Defiant Brides (29 page)

Over the years, compassion for Lucy’s ten ill-fated births increased Henry’s tolerance for his affectionate but prickly wife. One public example occurred as Knox ordered horses prepared for an outing with guests. As they gathered, a groom led Lucy’s horse to the door. Enraged that her horse was saddled when she had no intention of riding, Lucy turned to Knox before their guests and demanded an explanation. When he explained that one of their guests was going to borrow her horse, Lucy protested. At that, the red-faced former general turned to the groom and bellowed, “John, put Mrs. Knox’s horse in the stable and do not take it out again until God Almighty or Mrs. Knox tells you to!”
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Another incident pointed to the couple’s religious differences. One Sunday Knox invited the Reverend Thurston Whiting for dinner, but upon his arrival at Montpelier, Lucy rudely forged ahead and seated herself at the dining table. “Rise, my dear, and the parson will ask a blessing,” Henry asked. Lucy would not budge. Again, Henry repeated his request, but there a smiling Lucy sat. Finally in his most stentorian tones, Henry insisted, “Rise, my dear, the parson is going to ask the blessing!” A third time Lucy refused. Ultimately, the perplexed minister gave his blessing.
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Such scenes, recalled Harrison Gray Otis, who visited Montpelier, rarely fazed him or other guests, for they knew the Knoxes’ “mutual attachment never waned. It was . . . well-known that they frequently differed in opinion upon the current trifles of the day,” but they always reconciled. In large part that was due to Henry, Otis believed, who “showed his generalship by a skillful retreat.”
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Another memorable incident occurred after a large dinner. As Montpelier’s servants removed the soiled tablecloths, Knox asked them to also take the undercloths that protected the table. Lucy, “in an audible voice,” protested. The guests fell silent. Turning to them, Henry drolly announced, “This subject of the undercloth is the only one on which Mrs. Knox and I have differed since our marriage.” What followed was “a general merriment” among the guests.
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Henry’s debts were not as easily resolved. By 1799, his interest payments on loans were so steep that he declared the family could no longer afford to spend winters in Boston. Even so, Montpelier’s hearty patriarch refused to dwell on unhappiness. Even in March 1800, while mourning the December 14 death of his beloved commander, George Washington, he scolded his friend General David Cobb for moroseness. “You mention that your spirits are not good. For God’s sake, bear up against the devil of gloom. Put yourself in motion. Visit even me if you can find nothing better,” Knox urged. “Get Willich, a new author on diet and regimen, but above all, get—on horseback.” Dismissing his own troubles, Knox insisted, “I shall have bright days yet.”
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Being convinced that his life would improve meant that Knox saw no need to limit his hospitality. Even in late autumn, Montpelier hosted guests, “generally . . . eight or ten per day and commonly from five to ten at night,” as Henry noted in November 1801.
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Indeed by then, he had new reasons for optimism. By the 13th of that month, he had reached agreements with those settled on the Waldo Patent’s coastal lands who had either paid mortgages or provided collateral in lieu of cash. “It confirms my judgment of the measures I have pursued,” Knox crowed to his wife. “This you will call vanity. I own it and rejoice therein. . . . The heart . . . has a well founded claim to dance a little. But this [is] between ourselves.”
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Another psychological boost was Knox’s election that fall to the Massachusetts General Court. The only disadvantage of the election was the cost of supporting a temporary residence in Boston. A townhouse rental, he warned Lucy, who was again visiting friends in the city, was too expensive. “A lodging [boarding] house will be execrable, and yet feelings must give way to judgment. In either case, we must be economists.”
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Simultaneously the U.S. Navy had rendered a negative judgment on the Knoxes’ son, whose dissipated behavior ruined his chances for a commission as a lieutenant. At twenty-one, young Henry Jackson Knox continued to behave as wildly as when in his teens—squandering money, drinking excessively, and evading responsibilities. The young man was an embarrassment, a scar upon Knox’s impeccable public image. Denied promotion in the military and ill-suited for business, young Henry would have to depend upon his parents for support. “My mind can find no other employment for him than to make him our companion,” Knox confided to Lucy. “If he gets a wife . . . let him manage a farm . . . with such assistance as his affairs or necessity may require and we can afford.”
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Eighteen months later, on May 17, 1803, young Henry married Eliza Taylor Reed, the eldest daughter of Josiah Reed, Thomaston’s town clerk. Personable and intelligent, Eliza was later described as “faithful in the discharge of her domestic duties and a constant attachment to the moral virtues.”
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Those characteristics may not have been so during the first years of her marriage, though. An innkeeper’s bill of March 1805, from the young couple’s three-week trip to Boston, revealed days of heavy drinking. Upon their return to Maine, the Knoxes’ son announced that life at Montpelier was too quiet for the young couple. “The sudden change from a retired life to one continual round of dissipation affected our nerves . . . we are both surprised that you bear it so well thro’ the whole winter.” Disdaining the fact that his parents still paid his bills, Lucy’s son sneered, “What completely unfits us, you thrive upon.”
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Within a few years Henry Jackson’s marriage would dissolve.

