New York City. Although he and Rochambeau built an early rapport, the French general was privately concerned about Washington’s plans for attacking an entrenched city. Yet despite Rochambeau’s greater battlefield experience, he was under orders to report to Washington. So the general wisely focused his early efforts on building Washington’s trust.

In early 1781, however, that trust was tested when Washington committed a rare indiscretion. He wrote to his relative, Lund Washington, complaining “in confidence” about the French failure to attack British forces ravaging the coast of Virginia. The British intercepted and published letter.

Washington’s responded by immediately taking ownership his mistake, writing to Rochambeau explaining that it was written “to a private friend – a Gentleman … on whose discretion I could absolutely rely.” Rochambeau, for his part, accepted Washington’s explanation, and dropped the matter.

By the summer of 1781, it became increasingly clear that an attack on New York was not feasible. Moving south to Virginia offered the opportunity to trap British General Cornwallis’ force and utilize the French fleet in the Chesapeake Bay.

With time to adjust his views and learn to trust Rochambeau’s acumen, Washington eventually agreed with his initial assessment, recognizing the strategic advantage of a combined land and sea operation in Virginia. In eventually deferring, Washington subordinated his ego and let the best idea win. The combined French American operation at Yorktown resulted in the surrender of Cornwallis’ 8,000-man army and the effective end of major fighting in the colonies.

Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, John Trumbull (1820)

Parting Thoughts

There are several other important instances where Washington deferred to the advice of his subordinates throughout the War and many times when he relied on the expertise of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Madison, and others to navigate topics he was less experienced with as President.

If Washington – perhaps the greatest military and political leader in the history of the free world - can cede to the sound counsel of others, then so too can you, dear reader.

So too, can you.

Those words were carefully chosen.

Read them again, as they capture the single, unifying thread that connects all Americans worth venerating.

The Greats are the freedom-seekers. For themselves and for others.

To break down the meaning of the tag line one step further, this Project only profiles those who:

(a) helped secure, expand, or defend political freedoms; or

(b) secured or defended those gains on the battlefield.

Other pages can tell the stories of the Americans on the wrong side of history – those who fought to keep blacks enslaved, women without rights, to exterminate the Native Americans, and to enact and uphold laws to discriminate on the basis of race, gender or religious views.

They, of course, exist and are an important part of American history, too.

But they lost. They were losers then and now.

As Americans, we don’t celebrate losers – particularly those who don’t share our values.

Yet many are increasingly asking what those values are.

Some have forgotten, while others were never taught in a way that stuck. Others have become jaded by politicians who fail to live up to our expectations.

But those values are embedded in the Declaration of Independence. And the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They’re in the hearts, minds, and actions of “Greats” in every American generation.

They’re also part of the nation’s inclusive culture - when this country is at its best – a culture which says to bring the best of your ancestral roots, wherever you’re from. Bring the best ideas, wisdom, food, music, art, and general creativity. Let them compete and, if selected, blend them into this nation’s “melting pot.”

This “bring your best and brightest” is a trait that all great Republics and other global centers have shared throughout human history.

London. Amsterdam. Venice. Alexandria. Rome. Athens. Baghdad. Parsa. All have that openness in common.

America is now the world’s oldest Constitutional Republic because we also accept the fundamentals of rule-of-law, a limited, representative government, a commitment to free markets and property and individual rights, and the separation of powers.

Yet few understand this wonderful gift we’ve been given. In the words of the great David McCullough,

Which is why this Project exists: to highlight the stories of those who brought us here. To remember what America is at its best. And to stop the collective forgetting.

In practice, that means highlighting the values and virtues the Greats demonstrated - even if they did so just in key moments.

Because those men and women, and those moments, represent what this country can be, if “We the People” demand that standard from ourselves and our elected leaders.

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When those efforts failed, the Founders had to chart their own path in both the political and military arenas. And those most adept at applying historical knowledge often separated themselves from the pack.

