Life, Liberty, and the Promise of the American Brand

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 12:35:00 -0800

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In the winter of 1777, a fifteen-year-old Connecticut farm boy named Joseph Plumb Martin was camped with what remained of the Continental Army near Morristown, New Jersey. He hadn’t been paid in months. His shoes had disintegrated. He was surviving on what he later described as “half a day’s allowance of beef for a week.”

Martin would go on to serve the entire war—eight years—and write one of the only surviving enlisted-man memoirs of the Revolution. In his trademark style, Ken Burns uses Martin’s story to thread the needle in his new documentary, The American Revolution. What’s striking about Martin’s account is something more relatable to me than patriotism. It’s his complaining. He complains constantly. About the food, the pay, the officers, the mud, the lice, the boredom, the terror.

Brand Betrayal on The Findings Report

Life, Liberty, and the Promise of the American Brand

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