1. From the French Revolution of 1789 to Tiananmen Square in 1989, the American Revolution has inspired countless rebellions, uprisings, revolts, and demonstrations. About the ultimate meaning of the example set by the victorious colonists, Thomas Fleming is not in any doubt. Right at the beginning of his account of the American Revolution, he pauses to explain its world-historical significance:

In the Declaration of Independence, liberty became a birthright that every person could claim, no matter what any government said. In that great leap forward, the United States of America became more than a country; it became an idea, a heritage open to people of every race and creed. … The freedom to speak our minds, to worship in the churches of our faith, to vote for the political leaders of our choice, to pursue our careers, to manage our individual lives in a hundred different ways, depends on American liberty as it was enunciated and defined in the crisis years of the Revolution.

Fleming's theme, then, is the glorious progress of self-government.

Liberty! The American Revolution exhibits much of the verve, clean prose, and appealing production values that also marked the six-hour pbs special it accompanies. The stirring color prints with which the book is filled are a visual delight that contribute substantially to the narrative. The volume bears ample testimony to Fleming's wide reading in at least considerable stretches of the vast literature on the war and its effects. Several passages treating military subjects—on what exactly happened at Lexington and Concord on the eighteenth of April in 1775, the shifting goals of Britain's grand strategy, the skill of patriot generals George Washington and Nathanael Greene, and the brilliance of Gen. Benedict Arnold in the war's northern theater before he went over to the British—are as good as popular writing can get. Perhaps there could have been a few more maps, but the ones reproduced here are usually originals from the period and so add their own distinctive flavor to the volume's visual richness.

In Fleming's telling, liberty was secured in America through the far-sighted, self-denying leadership of the Founding Fathers. Chief among those fathers, and also the central figures of the book, are George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are the principle supporting actors to the heroic Washington and the wily, old Franklin. The villains of the piece are George III (Britain's well-meaning but incompetent monarch who suffered delusions of despotism), George's prime minister, Lord North (a sniveling lackey who did not possess even enough savoir faire to carry out an effective resignation), and Lord George Germain (British secretary of state for the colonies whose hauteur blinded him alike to the oppressive habits of the British nobility and the legitimacy of American complaints). These leaders, in Fleming's view, did defend a notion they called "British liberty," but they never had a clue about the genuine liberty for which American patriots fought.

The book devotes some space, and many excellent illustrations, to other folk—wives, women who actually took up arms; British MPs; members of the Continental Congress; slaves and freed blacks; British generals and admirals; the French who eventually came to the aid of the new United States; and members of both the patriot militia and the Continental line. But it is the Big Patriot Men who define the point of view of the book.

Fleming is a superbly gifted narrator whose briskly confident pace rarely falters. Yet the story, as it unfolds—likewise the parallel story told in the pbs series—is jammed full of what, for lack of a better term, can only be termed curiosities.

A first curiosity concerns, predictably, the patriots' defense of black chattel slavery. One of Fleming's early references to the issue also opens up other perplexities. After describing George Washington's attachment to standards of Roman virtue found especially in the eponymous hero of Joseph Addison's tragedy Cato, Fleming pauses to expand upon the ideal of freedom:

Virginia's liberty was very different from the ordered, morality-driven liberty to which the Puritans of Massachusetts were devoted. Virginia was closer to the traditional English idea of liberty—a right to rule, to have one's own way—and not to be ruled arbitrarily by the will or whims of others. In this view of life, the world was a harsh place that did not apportion liberty equally. Some men had more than others, and some had none at all—which explains why George Washington and his fellow Virginians saw no conflict between being fervent devotees of liberty and owners of slaves.

Here there are three problems.

The obvious one is that if modern Americans are heirs to the liberty of the American Revolution, a mutation must have occurred somewhere along the way, since modern instincts view the ideal of liberty as opposed to the practice of slavery. A second is that, if the Virginia ideal of liberty was not that different from the British, then why the War for Independence? The third is the acknowledged difference between Massachusetts and Virginia. Were the colonies in fact fighting for different things in the struggle against the mother country?

Also early in his account, Fleming pauses to praise the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew of Boston, who on August 25, 1765, preached a memorable sermon. At the time, Boston was at a fever pitch of resistance to the Stamp Tax that Parliament had passed only shortly before as a measure to recoup a fraction of the expense it had incurred in sending an army to the colonies to deliver North America from the control of the French. Mayhew's text was from the Epistle to the Galatians: "I would they were even cut off which trouble you. For brethren, ye have been called unto liberty." The next night a Boston mob, inspired at least in part by Mayhew's sermon, stormed the home of Massachusetts's American-born but royally appointed governor, Thomas Hutchinson. Here is Fleming's account of what the mob did:

Working through the night with ferocious determination, the rioters smashed doors to splinters, tore the wainscoting off the walls, chopped down the fruit trees in the garden, flung into the street the manuscript of a history of the colony that Hutchinson had been writing for years, destroyed or stole all the books in his library and made off with every piece of furniture, crockery and clothing in the place, plus £900 sterling. Dawn found them trying to tear off the roof. Another hour of darkness and they would have leveled the building. "Such ruins were never seen in America," Hutchinson wailed in a letter to an English friend.

