At 250 years, the American Revolution is no longer a story of simple triumph. Watching Ken Burns’ new PBS documentary The American Revolution reminded me that the nation’s founding was a struggle—moral, political, and deeply contradictory. And today, as our President acts in ways that seem to challenge the very principles this country was built upon, these contradictions feel urgent, alive, and unavoidable.
The Revolution is often remembered as a fight for liberty. But in 1775, roughly 500,000 to 600,000 people were enslaved in the thirteen colonies. In the South—Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina—enslaved people often made up 30 to 50 percent of the population, with rice and indigo plantations fueling vast wealth. In the Middle Colonies—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware—enslaved populations were smaller, usually 5 to 10 percent, working on farms, in households, and in urban trades. The Northern Colonies—Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire—had under 5 percent, though slavery persisted in towns and on farms. Roughly one in five colonists was enslaved. These numbers are not abstractions; they are a human reality that exposes the Revolution’s deepest hypocrisy.
Colonial ambitions collided with empire. The French and Indian War (1754–1763) reshaped North America. Britain’s victory opened vast new territories west of the Appalachians, but Parliament tried to block settlement with the Proclamation of 1763, seeking to protect Indigenous lands and maintain alliances. Tens of thousands of Indigenous people—including the Iroquois Confederacy and numerous Algonquian-speaking nations—inhabited these lands, with their own governments, trade networks, and spiritual connections. Colonists, however, saw freedom in the ability to seize land. Liberty for some meant dispossession for others.
Meanwhile, the British Empire’s wealth flowed from its Caribbean colonies, not the American ones. Sugar, rum, and other commodities from Jamaica, Barbados, and elsewhere enriched the crown and British merchants, powered by the labor of enslaved Africans. Parliament’s concern was profit, not liberty. Colonists, dreaming of expansion, often turned a blind eye to these truths. The Revolution was as much about economic and territorial interests as it was about moral principle.
In the decade before Lexington and Concord, colonial courts embodied a quiet but explosive contradiction: judges swore loyalty not to the communities they governed, but to a distant crown. Courts enforced imperial authority even when it clashed with local values. For colonists who believed liberty was inherent, this became intolerable. As one patriot warned, “Let not the iron hand of tyranny ravish our laws.”
Yet liberty was never only a political question. It was moral, and moral questions have a way of exposing inconvenient truths. When Samuel Adams declared Americans would be “either free men or slaves,” he voiced the Revolution’s deepest hypocrisy. Freedom was being defended in a land where hundreds of thousands of people remained in chains. That contradiction had faces and names—none more powerful than Phillis Wheatley Peters.
Taken as a child from West Africa, Wheatley was enslaved, expected to die, yet she mastered Milton, Pope, Virgil, and Ovid. Her Poems on Various Subjectsstunned New England elites and London intellectuals alike. Abolitionists hailed her as living proof that intellect and artistry reside in every human soul. Even some revolutionary leaders sensed the danger: Benjamin Rush warned, “The plant of liberty cannot thrive in the neighborhood of slavery.” Abigail Adams understood that a republic built on natural rights could not indefinitely deny humanity to millions. The moral reckoning had begun long before independence was declared.
By 1773, resistance turned combustible. Tea—taxed without consent—became a symbol of all that Parliament refused to hear. From Charleston to Boston, crowds demanded it be returned. Boston radicals disguised themselves as Native Americans to dump thousands of pounds of tea into the harbor. Violence revealed a deeper shift: America had lost its fear.
London responded with the Coercive Acts, closing Boston’s port and imposing military rule. Intended to isolate Massachusetts, the measures instead unified the colonies. Judges were expelled. Courts closed. Militias grew. Towns organized minutemen, ready at a moment’s notice. When the First Continental Congress convened, Patrick Henry captured the shift: “I am not a Virginian. I am an American.” Revolution was no longer debate; it had become culture.
On April 19, 1775, British troops marched toward Concord. Shots rang out at Lexington Green. No one ever agreed who fired first. John Adams knew there was no turning back. The causes of revolution, he wrote, were “like a cancer… too far spread and entrenched.” The war would last eight years, but morally, everything had changed.
The Revolution was never a clean story of liberty triumphing over tyranny. It birthed a nation that declared itself free while denying freedom to many within its borders. Yet those contradictions planted seeds. The language of equality and human dignity would fuel abolition, suffrage, labor struggles, civil rights movements, and today’s fights for justice.
Colonial Americans resisted judges who served distant power rather than the people. Today, attacks on judicial independence, threats to marginalized communities, and the erosion of democratic norms echo those early conflicts. Liberty does not survive on rhetoric alone; it depends on institutions willing to defend it.
The American Revolution was not only a struggle for liberty; it was a struggle over slavery, over who counted as human, and over the profits of empire. The same contradictions that fueled rebellion continue to shape us now: the tension between ideals and interests, between expansion and justice, between liberty and oppression. Recognizing that truth is not a detraction from the Revolution; it is an invitation to engage with its full moral complexity, and to carry its unfinished work forward.
A house divided cannot stand. The Revolution was never about perfection; it was about possibility. Today, as we reflect on 250 years of history, we are challenged once again to ask: Will we live up to the ideals we claim to honor, even when it is difficult? Will we confront the hypocrisies embedded in our past and present? Liberty is not abstract. It is a living principle, one that must be defended—not only against distant rulers, but against those in power today who threaten the very foundations of our democracy.
The unfinished work of the Revolution calls to us. To insist that justice and equality apply to all is not merely patriotic; it is moral. In that insistence, the willingness to face contradictions, to demand accountability, and to fight for the principles we celebrate, we honor the courage, conscience, and possibility of a nation still in the making.