In contrast to their disappointments over their son was the Knoxes’ pride in the engagement of their eldest daughter, Lucy. On January 6, 1804, banns were posted for the pretty twenty-three year old’s wedding to Ebenezer Thatcher, a Harvard graduate and attorney. Adding to their joy was the establishment of the newlyweds’ home in nearby Warren, Maine—and soon afterwards, a granddaughter, Julia, named after the Knoxes’ lost daughters. By late 1805 the couple had had a second child, Henry Knox Thatcher.

During those same years, Knox’s fortunes also improved. On June 2, 1804, he was appointed to Governor Caleb Strong’s council. A month later, Knox’s sale of land in Hancock and Lincoln counties for over $200,000 enabled him to pay off one of his mortgages. By 1806 Knox had also paid his debts to friends William Bingham and Francis Baring. His earlier prediction to General Cobb, “I shall yet have bright days,” was beginning to come true.

Even so, at fifty-five years of age, Knox contemplated his mortality. To wealthy Boston merchant Samuel Breck he wrote, in January 1806, “Years roll away, and soon we shall be numbered among those who have been atoms upon this atom of a globe, and very soon after, it will be forgotten that we had here any existences.” Still, the relentlessly upbeat Knox insisted, “But this ought not in the least degree to cloud any of our present enjoyments.”
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One of those “enjoyments” was his grandchildren. During a dinner in October, his eldest daughter watched Knox “amusing himself with the playful little Julia—who had entwined herself about his heart.” Watching him tease the baby, young Lucy exclaimed, “Oh Father I believe you never will be
old.
”
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Nor would he be. Several days earlier, Henry had swallowed a chicken bone. At that time he immediately left the table and sequestered himself in a nearby china pantry to clear his throat. When he returned, he assured his worried wife and daughters that he was fine. But by October 20 Henry felt so ill that he wrote merchant Walter Beale in an uncharacteristically weak hand that he had to postpone their appointment because of “a disposition which will probably prevent my setting out this week.”
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On October 23 Henry was complaining of intense pain—the first time, his eldest daughter recalled, that he had mentioned any discomfort. Alarmed, his wife Lucy summoned a doctor who vainly tended him for two days. On Thursday, October 25, at 8 a.m., in agony and “in full possession of his mind,” Henry died.
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A subsequent medical report revealed that the swallowed chicken bone had traveled through Knox’s intestines and created internal wounds that had become infected.

Lucy and her children were stunned. “My best of fathers is no more,” mourned his son. “Everything that could be was tried, but all in vain. He is gone, I trust, to a happier and better place.”
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Knox’s flabbergasted widow could not be consoled. The loss of “her Harry,” the beloved anchor of her life, set Lucy adrift.

The following Tuesday, October 28, 1806, on a day as sunny as Knox’s disposition had been, crowds gathered at Montpelier for his military funeral. Following a service in the mansion, the local militia, an artillery company, cavalry, and infantry marched to a beating drum across the front lawn to Knox’s favorite oak tree. Nearby, on the St. George River, ship flags flew at half-mast. In Thomaston, Paul Revere’s bell tolled from the church Knox had founded. After a military salute from a minute gun, the Revolutionary War general’s coffin was lowered into the ground, followed by a dramatic blaze of musketry.