The most curious word in Fleming's account is "wailed," as if Hutchinson were only a fastidious crybaby making up a complaint out of thin air. The most curious connection is Fleming's apparent approval of the notion that the Reverend Mr. Mayhew, by inciting such a riot, had actually communicated Saint Paul's very own understanding of the meaning of liberty.

One more of the many other curiosities of the book comes from Fleming's account of the last years of the war when, with both sides avoiding set battles, vicious partisan warfare ravaged some parts of the middle colonies and much of the South. In the summer of 1779, George Washington sent Gen. John Sullivan with 2,500 troops into western Pennsylvania in order to pacify the Iroquois allies of the British. Fleming describes the results graphically:

The Iroquois and Walter Butler's Tory rangers could do little more than harass the fringes of the column, as Sullivan's men grimly destroyed 40 Indian villages, more than 160,000 bushels of corn and vast quantities of vegetables. They left the Iroquois destitute and defeated, wishing they had ignored the British blandishments that had split their confederacy and brought most of their warriors into the war against the Americans.

Two years later, a British army under Lord Cornwallis advanced far up into Virginia. Thomas Jefferson, who was then serving as governor of the new state, escaped with only hours to spare, but one of his plantations, Elk Hill on the James River, was not so fortunate. Fleming wraps up the incident as follows:

Here, in Jefferson's words, is the havoc the Earl wrecked: "He destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco, he burned all my barns, containing the same articles of the last year, he used … all my stock of cattle, sheep and hogs for the sustenance of his army and carried off all the horses capable of service; of those too young for service he cut the throat; and he burned all the fences on the plantation, so as to leave it an absolute waste."

Curiosities: Jefferson does not "wail," Fleming makes no comparison with the American attack on the Iroquois, and he does not comment on Jefferson's culpability for listening to the blandishments of the rebels that had brought him into the war against the British.

2. The story, it seems, is not quite so straightforward after all. There are a few more twists and turns than we might have expected from the paeans to American liberty that begin and end the book. What is going on?

Someone who thought he knew what was going on was John Wesley. Writing from England in 1775, he published a short work setting out a view of the impending conflict strikingly dissimilar to that found in Liberty! The American Revolution. For his part, Wesley simply could not fathom what the Americans were talking about:

After all the vehement cry for liberty, what more liberty can you have? What more religious liberty can you desire, than that which you enjoy already? May not every one among you worship God according to his own conscience? What civil liberty can you desire, which you are not already possessed of? Do you not, every one, high or low, enjoy the fruit of your labour? … Would the being independent of England make you more free? Far, very far from it. It would hardly be possible for you to steer clear, between anarchy and tyranny.

But suppose, after numberless dangers and mischiefs, you should settle into one or more republics; would a republican government give you more liberty, either religious or civil? By no means. No governments under heaven are so despotic as the republican; no subjects are governed in so arbitrary a manner, as those of a commonwealth.

Anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of how the American War for Independence ended and then about the later history of the independent American republic knows that Wesley was a bad prophet. With the advantage of hindsight, that is, we can see that there was more to American liberty than merely persistent inability to define the word, the enslavement of African Americans, self-serving politicization of the Bible, mob rule, assaults on law-abiding citizens as demonized Other, and systematic slaughter of Native Americans. But if there was more to American liberty than this dreary list of atrocities, was Wesley in fact wrong in thinking it could be anything less?

To be sure, we now know that the Declaration of Independence, though penned by the slave-holding Jefferson, inspired Abraham Lincoln's abhorrence of slavery. And for a number of different reasons, most modern Americans hold that, though the United States was created in no small part by mobs acting outside the rule of law, it is generally preferable if mobs are not allowed a dominant voice in the course of public affairs. Still, if we now see some things that Wesley could not see, it is also true that he could see some things about the American Revolution that Thomas Fleming and the producers of the pbs series apparently cannot see.

The inability of these splendidly produced accounts of the Revolution to dwell on the moral inconsistencies of the struggle for American independence, to note the obvious fact that the patriotic vision of liberty was very selective, to admit that quite a few classes of people had to lose their liberty so that the patriots could gain theirs, or to hint that there may have actually been a logic to resisting the drive for American independence is a shame—in particular because it ignores so much excellent historical writing that presents a more nuanced view of the nation's founding. It is a shame, second, because the simplistic lessons drawn by Fleming and pbs make it nearly impossible to use the story of the Revolution as a source of reasoning about political morality today.

