By Andy Brack
Legendary documentary film director Ken Burns this week said South Carolina was one of two violent colonies where it would have been really hard to have lived during America’s war for independence. The other was New Jersey.
Both states saw a lot of bloodshed. In fact, Burns said one in five Revolutionary War battlefield deaths as a whole occurred here in the Palmetto State, which had more battles and skirmishes than any other state.
Too many people don’t realize how pivotal South Carolina was in the nation’s struggle for freedom from autocratic British rule. South Carolina’s location caused the British to stretch supply lines on a continent much bigger than most thought then.
Charleston’s wealth was attractive to the British, who captured it in 1780 after shelling the city for a month. More than 5,000 colonial soldiers – a Southern army – surrendered, leading the British to think the tide shifted toward them. But then came pesky backcountry fighters like Daniel Morgan, Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion.
Burns, in Charleston for a preview of his team’s new “The American Revolution” documentary that comes out in six months, said South Carolinians of 250 years ago faced a gruesome civil war inside a war for independence. Neighbors took revenge on neighbors. Loyalists killed patriots, who killed Loyalists and British soldiers who sacked the state.
“It’s an eight-year story of how the United States came into being,” he said during a press conference at the College of Charleston with SCETV, which will present the six-part, 12-hour series. “It’s not always a pretty story, but it’s a complicated and interesting one.”
Burns and his team say they hope the film helps Americans reconnect with their history.
“We think that understanding where you’ve been, particularly this most important of stories, helps you understand where you are and where you’re going,” he said. “Too often, we have told only a top-down version of our past. And what we have tried to do in all of our films for the last nearly 50 years of filmmaking in public media is to tell a bottom-up story as well – one that is not an unforgiving revisionism that throws out those top-down figures, but merges the two together.
He said he believes the new film is the most important in his career.
“The American Revolution is the most important event in human history, since the birth of Christ.”
People are often fond of thinking there’s not really much new that happens – that history repeats itself.
But the birth of the United States, where people chose rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness over an autocratic monarch, was new and different. No nation up until that time had been built on principles. Instead, they were based on inheritance, conquest or tyranny.
“There was something new under the sun that began here in these 13 former colonies that has been a beacon for the entire world,” Burns said. “And our film is an attempt to understand how it started, what its antecedents were and what took place during the revolution.”
Burns dodged a question about what Revolutionary War leaders like John Laurens and Christopher Gadsden, both of Charleston, would think about some leaders today who are turning to authoritarianism – particularly since patriots fought and died to shrug off the cloak of autocracy.
“What is so surprising to me is just how much people [back then] were willing to risk everything for this concept, a brand new concept of liberty and freedom of representation in a real sense. … We’re the first anti-colonial movement and we were rebelling against the arbitrary power and authoritarian aspects of the British government over us.”
“The American Revolution” premieres nationwide on public television on Nov. 16.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the Charleston City Paper and Statehouse Report. Have a comment? Send it to feedback@statehousereport.com.
