How Courage and Compromise Secured American Liberty
The 56 men who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence knew that if the British prevailed, they’d be tried for treason. When they pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,” they meant it – and put all those things at risk. Ben Franklin reportedly quipped, “we must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately.”
The courage of America’s founders in their David-and-Goliath struggle for freedom from Great Britain comes through loud and clear in “Revolutionary America,” a stunning new documentary narrated and co-produced by Tom Sellick. Timed to the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, it emphasizes the revolutionaries’ mental, moral, and physical fortitude in their defense of hearth, home, and liberty. It also reveals their adaptability.
Clocking in at less than two hours, it stands out as a lean but muscular account of the independence movement. Two other major documentaries marking America’s 250th have more time to complicate the Revolution’s central narrative. There’s “The American Experiment,” produced by Tom Hanks for Netflix, which boasts a five-hour total runtime. Meanwhile, a nonstop binge of Ken Burns’ impressive “The American Revolution,” which aired on PBS, would require half a day.
A product of Hillsdale Studios, “Revolutionary America” has little time to venture down the same narrative cul-de-sacs as its contemporaries. Yet it is notable for its emphasis on the founders’ capacity to learn and grow from past mistakes.
In framing government, the founders understood the need to navigate between “the tyranny that could come from a distant king and the tyranny that could come from the mob,” observes author and Daily Wire host Michael Knowles, one of the documentary’s talking heads. Other commentators include Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn and members of Hillsdale’s top-tier departments of history and politics.
American revolutionaries learned lessons from early experiments in constitutionalism, which allocated too much power to legislatures and too little authority to state governors. They learned from the experimental Articles of Confederation, which lacked any real capacity to compel and convinced many that too little power could imperil liberty just as drastically as too much power.
Delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention arrived in Philadelphia wondering if the hard-won victories of the Revolution might be undermined by internal division. “For the founders, diversity was not a strength,” Hillsdale politics professor Kevin Slack observes in “Revolutionary America.” Yet throughout the drafting of the Constitution and the ratification process that followed, diversity of opinion – and compromise – enhanced America’s system of government. The Bill of Rights, alongside checked, balanced, and divided power, stand among the greatest gifts we’ve received from the gutsy generation that won American independence.
“Revolutionary America” is available on YouTube now.
