Lucy Worsley Uncovers America’s Biggest Myths | Compilation | BBC Timestamp

0:00 In 1775, the rebels were stockpiling guns and ammunition.

0:05 They were getting ready for war, but the British were onto them.

0:10 British troops were ordered to go to seize and destroy

0:14 weapons that were being stored in the Massachusetts towns of Lexington

0:20 [music] and Concord.

0:21 The American patriots got wind of the British plan,

0:25 so they set up a signaling system.

0:30 When the British mobilized,

0:32 lanterns would appear in the [music] tower of the North Church here in Boston.

0:39 One lantern meant that the British were marching to Concord.

0:43 Two meant that they [music] were traveling by boat.

0:48 At the signal, a patriot would ride

0:50 through the countryside to alert the local militia.

0:55 Paul Revere was a local craftsman.

0:58 That night, [music] he would become a folk hero.

1:03 Paul Revere is celebrated as the single courageous hero who rode

1:10 through the night to warn the Americans that the British were coming.

1:14 But this is actually something of a fib.

1:20 [music]

1:19 And it was all cooked up by one of America's greatest poets.

1:26 [music] In 1860, 85 years after the event,

1:29 [music] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a stirring poem about Revere's ride.

1:37 It's been learned by generations of American school kids.

1:43 [music]

1:43 Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

1:48 Listen, my children,

1:49 and you shall hear [music] of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

1:53 But the poem isn't the only version of the story.

1:56 Revere himself described his ride in a statement

1:59 [music] made soon after the event.

2:03 He then wrote a more elaborate version 23 years later.

2:08 In each retelling of the story, though,

2:11 events become more dramatic and Revere takes a different route.

2:18 In the poem, Revere sees the signal in the church tower and sets off,

2:23 a lone rider in the moonlit night.

2:27 The fate of history is in one man's hands.

2:32 But according to Revere's own account, there's a second rider, Mr.

2:37 Dawes.

2:39 Revere rode north of the British route to avoid discovery,

2:43 while Dawes rode to the south of it.

2:46 After stopping at Lexington to warn rebel leaders,

2:50 they then headed towards Concord with a third man.

2:55 But poetry prefers a solitary hero, David taking on Goliath.

3:01 Longfellow's poem takes Paul Revere, the lone hero,

3:06 step by step through the Massachusetts countryside.

3:10 By 1:00 a.m., he reaches Lexington.

3:12 2:00 a.m., he gets to Concord.

3:15 Hooray, he's in time to wake the sleeping locals.

3:18 Mission accomplished.

3:23 Now, here's a funny thing.

3:25 If you look at Revere's own accounts, this is one of them,

3:29 you discover that he never actually made it to Concord that night,

3:34 because after leaving Lexington, he was captured by the British.

3:39 In reality, it was the third rider who

3:42 warned Concord that the British were on the march.

3:47 But Longfellow's poetic version guaranteed a place in history for Paul Revere.

3:59 [music] The morning after Revere's ride,

4:01 the local militia in Lexington were ready and waiting for the British.

4:07 But the British army overwhelmed the rebels.

4:13 [music] A company of British soldiers then marched

4:15 to the bridge in the neighboring town of Concord.

4:19 By the time the British got to the bridge,

4:21 there were 500 militiamen waiting for them on this side, and battle broke out.

4:28 The British had only sent 100 soldiers.

4:31 They were pretty soon outnumbered, overpowered,

4:34 and they began to retreat back towards Boston.

4:37 But the Americans didn't have enough arms

4:40 and ammunition to win a war by themselves.

4:43 So, to get rid of one king,

4:45 they turned for help to another, King Louis the 16th of France.

4:53 Within a week of signing the Declaration of Independence,

4:56 the American revolutionaries sent a copy [music] to the French monarch.

5:01 The British were France's greatest enemy.

5:08 In 1756, Britain and France had gone to war over territories in North America.

5:15 This became known as the Seven Years' War.

5:19 It was a battle for imperial supremacy, but the British came out on top.

5:28 And the French weren't happy about it.

5:31 France lost all of its Canadian colonies to Britain,

5:34 as well as parts of the Caribbean.

5:37 And all they had to show for their efforts was crippling debt.

5:45 Imperial France saw the American War of Independence

5:49 as the chance to get its revenge.

5:53 In 1776, it [music] began smuggling arms to support the patriot cause.

5:59 Then in 1778, [music] the French joins the United States as official allies.

6:06 The main thing that changed was the introduction

6:09 of the French navy [music] into the force.

6:11 The British were were always dependent upon

6:13 their navy to keep themselves supplied from London,

6:16 to move troops uh around from place to place,

6:20 and with the French navy now on American shores, all of that was cut off.

6:24 Britannia no longer ruled the waves, and for them,

6:28 it changed the uh completely the nature of the war.

6:31 Do you think that America could have won without this help from France?

6:37 No, absolutely not.

