TOM PAINE'S WAR

How a middle-aged English immigrant’s words kickstarted the American Revolution and sustained it in its darkest days.

The first chapter thrusts us into a minutely detailed account of the Battle of Kips Bay, which forced George Washington to abandon New York City to the British in September 1776. Thomas Paine was among the rebel soldiers who viewed those catastrophic events from their post across the harbor in New Jersey, and historian Kelly rolls back from there to explain how an artisan with bitter personal experience of England’s brutally unfair class system came to America at age 37. Then it’s back to more battles in the fall of 1776 before Part 4 finally gets to Paine’s arrival in 1774 and the publication in January 1776 of his fiery pamphlet Common Sense, which persuaded dissatisfied colonists that what they wanted from Great Britain was not better treatment but independence. It’s an odd way to launch into a gripping soldier’s-eye view of the string of losses that the underequipped, inexperienced American troops experienced in late 1776, climaxing in the loss of two forts in New Jersey and Washington’s retreat west of the Delaware River, followed by a vivid analysis of Paine’s resulting we’re-not-licked-yet manifesto, The American Crisis. Once readers adjust to Kelly’s idiosyncratic organization, however, they will appreciate his ability to convey terrors and uncertainties of people who had no way of knowing how their struggle would turn out. Paine’s firsthand experience of those catastrophic battles gave him the moral authority, Kelly argues persuasively, to urge Americans to fight on. He reminds us that, in an age when many people could not read, Paine’s gift for simple, direct prose made his words equally effective when read aloud. Continuing with his detailed military history, Kelly depicts the reinvigorated patriot army following Washington across the Delaware in a bold gamble to turn crisis into opportunity. It worked, and the revolution would never be in quite such dire straits again.

History as lived in the moment, messy and galvanizing.