George Washington, by all accounts, was considered a brilliant tactician on the battlefield.
Even if he was out-thought, and out-fought, by the British that day near Philadelphia.
The Revolutionary War was raging.
Upstart colonists on the other side of the Atlantic and well away from the Crown, wanted to keep it that way.
They preferred to disassociate themselves from British rule altogether, even as they knew the far-flung Empire wasn’t going to go gently.
Which is why the burgeoning Republic took up arms for the cause.
One of its young soldiers was John Kelly, an American by birth who came into the world in 1755, in the then-colony of North Carolina.
He was 19 when he enlisted in the Continental Army. By all accounts, he was good at soldiering.
Kelly eventually found himself in Morgan’s Riflemen, an elite infantry group — think Special Forces, the Colonial version — headed by its namesake, Gen. Daniel Morgan.
The Morgan soldiers used rifles, which were then cutting-edge, over the standard muskets.
Rifles were more accurate, and Morgan’s soldiers fought their war in more stealthy ways, opposed to standing up straight and marching into the enemy, firing away, point-blank, the whole time.
Kelly, like all the young soldiers who followed him in other wars across the generations, was battle-tested when he was barely out of his teens.
Three years after he joined up, he fell on a battlefield, on a date that continues to have reaching implications for every American in the 21st century.
Redcoat underground
It was the Battle of Brandywine.
The year was 1777.
Sept. 11.
Fierce fighting ensued in the glens near Philadelphia that day.
Local Loyalist scouts had tipped Washington’s British counterpart, Sir William Howe, that troops of the Continental Army would be on the move, with plans of intercepting them, so they wouldn’t be able to take the city.
The intelligence enabled Howe to gather another column of soldiers, unseen, who marched arduous miles, in order to loop around for a surprise attack.
A general and future president was caught in the counterintelligence.
Despite fierce fighting, the Continental Army, outnumbered, had to sound the order to retreat.
Around 300 of Washington’s soldiers were killed in the battle. Up to 600 more were wounded, and one of them was John Kelly.
Accounts of his injuries vary, depending upon who was doing the telling, but they all have the same narrative.
He was either shot in the head or back of the neck — and he was quite lucky to be alive.
Which is why his great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Cassie Kelly Tudek, regards fireworks way differently than she used to.
‘I wouldn’t be here’
Don’t get her wrong: Tudek, a teacher at the Monongalia County Technical Education Center and the daughter of longtime county Board of Education member Mike Kelly, loves the Fourth of July display as much as anyone.
It’s the booms and rattles of the patriotic enterprise, she said.
“I think about what that battlefield must have sounded like,” the teacher said.
“And I think about him, wounded on the ground, and not knowing if he was going to live or die. If he had been killed, we wouldn’t be having this conversion, because I wouldn’t be here.”
She grew up hearing stories about her great-grandfather, times six, who served with Washington.
An actual person came into focus, after she and her mother, Margie, dug into the geneology.
Tudek even did some research in the family’s ancestral homeland, when she and her husband went to Ireland for their honeymoon.
Muskingum County isn’t County Cork, but it was the former where they found Kelly’s grave a few years back.
The veteran is buried in a cemetery just outside Zanesville, Ohio, in a grave marked by a Revolutionary War headstone — slightly askew, from the passage of time and the elements.
She made sure to get a photograph of her dad at the marker, along with her brother, Kaleb and her son, Oliver.
Three generations of Kelly men, all in the present day.
Besides the obvious Butterfly Effect implications, she’s glad for his sake that John Kelly lived to tell about it.
Even with that serious wound, he survived the war — and then some.
Homecoming
He went on to Valley Forge with Washington after he recovered from his Brandywine wounds.
After the fighting, he even worked on surveying crews in Kentucky with his former general, who took up his original trade after the war and the White House.
He was 98 years old and the father of nine children when he passed from this mortal coil on June 11, 1853, in Ohio.
His obituary in the local paper referred to him as “a noble specimen of humanity.”
Tudek simply calls him “brave.”
“No matter what generation, war is war,” she said.
“And it’s the young people who go. That’s courage and sacrifice.”
And in the pragmatism of the battlefield, Brandywine turned out to be a moral victory for George Washington, after all.
While the British would take Philadelphia by sundown on that day 246 years ago, it didn’t take down the Colonists.
Like its young soldier Kelly, the Continental Army would live to fight another day.
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