Defiant Brides (4 page)

Within another week Philadelphia buzzed about the actions of its British rulers. “There is some movement in the army which we do not understand. The heavy cannon are ordered on board the Ships, and some other things look very mysterious,” Elizabeth Drinker noted on May 13.
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By early June, rumors abounded that the redcoats were preparing to evacuate Philadelphia. Still, the British lingered. “I sincerely wish’d it might be true, but was afraid to flatter myself,” sixteen-year-old Sally Wister, a Quaker living in nearby Germantown, confided to her journal. “I had heard it so often that I was quite faithless.”
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On June 7, Peggy’s uncle, Dr. William Shippen, wrote his fourteen-year-old daughter Nancy, “The enemy are preparing to leave Philadelphia and ’tis thought here they will go tomorrow.”
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The delay had to do with General Clinton’s uncertainty about his order by George III to send five thousand men to defend the West Indies against the French. “As my army would be much weakened by these detachments, I was commanded to evacuate Philadelphia and proceed by sea with the remaining troops and stores to New York,” General Clinton explained in his subsequent narrative on his North American campaigns.
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By dawn on June 18, 1778, Clinton and nine thousand British soldiers had evacuated Philadelphia. With them fled thousands of Loyalists.

New waves of disappointment swept over Peggy and her sisters. From bitter experience, they knew that the officers of the Continental army were unlikely to be as “witty or charming” as the British had been.
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Already the rumor mills churned out news that the city would be governed by General Benedict Arnold, a hero of the Continental army, whose bravery during the 1777 Battle of Saratoga Springs had contributed to General John Burgoyne’s defeat.

On May 20, the crippled general arrived at Valley Forge in a carriage. Surrounded by cheering soldiers, Arnold, the swarthy, blue-eyed “Eagle of Saratoga,” stiffly climbed out of the coach and stood unsteadily on his feet, leaning on a crutch.

Less public was the arrival of the woman he had escorted from New Haven, an attractive, high-colored brunette, Lucy Flucker Knox, and her toddler. Rushing to her side was Henry Knox, Washington’s young chief of artillery, who folded his wife into his fleshy arms. The couple “appear to be extravagantly fond of each other, and I think are perfectly happy,” their friend Nathanael Green wrote in apparent envy.
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Temporarily at least, thoughts of war were dispelled by those of love. Before long, that timeless knot would entwine General Arnold and “the handsomest woman” in America in a union whose intrigues remain controversial.

FROM THAT MOMENT IN
late August 1773 when sixteen-year-old Lucy Flucker first saw Henry Knox, she was smitten. The tall, “uncommonly good-looking officer” was drilling on horseback with the Boston Grenadier Corps, a local militia.
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Adding to Lucy’s curiosity was a black silk cloth wrapped around the officer’s left hand. “Lieutenant Knox appeared with a wound handsomely bandaged with a scarf which, of course, excited the sympathy of all the ladies,” recalled a fellow militiaman. That scarf concealed a raw red scar from a recent gun accident that had blown away Knox’s two smallest fingers.

Intrigued, Lucy visited Knox at his bookstore in Cornhill, Boston’s printing district, whose streets echoed with the clatter of churning presses. Within two years of its 1771 establishment, Knox’s New London Bookstore became a popular meeting place, attracting clients like engraver Paul Revere, Rhode Island blacksmith Nathanael Greene, and attorney John Adams. One reason for its attraction, Adams recalled, was Knox’s “pleasing manners and inquisitive turn of mind”—an opinion that others confirmed throughout Knox’s life.
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Another admirer, the French major general Francois Jean Beauvoir, Marquis de Chastellux, described Knox as “a man of understanding, a well formed man, gay, sincere and honest. It is impossible to know, without esteeming him, or to see without loving him.”
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Lucy sensed that from the start. Warming to his congenial personality and erudite knowledge, the bookish teenager immediately fell in love. Knox was equally enamored with the spirited and stunning brunette. Often, he was so distracted by Lucy’s snapping dark eyes, high color, and voluptuous curves that he fumbled making change for his clients. By late winter, the couple had decided to wed.