This post will cover the remaining three of the top five reasons why those Greats looked to the past:

3) To find role models for achieving greatness
4) To lead men in battle and win military victories
5) To develop structures for new state and federal governments

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Let’s get into it:

3) Finding Role Models for Achieving Greatness

There are time-tested abilities, behaviors, and values which are the precursors to political or battlefield success. For many early Americans, Greek and Roman philosophers, statesmen, and military leaders provided the model.

The Stoic political leadership of Rome’s Cato was particularly influential for George Washington, according to historian Gordon Wood. Joseph Addison’s play on the Roman leader was Washington’s favorite and he even had it performed at Valley Forge for the Continental Army during the winter of 1777-1778.

And when Washington was encouraged to seek a third term for his Presidency, he relied on the example of Roman General Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus and retired to his farm – returning the Republic to the people.

For others, such as John Adams, Marcus Tullius Cicero’s persuasive writing and personal sacrifices for the Roman Republic were the model. Cicero was such a huge influence for him that Adams hung his portrait in the oval office.

Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee was similarly so inspired by the example of Epaminondas - a Greek general who led the ancient city-state of Thebes out of Spartan subjugation - that he passed up a legal education in Europe to take to the battlefield. Epaminondas’ leadership provided a potential pathway to the eternal honor and glory which Lee sought.

4) Leading Men in Battle and Winning Military Victories

While Lee’s emulation was more thematic than tactical, the study of military history and tactics was essential for many of the Revolutionary generals, as they had relatively little experience compared to their British counterparts.

Even George Washington placed an order for a book on military discipline before heading to the second Continental Congress, recognizing that his prior military service alone was likely insufficient. Alexander Hamilton would later note he saw Washington read Thomas Simes’ book, The Military Guide for Young Officers, cover-to-cover many times. Published in 1776, the book was a compilation of excerpts from essays by famous generals Humphrey Bland and Maurice de Saxe.

de Saxe was also particularly influential for Henry Knox. A bookstore owner in Boston before the Revolution, Knox recommended de Saxe’s writings to his friend and fellow future Major General Nathanael Greene who had frequented his store. And he later cited an example from de Saxe’s book in a letter to Washington.

But perhaps the most important set of military tactics in the entire Revolution – the ones that eventually led to the patriot victory in the Southern Campaign – were inspired by the Roman General Fabius Maximus. Under Fabius’ leadership, the Romans defeated the Carthaginian General Hannibal by attacking his tenuous supply lines and isolated outposts, capturing his patrols and forage parties, avoiding pitched battles, and ultimately forcing him to attack fortified cities.

After early, nearly disastrous defeats for the Continental Army in 1776, Washington, relied on Nathanael Greene’s advice and changed his strategy to become more defensive. But it was Greene who put the Fabian tactics into full effect in the Southern Campaign of the war.

Working with Lee, Daniel Morgan, John Eager Howard, Andrew Pickens, Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, Otho Holland Williams, Wiliam Washington, Robert Kirkwood, and many others, Greene applied a modified version of the Roman general’s strategy. While the main force wore out British General Cornwallis’ army during the “Race to the Dan” river, a mix of militia and Continental forces attacked British supply lines and took back Southern posts. Greene’s efforts culminated with a decisive victory at the Battle of Yorktown. The Marquis de Lafayette, Hamilton, and John Laurens joined Washington, Greene and the combined Continental and French forces to secure the victory.

5) Developing Structures for New State and Federal Governments

Of all the fortuitous developments during the Revolution, perhaps none was more important than Thomas Jefferson’s selection as the lead drafter of the Declaration of Independence. Like other Greats of his era, Jefferson had risen to prominence by turning to history to craft his widely circulated pamphlet, “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” in 1774. It began with a quote from Cicero.

Two years later, he again turned to antiquity to produce the Declaration. The revolutionary notion of the primacy of the pursuit of “life, liberty, and happiness” - as well as the all-important egalitarian principle that “all men are created equal” - have an intellectual lineage tracing back to the Greek philosopher Epicurus.

Working from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, enacted a few days prior, Jefferson chose to leave out the modifier “when they enter the state of society” to the equality clause of the Declaration. That choice, reflecting the ancient understanding of Epicurus, but obviously incompatible with the institution of slavery, would help set the nation on the course to end the barbaric practice.

