The promise of America: Founding Fathers didnt just make liberty a democratic claim they expected we would continue their argument

There’s a moment in our film “The American Revolution” when the historian Jane Kamensky, now president of Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, reflects on the lasting meaning of the war: “Everybody, on every side, including people denied even the ownership of themselves, had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.”That line captures something essential about the Revolution that can get lost beneath the familiar portraits and marble monuments.The Revolution was not only a war for independence but also an argument about possibility — who counted, who belonged, and whether so-called ordinary people could claim ownership over their own lives and their own future.In 1776, citizenship itself was a radical idea.

Most human beings in history had been subjects.On the eastern edge of British North America, a group of imperfect, ambitious, often contradictory people began to imagine something different: that legitimacy might flow upward from the people rather than downward from a throne.At first, of course, that promise applied only to a narrow few, mostly white men with property.

But once the language of liberty entered the world, it could not be contained, especially as more and more people were called up to fight and support the war. As the war was fought and won, as much by so-called ordinary people — teenagers and those who didn’t own property — who knew they were as deserving of the blessings of liberty as the elites meeting in Philadelphia.That is the unfinished genius of the American founding.It created this sense of possibility for more and more people, a standard larger than the people who first proclaimed it.No figure embodies that sense of American possibility more fully than Benjamin Franklin.Without George Washington, as historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Christopher Brown told me and my collaborators in our film, there is no US.

He is the indispensable man of the Revolution.But if anyone shares that title, it is Franklin.Fra...