Henry Knox

“Every particle of heat seems to be eradicated from the head or else entirely absorbed, in the widely ranging fire emitted from the heart,” Knox penned on March 7. “To tell you how much I long to see you would be impossible—do my good girl let me hear from you some way or other.” Although Lucy’s parents disapproved, the twenty-four-year-old bookseller persisted in his courtship. “What news?” he asked. “Have you spoken to your father or he to you upon the subject?”
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When Lucy broke news of her engagement to the Fluckers, they exploded. Little did it matter that Henry was ambitious or had once attended Boston Latin School. To the Fluckers, he was ordinary. Lucy disagreed. Henry’s father, William, a comfortable shipmaster, had died suddenly in 1762, plunging the family into poverty and forcing twelve-year-old Henry to leave school. After his apprenticeship with a printer, Henry supported his widowed mother and younger brother, William. The Fluckers were not impressed. Knox was common, they sniffed, a “man in trade,” inappropriate as Lucy’s husband.

Her father, Thomas Flucker, was the Crown-appointed secretary of the province of Massachusetts. Her mother, a Waldo, was an heiress to vast tracts of land in the district of Maine. If Lucy insisted upon marrying Knox, they predicted, she would “eat the bread of poverty and dependence,” while her married sister, Hannah Flucker Urquart, rode through the streets in a fine carriage.
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Added to the Fluckers’ objections were Knox’s radical politics. Though the British had imposed harsh taxes upon the colonists and sent soldiers to patrol Boston, that had been done to restore peace. Could not Lucy understand that everything she enjoyed—the Fluckers’ Summer Street townhouse, fine clothes, imported household goods, servants—came from her father’s Crown appointments? To Lucy that was not important. “My mother,” her eldest daughter explained decades later, “claimed the privilege of thinking for herself on a subject so deeply involving her own happiness.”
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Interestingly, Lucy’s own mother, the beautiful Hannah Waldo, had also defied convention in her youth. In 1751, several days before her long-planned wedding to one Andrew Pepperrell, Hannah spurned him. Six weeks later, she married Lucy’s father, Thomas Flucker, a widower whose “natural” or illegitimate daughter, Sallie, later lived with the family. Even so, the Fluckers opposed Lucy’s decision. Ultimately they “gave a half-reluctant consent” but “refused to sanction [the marriage] by their presence.”
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On June 16, 1774, six weeks before her eighteenth birthday, Lucy defiantly married Henry Knox at Boston’s King’s Chapel.

“Be pleased to accept my sincere compliments of felicitation on your late auspicious nuptials with a lady famed for every female excellence,” Knox’s friend John Murray later wrote. “May that event be productive to you both of all the happiness your hearts can wish.”
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No such congratulations arrived from Thomas and Hannah Flucker, who left town on Lucy’s wedding day. Only two members of the Flucker family attended the ceremony: Lucy’s sister Hannah and half-sister Sallie. Nearly a year later, Lucy’s brother, Thomas, a British soldier, sent his wishes from Antigua. Radiant with happiness, the bride paid no attention to snubs or the wagging tongues of Boston’s wealthy Loyalists. What mattered most—and would throughout Lucy’s life—was her marriage to the “best and tenderest of friends,” whom she called “her Harry.”
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Relations between the newlyweds and the Fluckers remained tense and after the April 19, 1775, violence at Lexington and Concord, quickly deteriorated. By then, the Fluckers’ friend, General Thomas Gage, commander of the British forces in America, pressed Knox to support the Crown. When the young man refused, Gage threatened arrest if he bolted from the city.

The Knoxes refused to be bullied. Wielding her needle, Lucy stitched Henry’s militia sword into her cape. One moonless night, they slipped out of Boston and galloped to the headquarters of the Continental army in Cambridge.

