Flatland Explores Local American Revolution History in Light of Latest Burns Documentary

It was 10 p.m. on Veterans Day when the returning service members stepped onto the terrazzo floor between Baggage Carousels 5 and 6.

The veterans, many from the Vietnam War era, were returning to Kansas City International on the return leg of their trip through Honor Flight, the nonprofit that takes veterans on free, day-long visits to Washington, D.C. 

Waiting for them stood 12 area members of the Sons of the American Revolution.

Turned out in tri-corner hats, knickers and buckled shoes, they called out “Welcome home” while one of them played a fife.

Among those vets whose eyes grew watery was Russell Hannah of Harrisonville, Missouri, who returned from Vietnam in 1970.

“When we came home then, we were cussed at and spit on,” Hannah said.

“But this was beautiful.”

Among the SAR members was Darrell Jones, a retired minister from Smithville portraying a colonial clergyman.

“It’s almost like the Founding Fathers are here to welcome these veterans home,” said Jones, adding that the emotions prompted by their presence cannot be disguised.

“You can see it in their countenances,” he said

For Jones and his fellow SAR members, such small ceremonies are the authentic moments when abstract concepts like “freedom” and “liberty” come to life.

SAR, as well as the separate Daughters of the American Revolution, are lineage societies. Members qualify when they can document among their ancestors a “patriot” who served in the Continental Army or assisted in the triumph over British tyranny.

And just as the groups celebrate history, so too does filmmaker Ken Burns in his latest work: “The American Revolution, which debuted Sunday evening on PBS. (See here for local listings.)

Burns’s documentary is long — it runs 12 hours over six episodes.

But it does not match the year-round work of the local American Revolution groups in highlighting a conflict that influenced the growth and development of Kansas City, even though news of the war took years to make it to this part of the country and the main battlefields were far to the south and east.

It was a conflict, too, as local historians note, that raised complicated questions for Native Americans and enslaved Blacks.

SAR chapter members often organize color guards, like the one which greeted the Honor Flight veterans on November 11.

Members of the DAR, meanwhile, perform service projects. 

Last month, on the society’s annual “Day of Service,” members of the Westport Chapter prepared care packages at Heroes Home Gate, a Kansas City transitional living program that provides short-term housing and other support services for veterans.

The revolution’s 250th anniversary is being observed in a divisive time often characterized by charged rhetoric involving the future of democracy. 

Members of local Sons or Daughters chapters say they remain focused on honoring Revolutionary War patriots.

“We focus on their sacrifice,” said Bryan Wampler, a Lenexa SAR member who is serving as secretary of Kansas 250, the state anniversary commission.

“The Daughters of the American Revolution is a specifically nonpartisan and nonpolitical service organization,” added Julia Jackson, regent of the DAR’s Westport Chapter.

“We have nearly 190,000 members in 3,000 chapters across the world, and while I’m sure there is a full breadth of personal viewpoints among our members, the discussion of politics is explicitly prohibited.”

Approximately 217,000 individual service members served in the American Revolutionary War between 1775 and 1783, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Of the 577 patriots interred in Missouri, the graves of 27 — bearing names such as Isaac, Jeremiah, Ledstone and Nathaniel — can be found in the immediate Kansas City area, according to a database compiled by a Missouri SAR member.

There is one Elizabeth. 

And, in Kansas, there is a Sarah, honored in 2019 by Kansas SAR members.

It’s possible that neither Elizabeth Duncan Porter nor Sarah Ruddell Davis shouldered a musket against the British.

Both, however, were taken prisoner by the British and the Native American tribe members allied with them, forced to march hundreds of miles into captivity, and held for several years.

Upon her release, Sarah married Thomas Davis, another prisoner, and with him came to Missouri.

Upon her husband’s 1837 death, Davis moved to Kansas to live near a daughter, Sarah T. Johnson, wife of Thomas Johnson, operator of the Shawnee Indian Mission and the namesake of Johnson County. 

She died in 1865 and today her grave can be found in the small cemetery adjacent to Shawnee Mission Parkway in Fairway, Kansas.

In April, Missouri SAR chapters gathered at Kansas City’s Union Cemetery to honor Porter, who died in Jackson County in 1845. DAR members commemorated her gravesite in 2008.

These ceremonies were timely.

In 2020, the DAR launched the E Pluribus Unum Educational Initiative to increase awareness of women, as well as African Americans, Native Americans and those of mixed heritage who played roles in the revolution, Jackson said.

The initiative website includes thumbnail descriptions of individuals whose patriotic actions often are detailed alongside supporting documents and sometimes reproductions of 19th oil-on-canvas paintings. 

William Lee, an enslaved person who served as personal valet to George Washington, is thought to be the person of color visible in the background of a 1780 portrait of Washington by artist John Trumbull.

“The DAR is committed to telling the stories of those patriots who have been left out of the pages of history,” Jackson said.

Jackson has proved her connection to three patriots, among them James Woods, commissioned a Continental Army colonel in November, 1776, four months after the signing of the Declaration Of Independence.

“I like to believe that if we know the names of these patriots and learn their stories, they are not entirely forgotten,” Jackson said.

Ivan Stull of the SAR Harry S. Truman Chapter has documented two patriots among his ancestors. But he has been stymied in his attempts to document his connection to Laban Landon.

George Washington selected Landon, then serving in a New Jersey regiment, to serve as his bodyguard.

There is, however, a break in the documentation between Stull’s third and fourth great-grandparents.

“I have yet to find that piece of paper,” Stull said. 

But he continues to look and why not, considering the stories handed down about Landon?

