Ken Burns

And yet, if you tell a complicated narrative that goes, yep, this is who they were.

And sometimes, as Wynton Marsalis said to us in our jazz series, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time.

We don't understand that in our friendships and our loves and our relationships and stuff, but we don't apply it to our politics because everything's binary.

Everything's one thing, my way or the highway, or it's red state or blue state, or it's

On or off.

It's like the same in our computer world.

It's either a one or a zero and doesn't work like that.

It's a human thing, you know, that you've got this cause and it's really improbable that you have

so-called ordinary people that don't have any property that are fighting for an idea of liberty, of freedom, of equality.

What the hell does that mean?

And then, of course, they're having to deal with it various times and occupying

army, which always does bad things.

It loots, it forages, it steals crops, it rapes women, it destroys houses, it breaks your china, all of those things which create resentment.

And John Adams is realizing that the kind of supercharged combination of both cause and fury is what is going to animate

The reaction is true, particularly in New Jersey and South Carolina, where the fighting is so bloody and it is citizen to citizen, loyalists killing patriots, patriots killing loyalists, and not just set pieces of battles.

What you find is this great animus that comes from people not only—

dedicated to an idea.

A lot of people are dedicated to the ideas and disappear when the first shots are fired or disappear when their crops need to be planted or harvested.

But this revolution begun by property men to protect their property and their rights suddenly get blown into natural rights, talking about things that all human beings have, which means

enslaved people and Native Americans and women and people on the margins, as the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk says in our film, they're deeply influenced by the Declaration.