“The great and good General Knox departed this life yesterday,” reported the
Columbian Centinel.
Added to “his merits as a military chief and public man were joined those qualities which conciliate affection and engage esteem . . . which made him the delight of his family and the promoter of social happiness.” The
Centinel
added ironically, “The affairs of his fortune which for some years had been perplexed and difficult, had taken a course offering him pleasant anticipations.”
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Similar expressions of praise resounded through newspapers, letters, and the memories of those who fought alongside him in the Revolution. Among the most famous was Dr. James Thacher’s tribute in his diary, later published as
Military Journal of the American Revolution
: “Long will he be remembered as the ornament of every circle in which he moved, as the amiable and enlightened companion, the generous friend, the man of feeling and benevolence.”
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Knox’s will had bequeathed half of his estate to Lucy, its value, exclusive of his lands, worth $100,000. But without Henry, Lucy was lost. One reflection of her profound grief appears in a poem she penciled into the flyleaf of an account book, “’Tis hard to think you cannot come / Your presence like the fading of a flower / Now lingers upon me, and I listen for your step.” The poem continued, “I miss my husband, when morning breaks forth / and the birds carol in the trees.” Other stanzas referred to those times “her Harry” had comforted her: “Where, where was the arm that could pillow my head,” while “other hands did caress me . . . no [care] . . . like thine.”
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After Knox’s death, Montpelier’s legendary entertainments ceased. Some evenings Lucy invited guests to Montpelier to play cards or chess. One letter from her married daughter suggests that Lucy enjoyed her grandchildren; others, that she turned her attention to insuring that her younger daughter Caroline, fifteen at the time of Knox’s death, would eventually marry well. The girl, though less handsome than her older sister, was also gregarious and popular. A clergyman visiting Thomaston some years later described her as “the lovely Caroline.” When Nathaniel Hawthorne visited Montpelier in 1837, he recalled Caroline, by then fifty-six, as a “mild and amiable woman.”
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To find the young Caroline a suitable husband, Lucy escorted her to Boston in the winter months and sometimes left her there with affluent friends. Then, on May 21, 1808, after staying with Caroline in Boston, Lucy proposed that they and a friend take a “little excursion into the country for a week for the benefit of my [Caroline’s] health.”
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During the trip they met one of Caroline’s male acquaintances and his friend, James Swan, the curly-haired son of a wealthy Boston family whom Lucy knew. The attraction was immediate.

For five days, Lucy, her daughter, and her friend traveled along the Connecticut River Valley with the young men. “Surely never were people more supremely happy, than two [in] the party were,” Caroline, nearly eighteen, wrote her older sister on June 17. With Lucy’s blessings, she, Swan, and their friends took a ferry across the Hudson one day and were married by a Belleville, New Jersey, minister. “Tell me, my sister, can you conceive of more perfect happiness than that I now enjoyed married to the man of my heart loving and beloved,” the bride coyly wrote.
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Lucy’s triumph was redoubled when the newlyweds, probably at Caroline’s urging, decided to reside with her at Montpelier. “I always lived with my mother until her death and I never have known the same delightful home feeling since this place has been my own as when she was here to meet me with a welcome and caress,” Caroline reminisced years later.
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Yet the joy that Caroline’s marriage evoked was soon shattered by news that the Knox’s spendthrift son had been placed in a Boston debtor’s prison. After his release, young Henry enrolled in the Medical School of Dartmouth College, graduated in 1811, and served as a surgeon’s mate on the privateer
America.
Soon though—and here, again, the details are hazy—his earnings were seized by creditors. By 1818 he had returned to Montpelier and served as his mother’s clerk.

Records about the widowed Lucy’s life became increasingly vague. Determined to maintain her residence at Montpelier but plagued by debts, Lucy subsisted by selling off parcels of Montpelier’s acreage. In September 1817, Lucy invited the Massachusetts governor, John Brooks, to stay at Montpelier during his visit to Thomaston. Brooks accepted at the last minute, creating a flurry of activity among the servants at the deteriorating estate. By 1822 as Caroline warned a friend who planned to visit, “The days of show and profusion are all gone and we are a plain, retired country family.”
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