Henry Knox
Henry Knox was an American military officer, politician, bookseller, and a Founding Father of the United States. Knox, born in Boston, became a senior general of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, serving as chief of artillery in all of George Washington's campaigns. Following the war, he oversaw the War Department under the Articles of Confederation from 1785 to 1789. Washington appointed him the nation's first secretary of war, a position which he held from 1789 to 1794. He is well known today as the namesake of Fort Knox in Kentucky, which is often conflated with the adjacent United States Bullion Depository.
Knox was born and raised in Boston where he owned and operated a bookstore, cultivating an interest in military history and joining a local artillery company. He was also on the scene of the 1770 Boston Massacre. He was barely 25 when the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, but he engineered the transport of what became the "noble train of artillery", British ordnance captured from Fort Ticonderoga in New York, which proved decisive in the British evacuation of Boston in early 1776. Knox quickly rose to become the chief artillery officer of the Continental Army. In this role, he accompanied Washington on all of his campaigns and was engaged in the major actions of the war. He established training centers for artillerymen and manufacturing facilities for weaponry that were valuable assets in winning the war for independence.
Knox saw himself as the embodiment of revolutionary republican ideals. In early 1783, as the war drew to a close, he initiated the concept of the Society of the Cincinnati, authoring its founding document and establishing the organization as a fraternal, hereditary society of veteran officers that survives to this day.
In 1785, the Congress of the Confederation appointed Knox as Secretary of War, where he dealt primarily with Indian affairs. Following the adoption of the United States Constitution in 1789, he became President Washington's Secretary of War. In this role he oversaw the development of coastal fortifications, worked to improve the preparedness of local militia, and directed the nation's military operations in the Northwest Indian War. He was formally responsible for the nation's relationship with the Indian population in the territories that it claimed, articulating a policy which established federal government supremacy over the states in relation to Indian nations and calling for treating Indian nations as sovereign. Knox's idealistic views on the subject were frustrated by ongoing illegal settlements and fraudulent land transfers of Indian lands. He retired to Thomaston, District of Maine, in 1795, where he oversaw the rise of many inventive business ventures built on borrowed money. He died in 1806 just as his financial situation began to reverse.
Early life and marriage
Henry Knox's parents, William and Mary, were Ulster Scots immigrants who emigrated from Derry to Boston in 1729. His father was a shipbuilder who, due to financial reverses, left the family for Sint Eustatius in the West Indies where he died in 1762 of unknown causes.Henry was admitted to the Boston Latin School, where he studied Greek, Latin, arithmetic, and European history. Since he was the oldest son still at home when his father died, he left school at the age of 9 and became a clerk in a bookstore to support his mother. The shop's owner, Nicholas Bowes, became a surrogate father figure for the boy, allowing him to browse the store's shelves and take home any volume that he wanted to read. The inquisitive future war hero, when he was not running errands, taught himself French, learned some philosophy and advanced mathematics, and devoured tales of ancient warriors and famous battles. He immersed himself in literature from a tender age. However, Knox was also involved in Boston's street gangs, becoming one of the toughest fighters in his neighborhood. Impressed by a military demonstration, at 18, he joined a local artillery company called The Train.
Image:1771 HenryKnox BostonNewsLetter Aug15.png|thumb|left|upright|Newspaper advertisement for Knox's bookshop, Boston, 1771
On March 5, 1770, Knox was a witness to the Boston Massacre. According to his affidavit, he attempted to defuse the situation, trying to convince the British soldiers to return to their quarters. He also testified at the trials of the soldiers, in which all but two were acquitted. In 1771 he opened his own bookshop, the London Book Store, in Boston "opposite William's Court in Cornhill." The store was, in the words of a contemporary, a "great resort for the British officers and Tory ladies, who were the ton at that period." Boasting an impressive selection of excellent English products and managed by a friendly proprietor, it quickly became a popular destination for the aristocrats of Boston. As a bookseller, Knox built strong business ties with British suppliers and developed relationships with his customers, but retained his childhood aspirations. Largely self-educated, he stocked books on military science, and also questioned soldiers who frequented his shop in military matters. Knox initially enjoyed reasonable pecuniary success, but his profits slumped after the Boston Port Bill and subsequent citywide boycott of British goods. In 1772 he cofounded the Boston Grenadier Corps as an offshoot of The Train, and served as its second in command. Shortly before his 23rd birthday Knox accidentally discharged a gun, shooting two fingers off his left hand. He managed to bind the wound up and reach a doctor, who sewed the wound up.
