(gentle music) - [Narrator] "I did not solicit this command but accepted it after much entreaty.

As soon as the public gets dissatisfied with my service, I shall quit the helm with as much satisfaction and retire to a private station with as much content as ever the weariest pilgrim felt upon his safe arrival in the Holy Land."

George Washington.

- I'm interested in the US, but I'm interested in us.

And too often, I think our history books have presented a kind of top-down history.

Nothing wrong with it.

The most important person in our story is without a doubt George Washington and I will defend that to the end.

We don't have a country without him.

But there are lots of people who contribute to this, bottom-up stories.

And if you're gonna tell that, you gotta be faithful to the whole cast of characters.

- I previously worked on a film about Benjamin Franklin who was an extraordinary individual, but he is only one person.

And I'm very grateful to have this opportunity to work on a film about 3 million Americans.

And if there's 3 million people, there's a lot of stories that most of us don't know yet.

I think we were all surprised to find how many people left behind their memories.

- There are wonderful young men who signed up for the war when they were, I would consider boys, 14, 15 years old and served valiantly and patriotically through the whole conflict.

There are Native Americans who made decisions to side with the British and those who decided to fight with the patriots.

And we tell both those stories.

- For us, the Mohawk people, it was survival.

Period.

And you didn't know which side was gonna be the best choice.

We kind of gravitated mostly to the British because they had kind of won our respect, beating the French and pretty much having our interests when they dealt with the regular colonists.

- [Narrator] "The disturbances in America give great trouble to all our nations.

The Mohawks, our particular nation, have on all occasions shown their zeal and loyalty to the great king."

Thayendanegea.

- You get to know a Native American warrior named Joseph Brant, who's has his painting painted.

He's allied with the British.

He's trying to help them.

There are African Americans who are trying to make a huge decision whether to go with the British who are in some cases offering them freedom if they'll leave their rebel, as the British called us, or patriot owners.

And so you've got huge dynamics to it.

"Go with the British?

Do I fight for the Patriots?"

- We know that about 15,000 Black people actually joined the British or ran away to the British lines versus about 5,000 ultimately entering the patriot cause.

And that's because for many of those enslaved people, the British represented freedom.

The patriots did not.

- We've always been a country with a wide variety of people, a wide variety of cultures, a wide variety of opinions.

We tell the story of Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved woman who goes to court for her freedom in Massachusetts and is an amazing story.

Judith Jackson, who was an enslaved woman who sided with the British and wanted to leave and had to be separated from her daughter at the end of the war.

And Phillis Wheatley, who's the first published African American in the United States, who was a beautiful poet, corresponded with George Washington himself and came here on a slave ship.

- [Narrator] "I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate was snatched from Afric's fancy'd happy seat: what pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labor in my parent's breast?

Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd that from a father seized his babe belov'd.

Such, such my case.

And can I then but pray others may never feel tyrannic sway?"

Phyllis Wheatley.

- One of the characters whose stories we follow is Joseph Plumb Martin of Connecticut.

He was, I think 15 when he signed up in 1776, and he served for the duration of the war.

He was at Yorktown, he was at Germantown, and in the 1830s he wrote a memoir of his experience.

- [Narrator] "Our sergeant major informed us that the regiment was ordered to Long Island.

It gave me a rather disagreeable feeling as I was pretty well assured I should have to sniff a little gunpowder.

(cannons boom) The horrors of battle then presented themselves to my mind in all their hideousness.

'I must come to it now,' thought I."

Joseph Plumb Martin.

- He talks a little bit about the Battle of Fort Mifflin.

He was bombarded for weeks, along with his fellow Connecticut soldiers, by the British Navy.

He says, "You've never heard of this battle because there wasn't a Washington or a Wayne there, but I was there."

- [Narrator] "What could officers do without such men?

Nothing at all.

Great men get great praise; little men, nothing."

- He really gives us an opportunity to understand what the average soldier went through.

When you can bring all of those stories together and all of those thoughts together, all those people's perspectives together, you just get a much better understanding of the war.

- The voices are so varied.

They represent all of us.

Rebecca Tanner, who is a Native American woman, loses five sons in the American Revolution, fighting for the patriot cause.

- [Narrator] "No suffering which Britain can inflict will reduce America to submission.

The thunder of their artillery may lay waste the cities, but the spirit of the people is unconquerable."

Mercy Otis Warren.

(gentle music) - We're really lucky that people like Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren were writing as much as they were about what they experienced and what they thought during the war.

- There are many women you haven't heard of before.

Betsy Ambler, who was a 10-year-old when the war began in Yorktown, Virginia, and wrote beautiful musings for her sister to understand what their family had lived through.

- [Narrator] "The plan laid down for our education was entirely broken in upon by the war.

Instead of morning lessons, we were to knit stockings.

Instead of embroidering, to make homespun garments.

And in place of the music of the harpsichord, to listen to the loud clanging trumpet and never-ceasing drum.

For in every direction that we traveled, and heaven knows we left but little of Virginia unexplored, we heard nought but the din of war.

Our late peaceful country now became a scene of terror and confusion."

Betsy Ambler.

- You allow a story to have many different perspectives.

You have hundreds of voices of people: civilians, loyalists, Native Americans, Black, free and enslaved, patriots, women.

And then you understand there is a much more complex story.

- 18th-century war is not mechanized.

You either walk by foot or a four-legged creature is taking you.

And men didn't go alone.

They went with their families.

So behind the armies are their wives, their children, and the women therefore are supporting the troops in a way that many of us are unfamiliar with.

Women are always at the center of a story of war.

- [Narrator] "In the new code of laws I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.

Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could."

- Women in war are enormously brave, enormously strong, enormously important to the cause.

They made hundreds of shirts.

They publicized the actions of their husbands.

They not only took care of everybody, but they made the revolution something people wanted to be a part of, and they participated in it in many, many ways.

- Crisis changes people and it gave women different ideas about what they should be doing.

- Women were the main consumers in colonial society and they were the ones who made sure the boycotts worked.

Women stopped drinking tea, women started making their own fabric, women started making toys for their children.

And they didn't just stop buying British things and start making their own things, they publicized it.

- One of the key forms of political theater during the resistance movement would be for a local minister to invite the women of the community to come down to the church and to spend the day spinning and weaving cloth.

And it would be a competition to see which community could produce the most homespun.

It would be published in the newspaper and these women would be praised as great American patriots for having produced so much homespun cloth.

- This is a story in which women are a central part of the resistance, initially, and the revolution later.

- We're going to be able to hear a lot of their stories because the war and the revolution impacted them personally and it impacted millions of people within the original 13 colonies and beyond.

It really was just a world-shattering event.

(solemn music)