The awareness of the fundamental equality of man - and the necessity of the principle eventually becoming the law of the land - led James Madison to remark at the 1787 Constitutional Convention that it “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”

Of all the Founders, Madison had perhaps the deepest knowledge of ancient governments. He emerged from an isolated, multi-year study – aided by Jefferson’s personal library of over 200 books – to debut his “Virginia Plan” at the Constitution Convention. That plan, which contained a complex system of checks and balances to protect against the tyranny of the majority, was influenced and amended by James Wilson, Oliver Ellsworth, Roger Sherman, and others during the Constitutional debates.

Although the Constitution was eventually ratified by the states, it was not done so without significant debate. Much of that debate surrounded the lack of a Bill of Rights. George Mason led a push - both during the Convention debates and in the ratification process after - to ensure protection of individual rights from federal government overreach. Although not a lawyer, few could match Mason’s historical and legal knowledge.

In the words of Jefferson, Mason was “the Cato of his country, without the avarice of the Roman.” It was Mason’s advocacy in coordination with other “anti-federalists.” which eventually forced Madison back to the drafting table. And many of the eventual first ten amendments to the Constitution were based on Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights.

Conclusion

These are but a few of the many examples of how the Founders were inspired by, and practically utilized, history to advance freedoms and their own interests. In today’s fast-paced society, we’d all benefit from closer attention to the past as some knowledge truly is timeless.

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As discussed in greater detail below, here are the top five reasons early Americans learned and applied history:

1) To obtain educational credentials and social status

2) To protect the colonists’ legal rights

3) To find role models for achieving greatness

4) To lead men in battle and win military victories

5) To develop structures for new state and federal governments

Each of these reasons remain relevant today.

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But let’s explore why they mattered to the Founding generation:

1) Formal Education in the Revolutionary Era Required Significant Study of History; Leaders Applied History to Bolster Their Arguments, Personal Standing

Most political leaders of the Revolutionary generation who attended college were steeped in Roman and Greek history, as admission typically required fluency in Latin and Greek. Learning those languages inherently meant imbibing the history of those empires in the process.

This expectation of historical knowledge among the educated “elites” was not unique to the colonies, as Europeans since the Renaissance had seen the study of Roman and Greek culture as fundamental for forming ethical and upright citizens. The history of Rome took primacy for the colonists, however. As historian Thomas Ricks has noted, “[Rome] was not just [the Founders] core narrative, it was their lodestar.”

This was due, in part, to the coursework selected in the colonies at the time. Presbyterian minister John Witherspoon transformed the College of New Jersey’s (now Princeton University) curriculum when he arrived in 1768 to focus on lessons from antiquity, as well as the leading Scottish Enlightenment writers.

Under his direction, freshmen were required to read Roman authors Horace, Cicero, and Lucian. The junior year added lessons on logic and moral philosophy, including how to become a virtuous leader. Witherspoon specifically focused on how “true virtue promotes the public good,” and the necessity of “checks and balances” in every good form of government.

Those lessons had an outsized impact on early American leaders and the intellectual foundation of the nation. Princeton’s student body, by design, was drawn from up and down the Eastern Seaboard – in contrast to Harvard and Yale, whose students were nearly all from within their respective states. James Madison, Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee (both from Virginia) and William Richardson Davie (North Carolina) are just three of the many leaders who traveled long distances from their home states to attend Princeton during the Revolutionary era.

Under Witherspoon’s tenure, Princeton produced a president, vice president, nine cabinet officers, 28 senators, 49 congressmen, three Supreme Court justices, and 12 governors, among many other elected and appointed officials.

With so few provided an opportunity attend college during this era, however, the classically educated person, “enjoy[ed] the consciousness of superiority” over those deprived of that education. And those who we’re lacking knew it.

For leaders without that opportunity – such as Washington, as well as two of his favorite generals, Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox, and “Common Sense” author Thomas Paine – self education was the only option. These autodidacts devoured history and would similarly rely on its lessons to advance their careers in a variety of ways.

