On a glorious June morning at Clermont, the old Livingston estate in Germantown, Jack Kelly sat at a picnic table on the banks of the Hudson River and looked out at a view that, for him, was not merely scenic.
Birds sang. Sunlight moved across the river. Trees rustled in a gentle breeze. Before him stretched one of the most pristine expanses of the Hudson between New York City and Albany: water, forested banks, sky.
“Nothing has changed,” Kelly said, gesturing toward the river.
Of course, almost everything has changed. The country whose birth was argued, improvised and fought for along rivers like this one is now approaching the 250th anniversary of its independence. Across New York and the nation, museums, historic sites and communities are preparing to revisit the Revolution not as marble statuary, but as a human drama: uncertain, violent, radical and unfinished.
That is the Revolution Kelly has spent much of his writing life trying to recover.
Kelly, a local historian who lives in Milan with his wife, graphic artist Joy Taylor, is the author of seven history books, five of them exploring one aspect or another of the American Revolution. His latest, “Tom Paine’s War,” was published earlier this year by St. Martin’s Press. The book turns to one of the founding era’s most incendiary figures: Thomas Paine, the English-born pamphleteer whose words helped move American colonists from grievance toward independence.
Kelly has always been fascinated by military history, and his books reflect that passion. But with Paine, he said, he wanted to widen the lens. This time, “I also wanted to write about what The Revolution meant,” he said, and in that regard “Paine is a key character.”
Paine’s gift was to make the unthinkable feel not only possible, but necessary. In “Common Sense,” published in January 1776, he stripped monarchy of its mystique and made a plainspoken case that Americans should no longer imagine themselves as Britons seeking redress, but as a people capable of governing themselves.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Paine wrote.
Two hundred fifty years later, Kelly remains awed by Paine’s faith in the idea — and then the hard-won reality — of American independence. To loyalists of the day, loving America meant loving the Crown; the two were inextricable. Paine felt otherwise. He had spent the first 37 years of his life in England, a tenure that left him with little reverence for monarchy. He dismissed kings as “crowned ruffians” and called George III “the Royal Brute of Britain.”
For Kelly, Paine’s audacity still matters: the idea that a fragile collection of colonies, divided by interest, geography and temperament, could imagine itself into a nation.
At Clermont, that abstraction becomes local and physical.
It was here, in October 1777, that British forces came ashore intending to break the spirit of local American Patriots. The estate’s owner, Robert R. Livingston, had served on the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence. Wealthy, influential and ardently pro-independence, Livingston had turned his sprawling riverside compound into part of the Revolution’s supply network. Its mills helped produce black powder for rebel muskets.
The British torched the estate, then beat a hasty retreat downriver, never again venturing this far north. Within weeks, the Livingstons had begun to rebuild.
“I’ve always been interested in peak experiences,” Kelly said, ruminating on what has fueled his research and writing over the years.
By that, he means those moments, or episodes, in which an individual feels an intense clarity of purpose, urgency and even destiny. Moments where everything is on the line. War is stacked with such flashpoints. But Kelly’s earliest books were crime novels, often rooted in the past, including a fictionalized account of the Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger.
“What could be more peak than standing in front of a bank teller aiming a gun at the guy’s face?” he said wryly.
Kelly grew up about 20 miles east of Rochester, N.Y., in Ontario, a town named for the lake on which it sits. He studied psychology at Columbia University, then spent three years in Ireland, where he joined a national effort to revive and document the language, stories and traditions of Gaelic Ireland. Back in New York, he worked in business journalism and began writing books.
History had come alive for Kelly. He became interested in the nuts and bolts of past events: how developments came about, what made the march of history possible, and what people believed they were doing before posterity had supplied the meaning.
For a while, Kelly worked with American Heritage, a cornerstone of popular American history writing, and its sister publication, Invention & Technology. It dawned on him that the history of war is also the history of technology: guns, munitions, explosives, supply chains. The subject captivated him.
There is a logical progression from his 2009 book “Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics” to his subsequent volumes “Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America’s Independence,” “Valcour: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty,” and “God Save Benedict Arnold: The True Story of America’s Most Hated Man.”
“Tom Paine’s War” is the natural heir to that lineage. It widens the lens from the battlefield, though never abandoning it, to show how Paine’s radical text helped unite a disparate, hesitant collection of colonists around the cause of independence.
By late 1776, the Revolution was close to ruin. Washington’s army had suffered a string of defeats. Soldiers were freezing, starving and deserting their posts. Enlistments were expiring. The promise of independence had begun to look like a fatal delusion.
With calamity looming, Paine wrote a rallying cry.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” his essay “The American Crisis” begins.
The line is now so familiar that it risks sounding ceremonial. Kelly wants readers to hear it again as a dispatch from catastrophe. Paine was not writing after victory had been secured. He was writing when defeat seemed plausible, perhaps imminent. His words gave voice to dread while refusing surrender.
The essay galvanized the resolve of both the army and the public. Word of it, Kelly tells his readers, “spread like fire in a hay barn.” Within days of the pamphlet’s publication, Washington led his remaining soldiers across the Delaware River and attacked Trenton, a victory that revived the army, restored public confidence and helped prove to European powers that the Americans remained a legitimate force.
Talk about peak experience.
For Kelly, those hinge points are where history is most alive. The Revolution can seem inevitable only because it succeeded. In real time, it was a gamble.
That idea gives “Tom Paine’s War” its contemporary charge. The Revolution was not merely a war against Britain, Kelly’s work suggests. It was an argument over what political life could be.
Six years after Paine’s first “Crisis” essay, the war was won. But that was only the first hurdle. The job of defining the solid core of what this new country actually was, and what it could become, proved fiendishly thorny.
What is a nation without a king as its organizing principle? What binds people together when inherited hierarchy is rejected? Who belongs inside the promise of liberty, and who is left outside it?
“Our Constitution changed the world,” Kelly said, still amazed at the scope of the accomplishment. But the debates over its contents were fierce, he added. “And they remain so today.”
Bringing those messy, human friction points to light is part of what drives Kelly’s work.
“I want to tell a story, not just the facts,” he said.
As a narrative historian, his goal is to lay bare the beating heart of the episodes he reconstructs. His prose is clear, well-paced and often intensely cinematic. In plainspoken language, Paine used the power of the pen to rouse his readers, helping them withstand the undertow of doubt and, later, despair. Kelly uses that same power to pull modern readers back into history’s urgency.
His Revolutionary War books strip away the marble-statue mythology to reveal the living, breathing gamble of 1776.
When he is not researching or writing, Kelly kayaks, rides his bike and tends his backyard garlic patch. And he juggles.
At Clermont, a pod of five black beanbags, each maybe twice the size of a golf ball, spilled out of his backpack and onto the picnic table.
“It’s been a passion of mine for years,” he explained, launching into a tale of the retired Ringling Bros. juggler he apprenticed with decades ago. “For a while I tossed lit torches. I needed a lot of room for that, so I would come down here to practice.”
It is a delightfully apt image: Jack Kelly, war historian and explosives enthusiast, keeping a rotating wheel of fire aloft on the riverside banks of the storied Livingston property.
Kelly has no special plans for this year’s semiquincentennial. Unsurprisingly he has always loved fireworks, and for years he and his wife came out for Saugerties’ 4th of July display. But he plans to skip it this year. He can no longer tolerate the noise.
The explosions, for Kelly, are already on the page.
Wonderful article. I look forward to reading the book.