Before There Was A USA - These United Colonies

It started with a skirmish on a village green in Massachusetts that nobody planned and nobody won. It ended with the most consequential document in American history. Everything in between was doubt, heartbreak, and near disaster. Episode 11 of this 1955 television series — These United Colonies — is the dramatic climax of the series. Father John Francis Bannon of Saint Louis University carries the story from the first shots fired at Lexington and Concord through the grinding, uncertain years of the Revolutionary War to the moment Britain officially recognised the United States of America in 1783. What Bannon makes bracingly clear is how close it came to going the other way. The Continental Army was perpetually underfunded, undersupplied, and on the verge of collapse. Washington lost more battles than he won. The colonial population was deeply divided — a significant portion remained loyal to the Crown throughout the war. Foreign intervention from France, secured largely through Benjamin Franklin's diplomatic genius in Paris, may have been the single factor that tipped the balance. But Bannon also reaches deeper than the battlefield. He examines the internal contradictions that haunted the revolution from its first days — the tension between the soaring language of liberty in the Declaration of Independence and the institution of slavery that roughly a third of the signatories personally depended upon. The independence being fought for was, from the beginning, an incomplete and contested thing. The main chapters of American history, as Bannon puts it, were still to follow. This is the episode where colonial history ends and American history begins.