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and John Dickinson, among others, quickly rose to prominence in the years leading up to the Revolution by publishing pamphlets that displayed their deep knowledge of history, rights in representative governments, and human nature.

For Adams, his series of essays in the Boston Gazette in response to the passage of the Stamp Act announced his presence as a leader. As he wrote, the colonists were descended from those who knew the lessons of Romans and Greeks:

“They knew that government was a plan, simple, intelligible thing founded in nature and reason and quite comprehensible by common sense. They detested all base services and servile dependencies of the feudal system. They knew that no such unworthy dependencies took place in the ancient seats of liberty, the republic of Greece and Rome.”

Dickinson’s “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies,” (1767-68) and Jefferson’s “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” (1774) similarly marshaled history to make their case for the colonists’ rights and catapulted them to prominent leadership roles.

2) Applying Legal Precedent to Protect Colonial Rights

The colonial uprising was seen by most leaders at the time as inherently conservative, as it was a revolution in favor of representative government, as Professor Max Edling and others have noted.

The goal was largely to protect what the colonists perceived as preexisting rights. And protecting those rights in court and rousing the public to defend them required understanding and articulating their origins.

In the years leading up to the Revolution the British Parliament had repeatedly passed laws impinging on the colonists’ existing rights and freedoms. For example, in 1761 Parliament enacted the Writs of Assistance, which allowed British customs officials to enter any colonial house or property without a specific warrant to search for smuggled goods - essentially creating the power to search anyone's belongings at any time. In other words, a writ enabling arbitrary search.

James Otis Jr., a prominent lawyer employed by the Crown at the time, understood the fundamental threat this law posed to individual and property rights. He promptly resigned his role in the British government to defend the colonists free of charge. His oral argument against the Writs lasted five hours.

John Adams, who sat spellbound in the courtroom during the argument, would later note:

“[he] was a flame of fire; with a promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal authorities… American Independence was born.”

In other words, it was Otis’ mastery of history and the law that made his arguments compelling.

Similarly, in Virginia, it was Patrick Henry’s oratory and attack on the “divine right of Kings” (delivered in a way the jury could understand) which won the day in the “Parson’s Cause” case. Henry’s defense of the rights of religious minorities and the colonists - after British parliament had tried to overturn a Virginia law - catapulted him to local prominence and election to the Virginia House of Burgesses.

These are just two prominent examples from the years leading to the Revolution. Time and again, American leaders would send petitions to the King, take to the newspapers and courtroom and utilize history to explain their circumstances, justify their protests, and ultimately make the case for independence. And it was how they told that history that mattered.

Editor’s Note: this concludes Part 1, please subscribe to make sure you receive Part 2 when its posted.

“Pronounce [Lafayette] one of the first men of his age and you have not yet done him justice.”

-John Quincy Adams, eulogy delivered to Congress, 1834

The Marquis de Lafayette’s combined battlefield and diplomatic accomplishments were perhaps second only to George Washington during the American Revolution. Born Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette - but simply known as “Lafayette” or “our Marquis” to Americans - he served as Major General in the Continental Army, a diplomat, and an anti-slavery and free market advocate.

One of only two persons in U.S. history to receive honorary citizenship through an Act of Congress, he was also made a “natural-born citizen” by the state of Maryland in 1784. Lafayette would later note that he had become an American citizen before the French Revolution created the concept of French citizenship. In short, he was an American citizen by law and an advocate for all that America stands for by choice.

On the battlefield Lafayette displayed courage and strategic acumen, often leading Americans forces armed and equipped with his own funds to success against much larger armies. As a diplomat, he repeatedly secured financial and military aid from France, delivering loans, arms, and ships at critical junctures. After the war, Lafayette opened up free trade between the two nations, helping strengthen the American economy. He also emphasized the need for unity between the colonies to further secure free trade agreements and ward off foreign attacks.

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Early Years & Growing Into A Leadership Role

His early life was not without struggles, however. Born to a family with a tradition of battlefield heroism back to the Crusades, Lafayette was orphaned at age 12. His father had died when he was two years old, fighting the British during the Seven Years War. And his mother passed away just before he entered his teenage years, leaving him wealthy and politically connected but with only the guidance of his aunt and grandmother.