6:38 America could never have won the war without France.

6:41 This is not the story of the plucky little Americans with their muskets

6:44 and their plows going out and having

6:46 a go against the mighty evil British, is it?

6:49 And it never was true, and it was never a good fit.

6:52 Um the Americans uh could never have

6:55 uh brought themselves up by their own bootstraps.

6:57 In fact, the real story of the American Revolution is

7:01 that the United States became the centerpiece of an international coalition,

7:06 which together fought to achieve a common purpose, to defeat a common adversary.

7:14 The last major land battle of the Revolutionary War was in 1781.

7:21 In Yorktown, [music] Virginia, the British surrendered to George Washington's

7:25 army of American and French troops.

7:30 But the decisive role of Imperial France

7:33 in the American victory was very quickly played down.

7:38 The war was over, yet the battle to control

7:42 the story of the revolution was just getting started.

7:49 [music] The early histories of the revolution told the story

7:53 almost as a morality tale with good triumphing.

7:58 And that's because the new nation was still finding its feet.

8:02 It needed stability and purpose.

8:05 Meanwhile, the French, well,

8:07 they were now having a violent revolution of their own.

8:11 They were busy chopping each other's heads off.

8:16 [music] Emerson wrote his Concord Hymn in 1837.

8:19 By this time, Americans saw themselves as triumphant underdogs.

8:24 His embattled farmers were celebrated in poetry set to the tune of an old song.

8:32 [singing] The revolution was becoming remembered as a sacred story

8:40 outlining America's God-given destiny to lead others towards liberty.

8:48 [singing] In the 1840s, its conquest of Mexican and Native American

8:51 territory was presented as the divine destiny of an exceptional nation.

8:58 The idea that um we controlled our own destiny did not fit very well

9:02 with the idea that we depended upon European

9:04 power to support um our uh our birth.

9:08 And so, that part of the story became left out over time.

9:14 [singing] In the first half of the 19th century,

9:20 the nation's patriotism was growing ever stronger.

9:24 People were eager to tell stories of America's revolutionary heroes.

9:31 [music] Slavery is the thing that the entire

9:35 American economy at this point really rests.

9:37 The number of slaves in the South will grow from approximately about 800,000

9:42 in 1790 up to 4 million by the time of the Civil War.

9:46 Slaves themselves were were worth more than they had ever been.

9:49 A prime field hand male was worth

9:51 somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars.

9:54 So, if you do the math by today's numbers,

9:57 it's anywhere between two and nine trillion dollars.

10:01 Slaves and slavery was worth more than all of the factories, [snorts]

10:07 all of the warehouses, all of the railroads,

10:09 all they of the everything else in the economy in America.

10:13 Slaves dwarfed that.

10:17 Today, the USA has 50 states, but in 1861, there were only 34.

10:24 The Civil War began as a clash between the 19 northern states,

10:28 which had abolished slavery, and 11 southern states,

10:32 whose economy was built on slave labor.

10:38 At the same time, huge areas of the American

10:41 West were just beginning to emerge as new states.

10:48 Would they adopt the economic model of the north or the south?

10:55 Well, the issue in the western territories is whether or not

10:58 slavery is going to be allowed to exist in the west.

11:02 And the question then for the United States is,

11:04 as this territory, which is unorganized now,

11:07 becomes states, will we allow those states to be

11:10 free or will we allow them to be slave?

11:13 The issue is not so much about slavery where it exists,

11:16 but slavery where people want it to exist or not to exist,

11:20 depending on their perspective.

11:22 And there are people who can see that this is going to be

11:24 the powder keg that's going to set this whole [music] sectional conflict off.

11:28 Abraham Lincoln was a Kentucky-born southerner, but in 1860,

11:32 [music] he managed to win the presidential election

11:36 without taking a single state in the south.

11:40 Within two months, 11 southern states broke away

11:43 from the United States and set out to create the Confederacy.

11:49 As tensions rose, they installed their own president, Jefferson Davis,

11:53 [music] in their own White House in Montgomery, Alabama.

11:58 And at 4:30 a.m.

12:00 on the 12th of April, 1861,

12:03 the first shots were fired by Confederate troops [music] at Fort Sumter.

12:09 The war escalated [music] into a brutal conflict.

12:13 At the Battle of Gettysburg alone,

12:16 51,000 men lost their lives in just three days.

12:22 The Confederate forces were fighting for a new American nation.

12:27 So, this flag is what's called the first national flag of the Confederacy.

12:32 You have the original 11 stars of the Confederacy,

12:36 and you have these red and white stripes or bars on it.

12:39 It looks really quite like the stars and stripes.

12:42 Is that deliberate?

12:43 Well, that's part of the problem.

12:44 When you're on the battlefield, it's very hard to tell the difference between

12:48 it and a United States flag, an American flag.

12:51 So, you can't tell who's who?

12:52 You can't tell who's who.