“Washington looked him in the eye and said ‘How about you?’ ’’ Stull said. “That’s a close connection to Washington, and he was my fifth great grandfather.”

Wampler has documented his connection to five patriots. Among them is John Edwards, who enlisted as a teenager and served as a drummer for Pennsylvania regiments.

He and his SAR colleagues, Wampler said, seek to honor the sacrifices of their ancestor patriots. 

But there were several kinds of sacrifice, Wampler added. There were those made in resisting tyranny, and those made in just getting through the day in the no-antiobiotics, late 18th-century America.

“You look at how they had to live,” Wampler said. “Just securing food and finding shelter. Today we think about how important it is to get insulation that is rated R-30.

“The very best day in the lives of our patriot ancestors would be for us the worst day in our lives.”

St. Louis gets the news

The westernmost major battle of the Revolutionary War took place in what would become the state of Missouri.

The British lost.

The 1780 defeat of British troops and members of several Native American tribes by Spanish troops affected nothing immediately in what is now Kansas City. 

But the engagement between forces representing the empires then struggling for control of the American West – followed by the British surrender in 1781 – influenced the decision of the French fur-trading Chouteau family to establish in the early 1820s an outpost near the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers that would become Kansas City.

News of the Declaration had taken time to get around.

Residents of St. Louis didn’t learn of the Declaration until the 1778 arrival of George Rogers Clark, a frontier military leader who, acting on directions from Virginia Governor Patrick Henry, captured the British outpost in Kaskaskia in what is now Illinois.

The ongoing hostilities disrupted trade, and in 1779 Auguste Chouteau, the fur-trading family’s patriarch, headed south to New Orleans to secure trade goods.

“When he got there he found out that Spain, which then was controlling the upper Louisiana area which included St. Louis, had just declared war on Britain,” said William E. Foley, University of Central Missouri history professor emeritus.

The Chouteaus prospered for decades after the British surrender, expanding their fur-trading empire.

In 1821 Francois Chouteau, a nephew of Auguste, with his wife Berenice, established a trading post near where the Missouri and Kansas rivers met.

The family’s influence, Foley said, “continued unabated under the aegis of the United States and was instrumental in the subsequent founding of Kansas City.”

An estimated 15,000 African Americans fought with the British, responding to promises made to them, said George Pettigrew of Kansas City, chair of the Frontier Museum of the U.S. Army Foundation, now partnering with the Army to establish a new museum at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

“The British said ‘We will give you your freedom, we will pay you, and we will relocate you out of this country if you wish,’ “ Pettigrew said.

“The patriots didn’t promise that.”

Such assurances were rendered moot by the 1781 British surrender. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris the British agreed to return property taken from the colonials, Pettigrew said.

“That property included people.”

It’s only been in recent memory, he added, that many now believe a person of color can be seen handling an oar just to the right of George Washington in the iconic painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” rendered by artist Emanuel Leutze in 1851.

“There have been lots of stories we have chosen to ignore if they don’t fit that narrative that has been part of America for so long – that African Americans don’t have value, we are not worthy, we are not capable,” Pettigrew said.

But the African Americans who fought with Continental Army soldiers shared many of the same goals, added Donna Rae Pearson, a curator at the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka.

“The colonists were making of Britain the same demands that Blacks were making about representation and securing their own rights,” she said.

“In an interesting way, they were fighting the same war.”

The highly public dialogue about liberty resonated within the African American community, Pearson added, with figures emerging with their own action plans.

In 1775 Prince Hall, a free Black man in Boston, with others founded Prince Hall Freemasonry, the oldest African American fraternal order in the country.

In 1816 Richard Allen established the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Black denomination in the United States.

“Both of those were what we today would call social justice movements,” Pearson said.

In 1852 orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered an Independence Day address that articulated how the promises of freedom made during the Revolution remained unfulfilled for African Americans.

“The Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” Douglass said in Rochester, New York. “You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

Such plain speaking, Pearson said, “would set the stage for the Civil War.”

Not victims or bystanders

Last month the New York Times declared the “centrality” of Native Americans during the war to be the most “eye-opening” aspect of Burns’ documentary.

“They are presented not as victims or bystanders, but as members of powerful nations faced with complex choices about how to defend their own liberty,” the Times said.

The Native American legacy from the Revolutionary War is complicated, said Angela Montgomery of Shawnee, Kansas, a Citizen Potawatomi Nation member. 

This summer, as a member of a Johnson County Parks and Recreation public art selection committee, Montgomery helped dedicate the “Fire Keepers Circle” in Heritage Park in Olathe, Kansas. 

The sculpture marked the spot that some 800 Potawatomi tribe members reached near the end of the “Trail of Death” march of 1838. Forty-two Potawatomi died during the 660-mile slog from Indiana.

Some factions of the Potawatomi tribe had entered into an alliance with the British during the Revolutionary War.

“It was tricky, with a lot of moving parts,” said Montgomery of the options the Potawatomi faced.

“They were trying to make the best choices they could.”

After the British surrender in 1781, the federal government often proved hostile to Potawatomi interests. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson – who as a teenager had been taken prisoner by the British – signed the Indian Removal Act.

“This was a plan to eliminate the Indians both physically and spiritually,” said Montgomery, who in 2023 traveled the Trail of Death’s path.

“There was never a plan to live among the Indians — just a plan to get them out of the way or assimilate them, so they would behave and live in a more colonized manner.”

Consider Montgomery curious to see how the documentary presents the Native American perspective.

“I learn new things all the time,” she said. “I always try to keep an open mind.”

Flatland contributor Brian Burnes is a Kansas City area writer.