Quiet and somewhat socially awkward, he left France at 19 to travel to the colonies along with other French officers and a Continental Army commission in hand from Silas Deane. Initially rebuffed by Congress, Lafayette sent a letter to fellow Freemason John Hancock echoing the sentiment of the U.S. Declaration of Independence by pledging his life, fortune, and sacred honor to the patriot cause. It worked.

After a series of successful interviews, he was assigned as an aide-de-camp to General Washington. He immediately struck up what would become a lifelong friendship, with Washington eventually treating him as an adopted son.

In his first action at the Battle of Brandywine, Lafayette was shot through the calf while rallying men to assist General John Sullivan and was helped from the battlefield by then-Captain, and French-speaking future President, James Monroe.

After months of recovery, Lafayette succeeded in his first field command at the Battle of Gloucester. Responding to movements by British General Cornwallis - who was seeking to reinforce Hessian mercenaries attacking Colonel Christopher Greene at Fort Mercer - Lafayette ably scouted and surprised his much more seasoned opponent. Leading 350 men, he caught the Hessian sentries off guard, killing and wounding 40, while also capturing 20 prisoners. Lafayette led from the front and only lost one man.

Based on that performance, he was given the choice of commanding any unit within the Army. Emulating and honoring Washington, he choose a regiment from Virginia.

Lafayette would take his men to join Washington at Valley Forge for the winter of 1777-1778, purchasing shoes and clothes for them with his own funds when Congress was unable to deliver. While there, several of Lafayette’s French officers traveled to New York to meet with the Oneida Nation, which Minister Samuel Kirkland had previously befriended and recruited to the patriot cause. Oneida leaders committed to aiding the patriots and sent about 50 warriors south with the French officers to join Lafayette and Washington.

Battle of Barren Hill

With his new Oneida allies attached to his unit, Lafayette was assigned to lead a force of about 2,200 troops to monitor British troop movements as they prepared to evacuate Philadelphia. About midway between Valley Forge and the city, Lafayette decided to make camp at Barren Hill - ignoring Washington’s advice to remain on the move.

Although the Hill was defensible, once the British learned of his position they halted their evacuation and turned nearly all their forces toward Lafayette. Leaving nothing to chance, Howe gathered about two-thirds of his force - 8,000 British and Hessian soldiers in total - and marched toward Barren Hill with the intent trap Lafayette, force a surrender, and parade him around as a trophy.

Invitations were sent to the Tory ladies of Philadelphia to “dine with Lafayette” the following night and a special frigate was prepared to transport him back to England. In short, the British were supremely confident in their ability to capture him.

On the morning of May 20th, Lafayette woke up surrounded. But he wisely deployed his Oneidas and instructed his men to utilize their tactics, sending out small squads through the woods north of town to pop out and engage British forces before disappearing back into the brush.

With the British distracted and chasing his scouts, Lafayette maneuvered his men down the side of the cliff to the Schuykill River where they followed a road to Matson’s Ford and waded across, escaping Howe’s force. The Oneidas had given Lafayette the time he needed to escape.

The Virginia Campaign & the Final Battlefield Surrender

After a month of inaction, Lafayette set off to defend the city of Richmond, Virginia with a 1,000 man division. Over the course of the next six months he’d lead a series of engagements that would ultimately trap British General Charles Cornwallis, forcing his surrender and setting off a chain of events that would end the Revolutionary War.

Marching his men 150 miles in less then ten days to reach the city. By the time he arrived, 2,500 British soldiers were less than 25 miles south of the city, preparing to attack. Lafayette immediately went to work fortifying his troops across a wide swath on the embankment before the city. Using similar tactics as he had at Barren Hill, by keeping his men moving from shot to shot, it appeared he had a much larger force than he did. The British overestimated his force and withdrew.

Wasting no time, Lafayette went to work again, this time recruiting enslaved persons to serve as spies. One of those men was James Armistead.

