Ken Burns’ upcoming six-part, 12-hour documentary “The American Revolution” doesn’t just tell the story of icons like George Washington or Benjamin Franklin. The series, which premieres Sunday on PBS, brings to life the ordinary people — teenagers, women, free black Americans, immigrants, and ne’er-do-wells — who history usually crops out of the frame.
We all know the headliners of the Revolution. We’ve seen them haloed in oil paint, read about them in thousand-page biographies, and even watched them rap on Broadway. It’s startling that, 250 years later, there are still major players we don’t know. Get to know eight of them.
John Greenwood: The teenage fifer who became Washington’s dentist
One of Ken Burns’ favorite figures in his documentary is a teenager that “even a lot of historians aren’t familiar with,” Burns told the Post.
Greenwood, who’s voiced in Burns’ doc by “Stranger Things” actor Joe Keery, enlisted in 1775 as a fifer. At the time, he was just 15 years old and too young for a musket, but old enough to keep exhausted soldiers in step by playing his flute. He crossed the Delaware River with Washington for the surprise attack on Trenton, and when he finally staggered home from the winter campaigns, he was so infested with lice his father baked his clothes in the oven.
He went on to become Washington’s dentist. The Founding Father was so pleased with Greenwood’s work that he gifted him his last remaining tooth, a relic you can still see today at the New York Academy of Medicine on the Upper East Side. “I mean, you cannot make stuff like this up,” Burns told The Post with a laugh.
Sarah Osborn: The soldier’s wife who kept the siege moving
The Continental Army didn’t subsist on ration biscuits alone. It survived on women’s uncompensated logistics, the invisible infrastructure that kept men fed, clothed, and functional enough to fight.
Osborn followed her husband’s regiment and worked through Yorktown’s bombardment — mending uniforms, hauling supplies, cooking, and nursing, often under fire. When the cannons opened up at Yorktown, she didn’t retreat to safety; she kept the supply lines moving, because somebody still had to get bread to the trenches.
Without women like Osborn, campaigns stalled. With them, armies held.
Joseph Plumb Martin: The 15-year-old grunt who chronicled the war from the bottom up
When Martin enlisted in the Connecticut militia in 1776, the teen was too young to vote but old enough to die. Over the next seven years, he’d experience nearly every major battle and hardship of the Revolution, from Brooklyn and White Plains to Valley Forge and Yorktown.
Decades later, at age 70, Martin — voiced in Burns’ documentary by Alden Ehrenreich — published what would become the most vivid firsthand account of the Revolutionary War from an enlisted man’s perspective. His 1830 memoir, “A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier,” chronicled not the grand maneuvers but the grinding misery: the constant hunger, the lice, the casual brutality of camp life.
“Almost every one has heard of the soldiers of the Revolution being tracked by the blood of their feet on the frozen ground,” Martin wrote. “This is literally true; and the thousandth part of their sufferings has not, nor ever will be told.”
Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman: The woman who sued her way to freedom
In 1781, an enslaved woman in western Massachusetts listened to the words “all men are born free and equal” and dared to apply them to herself. Freeman sued for her freedom, won and helped set in motion the rulings that effectively ended slavery in the Commonwealth. The series treats her case not as a postscript but as a frontline of the Revolution’s ideas.
Years later, in an 1853 account recorded by novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Freeman said, “Any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman—I would.”
Boston King: A loyalist path to liberty
Boston King (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) was born enslaved in South Carolina around 1760. When British forces captured Charleston in 1780, King fled to join them, gaining his freedom. He served the British army, married fellow refugee Violet, and was evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783 as part of the massive Black Loyalist exodus.
In Nova Scotia, King became a Methodist minister and later emigrated to Sierra Leone, where he became the first Methodist missionary in Africa. He published his autobiography in 1798, one of only three memoirs by Black Nova Scotians.
Judith Jackson: The mother who paid the ultimate cost for her freedom
In May 1779, when British forces raided Norfolk, Virginia, Jackson fled her enslaver with her six-year-old child, joining over 500 other Black refugees who escaped during the raid. She found work with the British Royal Artillery, washing and ironing for officers, and attained the freedom she’d risked everything for. But in August 1783, as evacuation ships prepared to depart for Nova Scotia, a white Loyalist forcibly removed Jackson and her then 10-year-old daughter from their vessel, claiming he’d purchased them from her former enslaver.
At a Board of Inquiry held at Fraunces Tavern in Manhattan, Jackson fought back and won her case. But the price was devastating: she had to leave her daughter behind. Records show that a year later, Jackson headed a household in Birchtown, Nova Scotia — free, but alone. Her child’s fate remains unknown.
James Forten: From teen prisoner to abolition financier
Forten, a free black teenager from Philadelphia (voiced by Morgan Freeman), was shipped out at age 14 as a powder boy on the privateer Royal Louis in 1780. When the ship was captured, he became a British prisoner of war and spent seven months on the notorious prison ship HMS Jersey.
Released in a prisoner exchange in 1782, Forten walked home from New York to Philadelphia — arriving, as one account describes, “lean and ragged, with his hair nearly entirely worn from his head.”
He became an apprentice to sailmaker Robert Bridges and eventually bought the business, building it into one of Philadelphia’s most successful enterprises. By the 1820s, Forten was one of the wealthiest men in the city, employing both black and white workers.
He used his fortune to support abolition, funding at least six abolitionist organizations, purchasing freedom for countless enslaved people, and helping to finance William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator. His efforts show how black agency shaped the young republic from the start.
Canassatego: The Native American diplomat who gave Benjamin Franklin big ideas
Chief of the Onondaga nation, Canassatego is the film’s answer to anyone who thinks American democracy was purely a European invention. At the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster, he told the squabbling British colonies to “preserve a strict friendship” with one another, to unite the way the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy had, which made them “formidable.”
Benjamin Franklin was there, published Canassatego’s words, and clearly took notes. By 1751, Franklin was writing about the Haudenosaunee model. By 1754, his Albany Plan of Union was borrowing directly from Iroquois principles. Indigenous political thought didn’t just influence the Revolution, it helped write the playbook.
The blueprint for American unity had Native fingerprints all over it.
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