Once Henry enlisted, Lucy moved into a crowded house in Watertown, a few miles from the army camp at Cambridge. From there the teenager wrote to her family, especially to her mother and sister. But no letters arrived in return. The blood spilled at Lexington and Concord had ruptured her ties to the Fluckers. Years later, Lucy rebuked her sister Hannah for “the great neglect with which I have been treated both by you and my dear mamma.”
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Henry wrestled with different frustrations. With little time to pack his bookstore manuals on artillery and fortifications, he had to rely upon his memory to erect fortifications at Roxbury. Fortunately, Knox was a brilliant man. His intelligence, as Continental army surgeon Dr. James Thacher observed with wry understatement, was “not of the ordinary class.”
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By early June, Knox insisted that Lucy leave Watertown for the safer western Massachusetts town of Worcester, thirty-five miles from Cambridge. Reluctantly, she complied. Whenever separated from Knox, Lucy slumped, feeling alone and invisible. She wrote Knox that he was “always in my thoughts, whose image is deeply imprinted on my heart.” In a rare moment of self-awareness, the young woman even understood that her dependence was probably unhealthy. Henry, she declared, was a man “whom I love too much for my peace.”
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Nevertheless, Lucy continued to cling desperately to Knox, her one anchor in the churning tides of the Revolution.

Knox was equally attached to Lucy. Having served as caretaker for his widowed mother and younger brother, he continued that role after marriage even in the face of war. “I wish to render my devoted country every service in my power,” Henry later explained to his wife. His only objection was that it “separates me from thee, the dear object of all my earthly happiness.”
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The first sign of Knox’s prospects as a warrior began on July 6, 1775, when the newly appointed general George Washington toured Knox’s fortifications at Roxbury with General Charles Lee. Knox proudly wrote Lucy of the “pleasure and surprise” the two generals expressed over the fortifications he had built from memory.
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That same letter expressed his excitement—his “pleasure,” as he put it—to see Lucy the following week in Worcester.
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There, Lucy had her own “pleasure” to share with Henry—news that she was pregnant.

Though impressed with Knox’s engineering talent, Washington thought the twenty-four year old too young to assume responsibility for creation of the Continental army’s artillery corps. To that, Knox retorted in his deep voice, “I am growing older every day.”
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John Adams also urged Knox’s commission. The former bookseller, Adams wrote James Warren, speaker of the Provincial Congress and paymaster general of the Continental army, should not be overlooked for he was one of those “young gentlemen of education and accomplishment . . . [who] might become in time and with experience able officers.”
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In an effort to understand more about Knox’s potential, Washington invited him to dine with him and his generals. By September 22, the commander in chief also asked Knox and Lucy to a private meal at his Cambridge home and headquarters, the John Vassal House. Little is known about that dinner, but from the fond friendship that developed between Washington and the Knoxes, it seems Lucy’s wit and spirit charmed the reticent Virginian as much as Henry’s skills had impressed him. In October, Washington appointed Knox a colonel of the Continental army.

Coincidentally, Congress had just authorized Washington to seize the cannons the British had abandoned at Fort Ticonderoga, New York, the previous spring. Looming over the narrow straits of Lake Champlain at its juncture with Lake George, the stone garrison protected the waterways of America’s northern borders.

Ticonderoga was “the key of this extensive country,” as Benedict Arnold had warned Congress the previous May after his victory there over the British. To abandon that fort would be foolhardy, leaving “a very extensive frontier open to the ravages of the enemy.”
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For months Congress had ignored Arnold’s advice, but finally, after they allowed Washington to seize its guns, the commander in chief assigned that task to Knox.

In Worcester, ignorant of that assignment, Lucy waited vainly for Henry’s arrival on a blustery November 15. The next day his letter arrived, blaming his delay on bad weather. Within it was startling news: “Keep up your spirits, my dear girl. I shall be with you tomorrow night.” Knox added, “Don’t be alarmed when I tell you the general [Washington] has ordered me to go to the westward as far as Ticonderoga, about a three week’s journey. Don’t be afraid. There is no fighting. . . . I am going upon business only.”
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