Did Ken Burns go Woke?

I watched all 12 hours of American Revolution to find out.

I’ve been a Ken Burns fan for a long time. The Civil War, The Great War, and The Roosevelts were all great documentaries. They brought history to life in a way I had never experienced before (seriously, if you have not watched them you need to). So when Burns’ new documentary American Revolution was released, simultaneously hitting the top of the streaming charts while also being labeled “woke” by conservative media I decided I needed to watch for myself.

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What worked: As expected, the production quality and voice overs are extraordinary. To be honest, the maps and visuals alone are probably worth your time. You get constant displays of movements, battle lines, siege positions in a way that print cannot convey. You actually see how things happened, from Revere’s ride to Yorktown to the Charleston siege debacle. It helps you understand how the pivotal role geography played throughout the period.

Burns also highlights the diverse lives and cultures of the separate colonies. How the 13 were essentially different countries: Massachusetts Puritans, Pennsylvania Quakers, Virginia’s Anglican Aristocrats, New York’s Merchants, Scots-Irish frontiersmen, German Lutheran farmers, Maryland Catholics. You could go on. He helps you grasp how unlikely any union was between these communities.

What didn’t: Unfortunately, for all its high points, the real priorities become clear fairly early in the film (like the first scene). Burns, at the expense of the larger project, sets out to accomplish two things: platform marginalized voices and highlight the tension between what the (white male) founders aspired to and what enslaved people, women, and Native nations actually experienced. While these are legitimate issues to raise and you won’t find me arguing that they have been historical represented well, the pursuit unfortunately begins to shape everything.

Most notably, the opening scene presents as fact a contested claim that Franklin proposed the colonies form “a similar union” to the Iroquois Confederacy. This implies a strong link between Haudenosaunee political structure and American constitutionalism. Not only is this debatable (yet presented as fact), but Franklin’s actual 1751 letter refers to the Six Nations as “ignorant Savages” (that part gets left out).

At the other end of the project, the final episode (having completed the story of chronicling of warfare) compresses fifteen years of constitutional history: the Articles of Confederation, Shays’ Rebellion, the Constitutional Convention and subsequent ratification fights into about a fifteen minute after thought. We get coverage of so many (less than central) topics: the experience of foreign fighters, Caribbean plantation economics, detailed slave boat layouts, native governmental structures but on such a critical final point, we get almost nothing regarding what the founders actually built: the debates, the coalitions, the checks and balances, and the ultimate federal structure that made self-government possible at continental scale.

In the end, highlighting hypocrisy and centering interesting alternative storylines mattered more than diving into what was actually achieved by the revolution.

On the issue of hypocrisy, its worth raising one final point: The Asymmetry problem.

The Asymmetry Problem

As I mentioned, Burns leans hard into the founders’ hypocrisy. Men proclaiming liberty while holding slaves. Declaring equality while denying the vote to women and the unpropertied. That tension is fascinating, historically legitimate, and egregious. I am not here to argue about whether it is worth highlighting or not.

What I found disappointing is that we (the viewer) weren’t trusted with the full measure of tension present within each group and each topic found in the Revolution. Burns applies moral scrutiny asymmetrically. Let me give you a few examples of the types of tension left unmentioned in the piece:

On African participation in the slave trade: Burns emphasizes both the brutality of slavery and the global nature of the conflict—Haitian soldiers, Caribbean colonies, the war stretching around the globe. But if the scope is global, why not explore the African element as well?

Henry Louis Gates has written that historians estimate 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were first enslaved by Africans and sold to European traders. “Without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders,” Gates writes, “the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.”

This wasn't some revisionist discovery. Frederick Douglass himself, decades later, would warn: “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia.”

I am not arguing that this absolves or excuses European slavers from the market they helped create. I am saying that broadening the scope would’ve made the moral picture more about human evil rather than the audacity of white evil.

On Native American warfare and displacement: Burns does much work to establish the sophistication, independence, and uniqueness of many native tribes across the continent throughout the film. As mentioned before, even claiming they helped influence our structure. Notably, however, he presents Indigenous peoples consistently (and almost exclusively) as victims of war, disease, and displacement on a mammoth scale—doing much work to avoid exploring the conquest, bloodshed, and mass displacement that existed in the pre-Columbian America. The Lakota drove out the Cheyenne. The Comanche empire was built on conquest of the Apache. The Iroquois Confederacy itself was founded to end constant internal wars between groups.

None of this justifies what happened after European contact (much due to disease). But it would complicate a narrative that treats displacement as something done to Native peoples rather than something all peoples did. A fact that I believe is worth mentioning.

