Ken Burns

our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

George Washington may have been the richest man in America, and he certainly risked his life, certainly risked his fortune, constantly.

And let's remember that in addition, between his flaws,

and between the bad military decisions that he made, often, he also rides out on the battlefield risking everything at Kipps Bay in mid-Manhattan.

Living with the men in the freezing cold and being able to inspire them.

This is like the richest guy in America, or one of the richest guys in America,

And at Valley Forge, he loses something like 500 major officers who've gotten letters from home saying, hey, we're making a lot of money off this war, selling provisions and doing this, and they desert, and he stays.

There's zero chance that they're going to succeed at Lexington Green on April 19, 1775.

And this is a war that has been proposed and sort of undertaken by property owners, from militiamen who are farmers to businessmen and merchants and big planters and rich men.

But in order to actually succeed, it has to be, as you say, those teenagers and those felons and those ne'er-do-wells and those second and third sons without a chance of inheritance and recent immigrants who have nothing.

And so by the end of the war, the war is being fought in large measure by people who have little or no property.

that it started out as a war to protect the rights of property owners.

And so the interesting thing is our textbooks say, you know, the American Revolution was about bringing democracy.

Democracy is not an object of the American Revolution.

It's a consequence of it because those people, as Washington himself said so movingly, it is a standing miracle.

that that army stayed together and did it.

And that's what impresses the French.

And that's what impresses the world is that.

And in Johann Ewald, who we follow and it says, who would have thought a century ago that out of this multitude of rabble, he's dismissive of them, could come a people who could defy kings.

I've always thought of another way of saying DEI as E Pluribus Unum.