The New York Academy of Medicine Library<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nOne of Ken Burns\u2019 favorite figures in his documentary is a teenager that \u201ceven a lot of historians aren\u2019t familiar with,\u201d Burns told the Post.<\/p>\n
Greenwood, who\u2019s voiced in Burns\u2019 doc by \u201cStranger Things\u201d actor Joe Keery, enlisted in 1775 as a fifer. At the time,\u00a0he was just 15 years old and\u00a0too 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.<\/p>\n\n<\/aside>\nHe went on to become Washington\u2019s dentist. The Founding Father was so pleased with Greenwood\u2019s 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. \u201cI mean, you cannot make stuff like this up,\u201d Burns told The Post with a laugh.<\/p>\n
Sarah Osborn: The soldier\u2019s wife who kept the siege moving<\/strong><\/h2>\nSarah Osborn was one of many women who provided vital support to her husband. Wayne County Historical Society<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThe Continental Army didn\u2019t subsist on ration biscuits alone. It survived on women\u2019s uncompensated logistics, the invisible infrastructure that kept men fed, clothed, and functional enough to fight.<\/p>\n
Osborn followed her husband\u2019s regiment and worked through Yorktown\u2019s bombardment \u2014 mending uniforms, hauling supplies, cooking, and nursing, often under fire. When the cannons opened up at Yorktown, she didn\u2019t retreat to safety; she kept the supply lines moving, because somebody still had to get bread to the trenches.<\/p>\n
Without women like Osborn, campaigns stalled. With them, armies held.<\/p>\n
Joseph Plumb Martin: The 15-year-old grunt who chronicled the war from the bottom up<\/strong><\/h2>\nWhen 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\u2019d experience nearly every major battle and hardship of the Revolution, from Brooklyn and White Plains to Valley Forge and Yorktown.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Decades later, at age 70, Martin \u2014 voiced in Burns\u2019 documentary by Alden Ehrenreich \u2014 published what would become the most vivid firsthand account of the Revolutionary War from an enlisted man\u2019s perspective. His 1830 memoir, \u201cA Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier,\u201d chronicled not the grand maneuvers but the grinding misery: the constant hunger, the lice, the casual brutality of camp life.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlmost every one has heard of the soldiers of the Revolution being tracked by the blood of their feet on the frozen ground,\u201d Martin wrote. \u201cThis is literally true; and the thousandth part of their sufferings has not, nor ever will be told.\u201d<\/p>\nJoseph Plumb Martin (not pictured) chronicled the war with his memoir. Everett\/Shutterstock<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nElizabeth \u201cMumbet\u201d Freeman: The woman who sued her way to freedom<\/strong><\/h2>\nIn 1781, an enslaved woman in western Massachusetts listened to the words \u201call men are born free and equal\u201d 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\u2019s ideas.<\/p>\n
Years later, in an 1853 account recorded by novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Freeman said,\u00a0\u201cAny time while I was a slave, if one minute\u2019s 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\u2014just to stand one minute on God\u2019s earth a free woman\u2014I would.\u201d<\/p>\n
Boston King<\/strong>: A loyalist path to liberty<\/h2>\nBoston 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\nKen Burns\u2019 Revolutionary War series premieres Sunday on PBS. Courtesy of PBS<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nJudith Jackson<\/strong>: The mother who paid the ultimate cost for her freedom<\/h2>\nIn 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\u2019d 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\u2019d purchased them from her former enslaver.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 free, but alone. Her child\u2019s fate remains unknown.<\/p>\n
James Forten: From teen prisoner to abolition financier<\/strong><\/h2>\nJames Forten\u2019s efforts show how black agency shaped the young republic. Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nForten, 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<\/em> 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<\/em>.<\/p>\nReleased in a prisoner exchange in 1782, Forten walked home from New York to Philadelphia \u2014 arriving, as one account describes, \u201clean and ragged, with his hair nearly entirely worn from his head.\u201d<\/p>\n
He became an apprentice to sailmaker Robert Bridges and eventually bought the business, building it into one of Philadelphia\u2019s most successful enterprises. By the 1820s, Forten was one of the wealthiest men in the city, employing both black and white workers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s newspaper The Liberator<\/em>. His efforts show how black agency shaped the young republic from the start.<\/p>\nCanassatego: The Native American diplomat who gave Benjamin Franklin big ideas<\/strong><\/h2>\nChief of the Onondaga nation, Canassatego is the film\u2019s 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 \u201cpreserve a strict friendship\u201d with one another, to unite the way the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy had, which made them \u201cformidable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Benjamin Franklin was there, published Canassatego\u2019s 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\u2019t just influence the Revolution, it helped write the playbook.<\/p>\n
The blueprint for American unity had Native fingerprints all over it.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source celebrity.land \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ken Burns\u2019 upcoming six-part, 12-hour documentary \u201cThe American Revolution\u201d doesn\u2019t 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 \u2014 teenagers, women, free black Americans, immigrants, and ne\u2019er-do-wells \u2014 who history usually crops out of the frame. We all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2157636,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25174],"tags":[382390,21741,353975,349110,354420],"class_list":["post-2157635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gossip","tag-american-revolution","tag-entertainment","tag-george-washington","tag-history","tag-ken-burns"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/The-unknown-American-revolutionaries-who-were-almost-lost-to-history.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2157635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2157635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2157635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2157637,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2157635\/revisions\/2157637"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2157636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2157635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2157635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2157635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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