On the complexity of slaveholding: Finally, predictably, and justifiably, the film highlights the importance (even in the revolutionary era) of the slave economy. Additionally Burns was right to point out that this was a Southern, White, institution (almost entirely).

But.

Again, it is worth noting, the Cherokee Nation for example held slaves in the Revolutionary era (growing to total thousands by the start of the Civil War). The “Five Civilized Tribes” were, in the words of Smithsonian associate curator Paul Chaat Smith (himself Comanche), “deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized black codes, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy.”

Now, you might be asking, isn’t that obscure, the legacy of Native slaveholding? Comparatively, yes, absolutely.

But it’s about as obscure as claiming Franklin based our government on the Iroquois Confederacy and Burns thought that was significant enough to open the whole documentary. If he’s willing to platform claims that complicate a “white founders invented everything” narrative, why shy away from facts that complicate a purely racialized “victims” narrative?

MY BIG POINT: Virtually every civilization throughout history practiced slavery. What made America different wasn’t the sin, it was the desire and eventual capacity to abolish it.

The constitutional framework the founders dreamed up (yes it was flawed, compromised, and imperfect) nonetheless created a structure through which abolition occurred. And as is consistent with history it was not clean. 360,000 Union soldiers died to finish what wasn’t accomplished peacefully.

Their stated aim: “All men are created equal” was ultimately a standard that would haunt every generation that followed. We were not uniquely flawed. We were uniquely willing to aspire to something we knew we would immediately fall short of.

The Final Straw:

On the structure they built: Burns leaves you with the impression that the founders could have created a more inclusive system but chose not to. That exclusion was a feature, not a constraint.

But look at the coalition dynamics Burns himself documents. Thirteen functionally separate nations with fundamentally different economies, religions, and interests. These men weren’t naive about their contradictions. Many wrote extensively about slavery’s evil.

They understood they were playing a strategically sequential game. The Articles of Confederation were barely agreed to because the colonies were skeptical of any benefits of union. The Constitution was only ratified after experiencing the power of unity. After they’d won a war together, seen economic chaos, tried to govern, watched Shays’ Rebellion. They could progressively ask for more unity because people had progressively been forced to learn what disunity could cost them.

They took a massive bet, that if they could just bind these disparate peoples into a perpetual framework and give it the room to evolve, the system, full of a good and moral people could eventually muster the courage and fortitude to address what they couldn’t address at founding. Not because they didn’t care about justice right now, but because this was the weight the current coalition could bear that day.

Does Burns explore any of this? The documentary gestures at some of it. But you’re not left with genuine moral complexity—history that’s messy and complicated, fallen humans navigating impossible choices.

You’re left with something clean. Black and white. Who the hypocrites were. Who the victims were. Oppressors and oppressed.

What a Christian Lens Offers

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
- James Madison

The founders built a system premised on human fallenness. They assumed people would be selfish, factional, power-hungry. They designed checks and balances not despite that reality but because of it.

That’s a deeply Christian insight: total depravity as constitutional theory.

I'm not attempting to equalize suffering. This isn’t an “all sides are equally guilty” article. I’m not pretending the Civil War was about “states’ rights.” It was about preserving slavery—period. I'm not bringing up counter examples until no one's really actually responsible, that's a coward's game.

What I am saying: every human being has the capacity to act with malice toward a fellow human. African slave traders. Native warriors. British soldiers. White colonists. Everyone in this story is capable of cruelty. And everyone is capable of rising above to constructing something good out of their fallenness.

If we condemn evil (and we should) we should condemn it wherever we find it. And when we do, we’ll find history is more morally complex than categorically clean.

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”
- Alexander Solzjenitsyn

The miracle isn’t that a few saints built a perfect system. The miracle is that many sinners: white, black, native, foreign, all of them navigating exploitation and violence and competing factions built a system that could grow toward justice. A system that could (and did) become more perfect with time.

The Verdict

Should you watch it? Yes. Even if you disagree, like me, with the distracted narrative or framing, it’s a compelling story and you’re sure to learn something.

Burns trusts his audience with greater representation of marginalized voices—and that’s good. He leans into the full weight of the founders’ hypocrisy—and that tension is historically legitimate. But his failure to explore that same tension elsewhere leaves you believing one group of people was exceptionally capable of moral failure on a grand scale.

This relentless focus distracts from something remarkable: how unreasonably, unbelievably, unlikely this experiment was. Thirteen colonies that couldn't agree on anything, binding themselves into a perpetual union with a framework that could evolve and has since produced the freest, most prosperous, most innovative country the world has ever known.