As a Virginia native, James knew the local roads without a map - a skill that the British forces desperately needed. By posing as a runaway slave loyal to the British, James gained the confidence of American General-turned-traitor Benedict Arnold and General Cornwallis. It wasn't long before James enjoyed free access to the British headquarters, personally serving Cornwallis, who, ironically, ordered him to spy on Lafayette. This back-and-forth access would become invaluable as events unfolded over the summer.

In the meantime, while waiting on reinforcements from General Anthony Wayne and the Virginia militia, Lafayette harassed the British encampment at the nearby Petersburg and began emptying the munitions depots as the city as the British forces swelled to more than 7,000 with the arrival of reinforcements. With no help in sight from Wayne, the VA militia or other nearby patriot forces, Lafayette seemed destined for inevitable defeat and death. He wrote what he thought might be a final letter to his friend, and former fellow Washington aide-de-camp, Alexander Hamilton, noting:

“I have so many arrangements to make, so many difficulties to combat, so many enemies to deal with, that I am just that much of a general as will make me a historian of misfortunes and nail my name upon the ruins of whaat good folks are please to call the army of Virginia. We have 900 continentals. Their infantry is near five to one; their cavalry ten to one…”

After saving and hiding the last of the munitions, Lafayette led an orderly retreat from the city northward, hoping to link with Generals Washington and Wayne. Stalked by the notorious Banastre Tarleton who now had a unit of 800 horses, he had to head to the forested western foothills to diminish the effectiveness of the British cavalry. General Nathanael Greene wrote him with tactics that Daniel Morgan and Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion had used to delay and harass the British in the Southern Campaign, which Lafayette now effectively deployed as well.

By early June, Lafayette had put 35 miles between his force and Tarleton. Cornwallis ordered Tarleton to stop giving chase and instead take Charlottesville. Tarleton and his men rushed the town, taking seven prisoners from the Virginia legislature while it was in session and nearly capturing then-Governor Thomas Jefferson.

Lafayette was able to return to Richmond and on June 22 teamed up the VA militia and additional Continentals led by Baron Von Steuben, a Prussian military officer who had instilled professional discipline in the regulars during the winter at Valley Forge. Now with 5,000 men, Lafayette had the force he needed to harass Cornwallis again - eventually forcing him to retreat away from the city onto the VA cape.

At just 24 years old, he had outmaneuvered and harassed General Cornwallis across the state without confronting him in a traditional battle. And now Washington and French General Rochambeau were on their way south to reinforce him.

Under orders from General Clinton to provide protection for the British navy headed his way, Cornwallis began building fortifications Yorktown. In response, Lafayette established a ring of entrenched artillery positions around the city to prevent Cornwallis breaking out by land and waited for his reinforcements.

Of the several spies that Lafayette sent to obtain this intelligence, it was James Armistead's reports, dated July 31, 1781 that proved most valuable. Using that detailed report, Washington and Lafayette were able to prevent the British from sending reinforcements to Yorktown.

By September 28th, with French reinforcements and the Washington and Rochambeau contingent arriving, the combined unit of nearly 17,000 troops began laying siege to Yorktown. Two weeks later, with the first two walls breached, Lafayette and Colonels Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens stormed the British fortifications. After a brief counterattack by Cornwallis, he sent a message to Washington and surrendered on October 19, 1781.

In subsequent years, Lafayette helped secure a French and Spanish alliance against the British that established their naval superiority, leading to the Treaty of Paris and the end of the War in 1783.

After the War

Lafayette continued to advocate for the American cause even after the conclusion of the war. As he noted to James Madison, his three “hobby horses were:” (1) strengthening the alliance between America and France; (2) promoting the union of the United States; and (3) the manumission of slaves.

And he knew the first wasn’t possible without the second. In 1785 he embarked on a letter-writing campaign, encouraging friends such as Greene and Richard Henry Lee to push for a stronger union.

In the meantime, he worked to open trade in whale oil between Nantucket, MA and France, seeking and obtaining a precedent-setting tariff exemption which eventually opened up free trade to a variety of goods from the states.

