Jeremy Scahill

It was an uncivil war because it was so hard fought.

A vicious local fight that played out for all kinds of reasons.

When people hear about the American Revolution, they often think, wait a minute, I didn't know religion mattered in this.

I didn't know ethnicity mattered in this, but it did.

He moved to Philadelphia because not only was Philadelphia a bigger city and was more vibrant, Boston was still very much a city under the control of, by then, the kind of fourth generation descendants of the Puritan aristocracy.

And he wanted room to move and grow and succeed.

And to him, Philadelphia, even though it had had its own aristocracy, was this city of opportunity.

He's kind of one of the early self-made man stories from that period because he was an incredibly smart printer.

He knew how to print the English language in ways that were captivating and compelling to his fellow countrymen.

At that time, Franklin was a diehard British subject, and he claimed that the British colonies needed to unite if they were going to successfully respond to the challenges of this war.

They needed to unite or they would die.

But he wasn't claiming they needed to unite against the British government.

It's that they needed to unite against their French opponents in this war.

The revolutionaries were able to mobilize support because they produced all this printed material.

And it was totally over the top.

It would levy the most extreme accusations against the British government, but it moved very quickly.

It also helps to explain how a small series of protests became a national revolution.

And one of the things we see is that the Northern colonies joined the movement more quickly.

The Southern colonies joined more slowly.

One of the reasons is there are fewer printing presses.