The unknown American revolutionaries who were…
Ken Burns’ upcoming six-part, 12-hour documentary “The American Revolution” doesn’t just inform the story of icons like George Washington or Benjamin Franklin. The sequence, which premieres Sunday on PBS, brings to life the unusual people — youngsters, ladies, free black Americans, immigrants, and ne’er-do-wells — who historical past often crops out of the body.
We all know the headliners of the Revolution. We’ve seen them haloed in oil paint, read about them in thousand-page biographies, and even watched them rap on Broadway. It’s startling that, 250 years later, there are still major gamers we don’t know. Get to know eight of them.
John Greenwood: The teenage fifer who grew to become Washington’s dentist
John Greenwood went to battle with Washington as a teen and later served as his dentist. The New York Academy of Medicine Library
One of Ken Burns’ favourite figures in his documentary is a teenager that “even a lot of historians aren’t familiar with,” Burns told the Post.
Greenwood, who’s voiced in Burns’ doc by “Stranger Things” actor Joe Keery, enlisted in 1775 as a fifer. At the time, he was just 15 years previous and too younger for a musket, but previous enough to keep exhausted troopers in step by taking part in his flute. He crossed the Delaware River with Washington for the shock assault on Trenton, and when he finally staggered home from the winter campaigns, he was so infested with lice his father baked his garments in the oven.
He went on to grow to be Washington’s dentist. The Founding Father was so happy with Greenwood’s work that he gifted him his last remaining tooth, a relic you’ll be able to still see today at the New York Academy of Medicine on the Upper East Side. “I mean, you cannot make stuff like this up,” Burns told The Post with a giggle.
Sarah Osborn: The soldier’s spouse who stored the siege shifting
Sarah Osborn was one of many ladies who offered important help to her husband. Wayne County Historical Society
The Continental Army didn’t subsist on ration biscuits alone. It survived on ladies’s uncompensated logistics, the invisible infrastructure that stored males fed, clothed, and useful enough to struggle.
Osborn adopted her husband’s regiment and labored through Yorktown’s bombardment — mending uniforms, hauling provides, cooking, and nursing, often under fire. When the cannons opened up at Yorktown, she didn’t retreat to security; she stored the availability strains shifting, because anyone still had to get bread to the trenches.
Without ladies like Osborn, campaigns stalled. With them, armies held.
Joseph Plumb Martin: The 15-year-old grunt who chronicled the warfare from the underside up
When Martin enlisted in the Connecticut militia in 1776, the teenager was too younger to vote but previous enough to die. Over the next seven years, he’d expertise practically every major battle and hardship of the Revolution, from Brooklyn and White Plains to Valley Forge and Yorktown.
Decades later, at age 70, Martin — voiced in Burns’ documentary by Alden Ehrenreich — revealed what would grow to be the most vivid firsthand account of the Revolutionary War from an enlisted man’s perspective. His 1830 memoir, “A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier,” chronicled not the grand maneuvers but the grinding distress: the fixed starvation, the lice, the informal brutality of camp life.
“Almost every one has heard of the soldiers of the Revolution being tracked by the blood of their feet on the frozen ground,” Martin wrote. “This is literally true; and the thousandth part of their sufferings has not, nor ever will be told.”
Joseph Plumb Martin (not pictured) chronicled the warfare with his memoir. Everett/Shutterstock
Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman: The girl who sued her means to freedom
In 1781, an enslaved girl in western Massachusetts listened to the phrases “all men are born free and equal” and dared to apply them to herself. Freeman sued for her freedom, received and helped set in movement the rulings that successfully ended slavery in the Commonwealth. The sequence treats her case not as a postscript but as a frontline of the Revolution’s concepts.
Years later, in an 1853 account recorded by novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Freeman said, “Any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman—I would.”
Boston King: A loyalist path to liberty
Boston King (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) was born enslaved in South Carolina around 1760. When British forces captured Charleston in 1780, King fled to be a part of them, gaining his freedom. He served the British military, married fellow refugee Violet, and was evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783 as half of the large Black Loyalist exodus.
In Nova Scotia, King grew to become a Methodist minister and later emigrated to Sierra Leone, where he grew to become the first Methodist missionary in Africa. He revealed his autobiography in 1798, one of only three memoirs by Black Nova Scotians.
Ken Burns’ Revolutionary War sequence premieres Sunday on PBS. Courtesy of PBS
Judith Jackson: The mom who paid the final word value for her freedom
In May 1779, when British forces raided Norfolk, Virginia, Jackson fled her enslaver with her six-year-old baby, becoming a member of over 500 other Black refugees who escaped during the raid. She discovered work with the British Royal Artillery, washing and ironing for officers, and attained the freedom she’d risked every little thing for. But in August 1783, as evacuation ships ready to depart for Nova Scotia, a white Loyalist forcibly eliminated Jackson and her then 10-year-old daughter from their vessel, claiming he’d bought them from her former enslaver.
At a Board of Inquiry held at Fraunces Tavern in Manhattan, Jackson fought back and received her case. But the price was devastating: she had to depart her daughter behind. Records show that a 12 months later, Jackson headed a family in Birchtown, Nova Scotia — free, but alone. Her baby’s destiny stays unknown.
James Forten: From teen prisoner to abolition financier
James Forten’s efforts show how black company formed the younger republic. Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Forten, a free black teenager from Philadelphia (voiced by Morgan Freeman), was shipped out at age 14 as a powder boy on the privateer Royal Louis in 1780. When the ship was captured, he grew to become a British prisoner of warfare and spent seven months on the infamous prison ship HMS Jersey.
Released in a prisoner exchange in 1782, Forten walked home from New York to Philadelphia — arriving, as one account describes, “lean and ragged, with his hair nearly entirely worn from his head.”
He grew to become an apprentice to sailmaker Robert Bridges and finally purchased the business, building it into one of Philadelphia’s most profitable enterprises. By the 1820s, Forten was one of the wealthiest males in the town, using both black and white staff.
He used his fortune to help abolition, funding at least six abolitionist organizations, buying freedom for numerous enslaved people, and serving to to finance William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator. His efforts show how black company formed the younger republic from the start.
Canassatego: The Native American diplomat who gave Benjamin Franklin big concepts
Chief of the Onondaga nation, Canassatego is the movie’s reply to anybody who thinks American democracy was purely a European invention. At the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster, he told the squabbling British colonies to “preserve a strict friendship” with one another, to unite the way in which the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy had, which made them “formidable.”
Benjamin Franklin was there, revealed Canassatego’s phrases, and clearly took notes. By 1751, Franklin was writing about the Haudenosaunee model. By 1754, his Albany Plan of Union was borrowing immediately from Iroquois rules. Indigenous political thought didn’t just affect the Revolution, it helped write the playbook.
The blueprint for American unity had Native fingerprints all over it.
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