As then French Ambassador Jefferson would note to Madison, he was:

“my most powerful auxiliary and advocate. His zeal is unbounded and his weight with those in power, great. His education having been merely military, commerce was an unknown field to him. But his good sense enabling him to comprehend perfectly whatever is explained to him, his agency has been very efficacious. “

Lafayette attempted to influence the King on ending slavery but after not getting a response acted on his own, buying a 125,000 livre sugarcane plantation in French Guyana and established a program for education and emancipation.

Lafayette’s project in Guyana moved Washington to write to him:

“The goodness of your heart displays itself in all circumstances and I am never surprised when you give new proofs of it; your acquisition… with a view to emancipating the slaves is a generous and noble proof of your humanity. God grant that a similar spirit will animate all the people of this country! But I despair of every seeing that happen. A few petitions for the abolition of slavery were presented to the last session of the Virginia assembly but they barely obtained a reading. Sudden emancipation would bring many evils, I believe; but certainly it could be, it should be accomplished gradually and by legislative authority.”

He would go on to lead France through two Revolutions, but those are stories beyond this project. Throughout his life, however, he remained an ardent supporter of the American cause.

Sources:

- Harlow Giles Unger, Lafayette, 2002, available for purchase here: https://www.amazon.com/Lafayette-Harlow-Giles-Unger/dp/0471468851

- Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin, Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution, 2006, available for purchase here: https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Allies-Indians-American-Revolution/dp/0809046008

- Ruth Quinn, James Armistead Lafayette, U.S. Military, Feb. 21, 2014, available at https://www.army.mil/article/119280/james_armistead_lafayette_1760_1832

- Letter to Nathanael Greene, March 16, 1781; letter to Richard Henry Lee, March 16, 1781

- Letter, Washington to Lafayette, Mount Vernon, June 8, 1786

- Letter, Jefferson to Madison, January 30, 1787

Much of Hall’s early life remains unclear. However, it’s known he became a free man in 1770. With his freedom secured, he started successful catering and leather dressing businesses, counting John Hancock among his clients.

Not content with his own freedom, Hall recognized that most influential men of the time were Freemasons and becoming one could help advance rights for all Blacks. By 1775, Hall had formed African Lodge #1, with 14 members.

Less than two years later Hall and seven other Black Americans presented a petition for freedom to the Massachusetts Council and the House of Representatives. Although the petition was rejected, John Adams’ new MA Constitution of 1780 would similarly echo Jefferson’s words and MA Supreme Court would end slavery in the state three years later.

In 1786, Hall’s Lodge demonstrated their support for rule of law by offering to raise troops to support the commonwealth’s efforts to end Shay’s Rebellion. A year later, he campaigned for to establish schools for Black children. That same year the Grand Lodge of England granted his lodge a formal charter.

In 1788, Hall became a local leader in efforts to stop enslavers from kidnapping free Black people and selling them into enslavement. He again submitted a petition to the MA legislature seeking aid, this time asking legislators to “do us that justice that our present condition requires” and publicized the petition in newspapers in Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.

Prince Hall Freemasonry quickly expanded, with leaders Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and James Forten joining the Philadelphia Lodge. By 1865, Prince Hall Freemasonry would become one of the essential centers for Black civic leadership, with more than 2700 Masons meeting in 22 states.

Editors Note: Like other early Great Americans, Hall’s story is one that contains many myths and half-truths dispersed throughout various biographical sketches, which were then often repeated. This post, as with all profiles, focuses narrowly on the known, independently verifiable facts.

Sources:

· Danielle Allen, A Forgotten Black Founding Father, The Atlantic, Feb 10, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/prince-hall-forgotten-founder/617791/

· Massachusetts Historical Society, Petition for freedom (manuscript copy) to the Massachusetts Council and the House of Representatives, [13] January 1777, https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=557.

· Smith, S.(2021). Reimagining Prince Hall: Race, Freemasonry, and Material Culture In Boston, 1775-1870. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/6426

· William A. Muraskin, Middle-class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America, https://books.google.com/books?id=tKoc4KF8u1cC&pg=PA33#v=onepage&q&f=false.

· The Library of Congress, The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/free-blacks-in-the-antebellum-period.html.