3. Even brief mention of several recently published books shows how much complexity attended the actual unfolding of the War for Independence and how important that complexity was. For instance, Susan Juster's Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England carefully studies the records of Baptist congregations in New England from the colonial Great Awakening in the 1740s through the first decades under the Constitution. She finds that revivals brought an unusual measure of liberty to Baptist fellowships of New England, especially in the breakdown of some traditional restrictions on what women were permitted to do in various church settings. As the Revolution came on, these Baptists began to take more interest in the political sphere. Although they mostly supported the drive for independence, they concentrated even more on securing full freedom from the religious establishments of New England. In the process, however, the concern of Baptist men to assert their liberty against England and against the Congregational establishments seems to have led quite directly to reimposition of restrictions upon women. Where in the revival era, Baptists of both genders were encouraged to take part in most church activities, by 1800 Baptist women were almost entirely silenced in the face of the desire by Baptist men to assert their place in public life and in running the churches all by themselves.

Pauline Maier's American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence provides complexity of a different sort. Again in a very well-researched volume, Maier finds scores, if not hundreds, of "declarations of independence" before, after, and contemporaneous with the famous Declaration from Philadelphia in early July 1776. Her research leads her to the conclusion that for many people in many different parts of the colonies and in many different economic and political conditions, these local proclamations were far more important than the distant activities of the Continental Congress. In addition, Maier traces later American reverence for the Philadelphia Declaration to conditions in the new republic that seemed to require a civil religious glue to hold the fissiparous American republic together. Her conclusion is that, in the Revolutionary era itself, the Philadelphia Declaration was by no means as important as it later appeared, and that later concentration on the Philadelphia edict has obscured the many paths that others took—besides the wealthy, patrician, often slaveholding gentlemen—to opt for independence.

A different corrective still is administered by Richard Rosenfeld's American Aurora: A Democrat-Republican Returns: The Suppressed History of Our Nation's Beginning and the Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It. This unusual (and lengthy) book presents a series of excerpts from one of the most important American newspapers of the 1790s along with Rosenfeld's informative, but also polemical, annotations. The American Aurora was a newspaper devoted to the cause of the Democratic Republicanism championed by Thomas Jefferson and opposing, with sometimes incendiary ardor, the Federalism associated with John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. The most notable thing about the political arguments that Rosenfeld presents is the deep, far-reaching level of antagonism they reveal between the patriots who 20 years before had worked together against the British. So profound was the antagonism between Federalist notions of a deferential freedom (which, however, had some room for harkening to the complaints of slaves) and the more egalitarian notions of freedom promoted by the Jeffersonians (who, by contrast, were not interested in extending any sort of democracy to African Americans) that leading spokesmen on both sides talked of civil war or the fragmentation of the United States. The corrective this book offers to the simplistic picture in the Fleming/pbs accounts is the reminder that liberty was always a contested notion. It was always an ideal with multiple meanings, some of them so different that people holding to the very same word could become violent political antagonists.

Works like those by Juster, Maier, and Rosenfeld now abound for almost all aspects of late-colonial society, whether religious and intellectual, social and economic, gendered and racial, political and diplomatic. The message of these careful histories is by no means unified. Yet they do make one thing clear—simplistic accounts of the American founding squander a vast resource of careful studies that now exists for understanding what, in its multiform complexity, was actually going on in the era that witnessed the birth of the United States.

4. Simplistic accounts create another, related problem. When the strife of the American Revolution is presented as a clear divide between right-thinking patriots and corrupt subjects of the king, it becomes almost impossible to use the history for discriminating moral education. A case in point is the treatment of George III in Liberty! The American Revolution. As Fleming and the pbs producers have it, this poor bumpkin could never get anything right. He underestimated the colonists' attachment to their own prerogatives, overestimated their residual loyalty to his royal rule, tyrannized his own parliamentary ministers, just could never get it when people told him that he was wrong, and on and on.

It is important to recognize that this is not a systematically false portrait. Few historians have mistaken George III for Winston Churchill or suggested that his handling of the colonies was a textbook case in how to nurture an empire.

Nonetheless, King George probably saw aspects of the colonial situation more accurately than did the American patriots. He may have even been more perceptive than the colonists on some questions concerning liberty. Thus, Fleming cites George III's own understanding of the ideal. In writing for assistance from William Pitt, George remarked that he knew Pitt would "zealously give his aid towards destroying all party distinctions and restoring that subordination to Government which can alone preserve the inestimable blessing, Liberty, from degenerating into licentiousness." As almost all American experience during the Revolution and afterwards has indicated, the stupid king was onto something here.

