Ken Burns (32:29)
Well, this is what happened. The individual colonies that had no interest in connecting with one another. Franklin had suggested back in the 1750s, let's get together into a union. Union like the native peoples can't do. And we all said, no, we're not giving up our autonomy. Nobody came. Nobody wanted to do it. But then as these taxes happened, as the. The decision to not allow colonists to go into Indian land was enforced, they just suddenly started coming together. And there's committees of correspondences, the Sons of Liberty. There's resistance. Women are hugely part of it. You never hear about this. They keep this thing going. They said, we can do without. This is imported goods. We'll make our own homespun cloth. And so people are in competition. The ladies of this province are this. And. And so what happens is eventually, as always happens, and this happens in history so much is that I tell you, you know, you're acting radical. You may not be acting radical, but then you start acting more radical. You say, me, you're being tyrannical, and I may not be tyrannical, but I start acting more tyrannical. And you get to this point where somebody says this, we think they're storing arms in Lexington and Concord. Let's go and capture their leaders, this firebrand, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and let's collect this stuff, the weapons of mass destruction. Well, it's. It's their rifles and muskets and flints and gunpowder. And they go and, you know, the patriots meet them on the. On the green at Lexington. And the British say, disperse. And they'd start to. And a shot fires out. Somebody said, it's a massacre. The British kill eight or nine of us and wound others. And then they march onto Concord. And then finally at Concord, everybody said, f this, you know, we're going. And so they fight back. And the whole way, the retreat back to Boston is just a slaughter for the British. And then they're hemmed in. They're not. They can get out. They've got their. The most powerful navy on earth, but they can't. They can't move out because there's just thousands of patriots who've rushed from Rhode island and Connecticut and New Hampshire, as well as Massachusetts, Massachusetts towns, to the defense of Boston. And they ring them and they've got them in. And then it begins a war that is going to take six and a half years until Yorktown. And anytime you're in telling a story, you have to remember that everyone who's in it doesn't know how it's going to turn out. And that if you're a good storyteller, you have people tune in, pay attention to the story. Because you think it may not turn out the way you know it did. That's the essence of it. So I have people telling me about my Civil War series. They say, you know, I went into that Ford's Theater hoping the gun would jam this time. And I went, yes, that's exactly what you want, right? That's exactly what you want. Even. Even when the French decide to come in after the Battle of Saratoga, it's still not a given that we're going to win. Washington isn't totally sure that we're going to win. And when Charleston falls in in the spring of 1780, it's like, I think the game is over. I'm not sure how we can continue. And he does. And. And then the French, we have a few engagement. The first couple of engagements with the French are disasters. And we're thinking, maybe we don't. Their help isn't going to be helpful. And then their army comes and they march with Washington not to New York to liberate it, but around and down, and they trap Cornwallis and the French navy, defeats the British and allows the big guns to come in from New. I mean, it is as riveting a story as you could ever tell. And it's our story, and nobody knows it. It's our origin story. It's our origin mythology. It's our. It's our, you know, Valhalla. It's our. It's our Thor and Odin. These are all the founding stuff. And what could be more important and particularly today when we feel like we're divided, so divided. Well, you go, well, we're pretty divided back then, and we were pretty divided during the Vietnam. We were really divided during the Great Depression. And. And we were really, you know, in America first. And we were really divided during the Civil War. So maybe we're always divided and maybe the essence is not to just keep pointing and escalating it, but say, how do. What do we share in common? Common? Well, I'll tell you what we share in common. We share an origin story that on July 4th in 1776, very few countries know exactly when they were born. Where? Philadelphia. When? July 4, 1776. And what we hold these truths to be self evident. That's our story.
