Because the Fourth of July is Friday, our Editorial page comes a bit early this week, though if I get industrious, there will probably be a few more columns published over the weekend. Columns come from Jonathan Tobias of Edenton who talks about a new documentary series, “The American Revolution” with another column by John Hood, who talks about being vigilant because government is not always inclined to be self regulating. If you have a column that you would like to submit to the Albemarle Observer, send it to mileslayton1969@gmail.com
Get Ready for the Revolution
BY JONATHAN TOBIAS
November 16th can’t come soon enough. That’s when PBS will begin broadcasting its brand-new, six-part, 12-hour documentary series, “The American Revolution.” I have the singular privilege to read the Declaration of Independence next Friday at 10 am on the Courthouse Green, during the finest annual July 4th celebration put on by the Edenton Tea Party Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. So I’ve been thinking about that Revolution quite a lot.
As the 250th Anniversary of the United States is coming up next year, this is simply “must see TV.” And it’s being brought to the screen by the only one who is up to this monumental task – the great grandmaster of the historical documentary himself, Ken Burns, along with co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt.
The narration will be done, of course, by that drawling, gravelly born-to-narrate voice of Peter Coyote. And, according to Burns’ well-established script, some equally familiar voices will be speaking the parts of over 200 historical figures: Kenneth Branagh, Josh Brolin, Jeff Daniels, Morgan Freeman, Paul Giamatti (John Adams), Amanda Gorman (remember her great poem “The Hill We Cimb”?), the inimitable Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson, Damian Lewis (Major Winters in “Band of Brothers”), Laura Linney (Abigail Adams), Tobias Menzies (Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in “Manhunt”), Mandy Patinkin (“Hello. I am Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”), and Meryl Streep (!!!), among others.
I remember waiting for and being captivated by Ken Burns’ breakout documentary about the Civil War starting on September 3rd 1990. It was the first time I felt such strong emotions during a historic presentation.
And I felt it from first-person accounts from both sides. Who could not be moved by the melancholy accounts of Mary Chestnut (wife of South Carolina Senator and secessionist James Chestnut), especially when voiced by the late stage and screen doyenne Julie Harris? And that letter from Major Sullivan Ballou, written to his wife Sarah on the eve of the First Battle of Bull Run/Manassas, touched down into the well of pathos that found release at the last words, “Sullivan Ballou was killed a week later at the First Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861.”
Ken Burns has done a whole panoply of varied documentaries besides the Civil War: the Brooklyn Bridge, baseball, jazz, country music (my second favorite, though I’m no abiding fan of that music genre), Benjamin Franklin, Jackie Robinson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, the Dust Bowl (I used to live in Oklahoma), the Viet Nam War, World War II, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, Huey Long (which is becoming spookily familiar), and the National Parks (my first favorite – I’d watch just to listen to the soundtrack alone).
But here’s what I think: this next one, about the American Revolution, will end up being his finest.
“I love my country,” he told the BBC journalist Katty Kay in an interview last April. Katty was trying to fish around for his secret for making documentaries that stand apart, head and shoulders above the rest in the genre.
He did the reveal, in a poignant reflective moment: “I don’t present a story with a single idea that I try to persuade you to adopt. I think of history like a bicycle wheel. Everyone’s story, every witness, is like a spoke of the wheel.”
That makes sense. A single passage of time is experienced and remembered in different ways. Anyone can recount their own version. They can cut it and change it to serve their own purpose. But it takes sympathy, even pity, a feeling of commonality, and no shortage of wisdom and learning, to listen to all the witnesses, to see not only a few spokes but the whole wheel.
He told Katty that the American Revolution was not only a colonial struggle, but it was also a world war, stretching from Canada to the Caribbean and across the Atlantic Ocean, involving not only America and England, but also (especially) France, and (covertly) Spain. It was also a civil war in its own right. At least twenty percent of the American colonists were Loyalists, who opposed the Declaration of Independence and wanted to remain loyal subjects of the king. There were, just as the next civil war that occurred “four score and seven years” later, families and friendships torn asunder. Civil society was breached, communities were broken.
“The American Revolution is one of the most important events in human history.” Ken Burns has said. “We went from being subjects to inventing a new concept, citizens, and set in motion democratic revolutions around the globe. As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our founding, I’m hopeful that people throughout the country will come together to discuss the importance of this history and to appreciate even more what our ancestors did to secure our liberty and freedoms.”
As someone whose great-great-great-grandfather, born and bred in Edenton, fought in the entire Revolutionary War under General Nathaniel Greene and distinguished himself in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, I will take it as a matter of family honor to watch “The Revolutionary War” documentary this November. It will be, I expect with anticipation, Ken Burns’ finest.
Editor’s Note: The next column comes from John Hood at Carolina Journal.
America’s freedom clock needs winding
BY JOHN HOOD
When we commemorate the formal birthday of the United States of America, we don’t just celebrate a place, a set of governmental institutions, and a shared history that binds together people with differing backgrounds, faiths, and aspirations. We celebrate a revolutionary act.
As John Adams put it in 1818, the war that secured America’s independence was an effect, not a cause, of the American Revolution. “The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people,” he wrote.
During the turmoil of the 1760s and early 1770s, Americans began to discard the pseudo-religious concept that God had ordained kings and queens to rule over them. They also discarded the secular “habitual sentiments of allegiance and loyalty” that bound them to the crown, viewing the king’s trespasses against their liberty to have dissolved their reciprocal obligations to him.
These were revolutionary concepts in the 18th century. Indeed, America remains a revolutionary society today. But that need not make it unstable, unwieldy, or unattached to tradition. Our revolution of the mind didn’t reject the facts of human nature, the constraints of human life, or the intricacies and responsibilities of human community. It was fundamentally different than the subsequent Continental revolutions that produced guillotines and gas chambers.
Our revolutionary principle — inconsistently applied at first, imperfectly practiced today — was that all human beings are created equal in the eyes of God and the laws of man. It never meant that all human beings were, or could ever be, equal in all respects. It meant only that each of us has the natural right to liberty.
That is, we all enjoy the right to decide what we will do, with whom, to what end, as long as our actions don’t encroach on others’ right to do the same. And it means that when the latter proviso applies — when collective, coercive action is necessary — we all get a say in how such governmental power is exercised by expressing our views and casting our ballots.
Few human societies before 1776 exalted the principle of equal liberty above the interests of powerful monarchs and cabals. More have done so since, however imperfectly, with the delightful result that humanity is happier, healthier, wealthier, and freer than ever before in the history of our species. That’s a revolution worth celebrating.
It could easily have failed. As Adams explained in his letter, the colonies “had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action, was certainly a very difficult enterprise.”
That’s what makes the events of 1776 so momentous. “The complete accomplishment of it, in so short a time and by such simple means, was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind,” Adams said. “Thirteen clocks were made to strike together — a perfection of mechanism, which no artist had ever before effected.”
Alas, just as there were no guarantees the American Revolution would succeed a quarter of a millennium ago, there are no guarantees of its continued success. Our institutions were designed to check and balance power, to limit its excesses, to protect our freedom against foes foreign and domestic — including our own foibles and temptations. They’ve worked fairly well. But they don’t work seamlessly. Clocks that strike together at first will, over time, get out of sync.
The framers of North Carolina’s constitution understood well that the system isn’t fully self-regulating. In Article I, Section 35, it states, “A frequent recurrence to fundamental principles is absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty.” Each of us has a role to play in winding, adjusting, and repairing the clockwork of constitutional government. It’s the gift we should all give our country on its birthday.
John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy and American history.