The American war effort was, in fact, badly hampered by excesses of liberty—that is, by licentiousness. Fleming recounts the arrival of Virginia troops under Daniel Morgan at Washington's headquarters early in the war. Fleming's comments sound like he is making a joke: "But the new troops soon gave Washington major headaches. They were totally immune to discipline. When one of the men was put in the guardhouse, his friends rescued him and, for good measure, burned down the guardhouse." But the situation was not a joke at all. Only rapid—and very high-handed—action by Washington restored order to the Continental army. Throughout the conflict, the American cause threatened to go down on numerous occasions when militia exercised their liberty by not heeding Washington's call for aid, when colonies exercised their liberty by not sending money to the Continental Congress, and when the Congress exercised its liberty by worrying about who would snap up choice holdings in the opening West rather than about how to supply Washington's army with provisions. George III, in other words, was right. Liberty without constraint is deadly.

Such an observation is elementary indeed. But because even this elementary realization is not a part of the Fleming/pbs account, the whole presentation of liberty wanders in an ethical minefield. The mines explode on slavery.

To its credit, the book and video do not hide the fact that many of the leading American patriots owned slaves. Yet their simplistic understanding of liberty leads to moral contortions.

For example, Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, made a proclamation in mid-1775 declaring that all slaves and indentured servants who joined the British to assist in putting down the rebels would be granted their freedom. Fleming quite properly notes the pragmatic, rather than humanitarian, motives behind Dunmore's act. He is also accurate in recording the outrage of leading Virginians who saw this step as promoting a race rebellion that would destroy their idea of what Virginia society should look like.

Fleming also does good historical service by indicating that the British did not follow through in providing sustained protection to many of the slaves who fled to their ranks. Yet even with all of these nuances, Fleming is led up to a conclusion that he will not make. After properly noting complex details, it is nonetheless still the case that for nearly one-fifth of the American population, the British were the real defenders of liberty and the American patriots were the despots.

Not making such qualifications means that there is very little a reader can take from the book into contemporary political discussions over how far personal rights should extend in modern American society. Are we justified in following the Founders' practice and excluding certain classes of persons (take your pick—homosexuals, the unborn, illegal immigrants, the terminally ill) from the exercise of liberty or are we not? Heeding a simplistic paean to liberty provides no help at all.

By contrast, if Fleming had acknowledged that the Revolutionary generation included some ironies, some self-deception, some no-win forced choices, some blatantly specious posturing, as well as some arguably estimable examples, he would have provided a much more satisfying resource for contemporary debates in political morality.

5. Everyone knows that history can be used to beat up on enemies or to justify one's own political, social, religious, or economic position. The ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, or South Africa—as well as debates surrounding the fiftieth anniversaries of both India and Israel—illustrate this commonplace with great clarity. Not a few modern critics have gone on to suggest that such uses of history are, in fact, the human norm. History is so plastic that, when examined with care, there really is nothing there at all—except another illustration of how the most powerful interests in a society exert control over all its commodities.

Few critics and far fewer working historians agree with such radical conclusions. They contend, rather, that though historical writing can never be indubitable, complete, or inerrant, it is possible to obtain a degree of clarity about many aspects of human existence in previous generations. At the same time, most defenders of modest historical knowledge concede the power of present-day concerns to shape a view of the past. As a result, they stress the ways in which historians and the communities in which historians live influence selection of subjects, angles of insight, and ranges of possible interpretation. As in the case of historical works on the Revolutionary era, such modest realists are also prone to say that historical knowledge flourishes best in adversarial relationships. Open, frank debate over historical evidence, over political reasons for seeing the past one way or another, over whether historical evidence is being obscured in order to serve partisan interests are regarded as the best vehicles for advancing historical knowledge.

Apparently, however, in modern America, debates over hegemonic discourse, the multiple historical perspectives demanded by life in a multicultural society, or the perspectival character of historical knowledge are frightening, and perhaps especially frightening to the makers of documentary films that will be shown first on pbs and then in the nation's classrooms. Maybe the fright in this case comes from producing material on the American War for Independence, the event that is supposed to be, if we are an "American," the origin of "us" all, the originating point from which "we" trace "our" beginning. Perhaps notions of collective identity are now so fragile that inviting debate over who "we" are is just too frightening to contemplate, especially if a big budget and the possible wrath of congressmen are factors.

Historical truth, unfortunately, requires subtlety. The great shame of Liberty! The American Revolution is that, while it does many things well, it does not encourage the kind of debates that are necessary for historical truth. Through its unreserved praise of great men like Washington and its uncomplicated depiction of liberty, it plays directly into the hands of the most radical cultural critics. Such efforts, because they come backed by such wealth and such powerful interests, are a greater threat to the possibility of historical truth than the incomprehensible prose of the postmodernists. The worst thing about Liberty! is that it does such a professional job of running away so fast from the moral conundrums, the ironies, and the interpretive conflicts surrounding the nation's birth.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.