12:53 That prompted the Confederate government to create another flag,

12:57 a flag that would be used in battles.

12:59 And we just happen to have an example of that here as well.

13:03 So, I can see that I've been thinking of the Confederate flag wrongly.

13:08 What I'm actually thinking of is the Confederate battle flag.

13:11 That's correct.

13:12 It is the battle flag.

13:13 So, this is a purely military flag designed to be used by troops in the field.

13:17 This particular flag was in the Battle of Gettysburg.

13:21 You'll notice a lot of the battle damage on it.

13:23 One of the other things you might notice is the number of stars.

13:27 So, that's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

13:32 10 And one's gone missing at the end there, but that's 13.

13:36 There's 13 stars.

13:38 isn't it?

13:38 By the time this flag was created in the fall of 1861,

13:42 the Confederate government had admitted two other slave-holding

13:46 states that never formally seceded from the Union, Kentucky and Missouri.

13:53 Isn't that clever then they were trying to snap up any state

13:56 that showed a flicker of interest in the cause of the Confederacy?

14:00 This is a real case of smoke and mirrors, isn't it?

14:03 Even the flag itself, there's more to it than you think.

14:07 It's not quite telling the straightforward truth.

14:09 It feeds into this this sort of this myth in how

14:12 we understand the the Confederacy and the Civil War to this day.

14:16 Three days later, Lincoln came here to Ford's Theatre to see a show,

14:21 and Booth made good on his promise.

14:23 He got into the theater,

14:25 and he shot the president at close range in the head, shouting,

14:29 "Thus to all tyrants." Lincoln's bleeding body was carried out

14:34 of the theater and across the road and to that house over there.

14:38 He lingered on for 24 hours, and then he died,

14:42 instantly becoming a martyr to the cause of emancipation and the Union.

14:49 Unionists descended into mourning.

14:52 Millions lined the streets as his funeral

14:55 train traveled 1,700 miles across the country,

14:59 finally reaching his burial place in Springfield, Illinois.

15:04 Almost as soon as he was dead,

15:06 images like this one began to appear in the press.

15:09 In memory of Abraham Lincoln, the reward of the just.

15:14 And he's been carried off up to heaven by an angel.

15:18 It's almost as if he's become a religious figure.

15:21 And like Christ himself, he died at Easter.

15:25 The fatal shot was fired on Good Friday.

15:30 Soon after Lincoln's death, Charlotte Scott, a former slave from Virginia,

15:36 gave $5 from her pay packet to begin fundraising for a statue of Lincoln.

15:42 In April, 1876, this photograph of Charlotte was sold to visitors

15:47 at the grand unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington.

15:53 The main speaker at the ceremony was another former slave,

15:56 now a politician and reformer, Frederick Douglass.

16:00 And he began a reassessment of Lincoln's memory.

16:05 Frederick Douglass was at the time arguably

16:09 the most important black man in the country, and he didn't disappoint.

16:14 He very quickly launches into almost a tirade about Lincoln's shortcomings.

16:20 He talks about the fact that Lincoln was preeminently the white man's president.

16:27 That even though he had helped to free enslaved people,

16:32 Lincoln always did what was in the best interest of his race.

16:36 But this man was president when we got our freedom.

16:41 And this is what he did to help us get our freedom.

16:44 So, he's balancing it.

16:46 Was there any criticism of the design itself?

16:50 Yeah, there was tremendous criticism of the design, and rightly so.

16:53 You've got Lincoln towering over this crouching black figure,

16:59 a man who's halfway on his knees.

17:02 He looks like he may be rising, but he's still almost kneeling,

17:06 almost to Lincoln as if Lincoln is a god.

17:09 His chains are being broken, but still he's not quite free.

17:13 And it looks like Lincoln is beckoning him to rise.

17:16 Do you think people were surprised at the time

17:19 to hear words of criticism being spoken at all?

17:22 Lincoln was an anti-slavery man,

17:25 but he was no abolitionist before the Civil War.

17:29 He's someone who believed that slavery was a legitimate institution,

17:35 a constitutionally protected institution.

17:39 And because of that, the federal government could

17:42 not touch that institution where it already existed.

17:46 But he believed that if you contain it, it would die a natural death.

17:50 Might take 200 years, mind you, but it would eventually die out.

17:54 Did Lincoln believe in racial equality?

17:58 Uh it depends upon what time in his life we're talking about.

18:03 In 1858, he was engaged in a series of debates,

18:08 and Lincoln was in an environment where he had to show

18:11 the local people that he was just as anti-black as they were.

18:15 To get their votes.

18:16 To get their votes, absolutely.

18:18 And so, this is what he says to them.

18:21 I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been,

18:25 in favor of bringing about in any way the social

18:28 and political equality of the white and black races.

18:32 And I, as much as any other man,

18:35 is in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

18:40 Woah.

18:41 in 1858, Lincoln is decidedly not for racial equality.

18:47 Not in this statement, but not in reality, either.