Knox supported the Sons of Liberty, an organization of agitators opposed to unpopular polices of the British Parliament. It is unknown if he participated in the 1773 Boston Tea Party, but he did serve on guard duty before the incident to make sure no tea was unloaded from the Dartmouth, one of the ships involved. The next year he refused a consignment of tea sent to him by James Rivington, a Loyalist in New York.
At 24 years old, Henry married the well-educated Lucy Flucker, the 18 year-old daughter of wealthy Boston Loyalists, on June 16, 1774, despite opposition from her father, who had differing political views. Lucy was an avid reader and the couple met in 1773 at Henry's bookshop. Her brother served in the British Army, and Lucy's family attempted to persuade Knox to join the Army as well. Lucy's Tory parents disowned her when she married Henry. Despite long separations due to his military service, the couple were devoted to one another for the rest of his life, and carried on an extensive correspondence. After the couple fled Boston in 1775, she remained essentially homeless until the British evacuated the city in March 1776. Even afterward, she often traveled to visit Knox in the field. Lucy never saw her estranged parents again after they left, never to return, with the British during their withdrawal from Boston after the Continental Army fortified Dorchester Heights, a success that hinged upon Knox's Ticonderoga expedition. The couple had 13 children but only 3 survived to adulthood.
Military career
Siege of Boston
The war broke out with the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Knox and Lucy snuck out of Boston, and he joined the militia army besieging the city. His abandoned bookshop was looted and all of its stock destroyed or stolen. He served under General Artemas Ward, putting his acquired engineering skills to use developing fortifications around the city. He directed American cannon fire at the Battle of Bunker Hill. General George Washington arrived in July 1775 to take command of the army, and he was impressed by the work that Knox had done. The two also immediately developed a liking for one another, and Knox began to interact regularly with Washington and the other generals of the developing Continental Army. Knox did not have a commission in the army, but John Adams in particular worked in the Second Continental Congress to acquire a commission for him as colonel of the army's artillery regiment. Knox bolstered his own case by writing to Adams that Richard Gridley, the older leader of the artillery under Ward, was disliked by his men and in poor health.Image:Siegeofbostonartillery.jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|left|An ox team hauls cannon toward Boston as part of the 1775-76 "Noble train of artillery"
As the siege wore on, the idea arose that cannon recently captured at the fall of forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point in upstate New York could have a decisive impact on its outcome. Knox is generally credited with suggesting the prospect to Washington, who thereupon put him in charge of an expedition to retrieve them even though Knox's commission had not yet arrived. Reaching Ticonderoga on December 5, Knox commenced what came to be known as the noble train of artillery, hauling 60 tons of cannon and other armaments by horse-drawn and ox-drawn sleds across some of ice-covered rivers and snow-draped Berkshire Mountains to the Boston siege camps.
The region was lightly populated and Knox had to overcome difficulties hiring personnel and draft animals. On several occasions, cannon crashed through the ice on river crossings, but the detail's men were always able to recover them. In the end, what Knox had expected to take just two weeks actually took more than six, and he was finally able to report the arrival of the weapons train to Washington on January 27, 1776. Historian Victor Brooks writes that this was "one of the most stupendous feats of logistics" of the entire war, and Knox's effort is commemorated by a series of plaques marking the Henry Knox Trail in New York and Massachusetts.
The cannon were immediately deployed to fortify the Dorchester Heights recently taken by Washington. The battery's position over Boston harbor led the British to evacuate Boston for Halifax, Nova Scotia. With the siege ended, Knox undertook the improvement of defenses in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York in anticipation of a possible British assault. In New York he became friends with Alexander Hamilton, commander of the local artillery. He also established a close friendship with Massachusetts general Benjamin Lincoln.