Defiant Brides (5 page)

The news terrified Lucy. Alone and pregnant, Lucy feared Knox might perish in the northern wilderness. Would she and their unborn child ever see him again? If not, what would become of her? Their reunion could only have been stormy, with Lucy sobbing and Henry defending his promise to fulfill Washington’s orders. Later that month, writing from New York City before sailing north on the Hudson, Henry attempted to appease his distraught wife. “Her Harry was and is all anxious for her safety,” he wrote. “Keep up your spirits, my Lucy. Preserve your health by every means in your power for the sake of the youth who values you above all earthly blessings.”
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A day later, that “youth” arrived at the southern tip of Lake George and lodged in a tiny cabin. His roommate was a congenial British prisoner, Captain John André. Neither man could have suspected that their paths would cross again.

The paths to and from Ticonderoga were equally unpredictable. The “three weeks journey” Knox had originally announced to Lucy became fifty-eight days that were plagued with bad weather. Anguished by their separation, he wrote on January 5, “Those people who love as you and I do never ought to part. It is with the greatest anxiety that I am forced to date my letter at this distance from my love. . . . My Lucy is perpetually in my mind, constantly in my heart.”
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Two hundred miles north thirty-five-year-old Benedict Arnold lay in a military hospital, his leg shattered at the disastrous Battle of Quebec. Among his sorrows was the recent death of his heroic fellow commander, General Richard Montgomery, and that of his thirty-year-old wife, Margaret Mansfield, the previous June.

On a chilly, snow-packed January 24, 1776, Knox cheerfully arrived at Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge with the first of Ticonderoga’s forty-three cannons and sixteen heavy guns. The rest of the artillery, he explained to the beaming commander in chief, was on its way from Framingham, being pulled on sleds by 1,600 oxen. As Knox reached western Massachusetts, messengers rode ahead with the news and attracted crowds along the Boston Post Road. Among the onlookers were John Adams and Elbridge Gerry, who were then returning from Congress to Boston. Awed, the two delegates stared at the large guns—some eleven feet long. Adams later listed them in his diary as “9 eighteen pounders, 10 twelves, 6 four to nine pounders, 3 thirteen-inch mortars.”
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In celebration, Washington and his kindly wife, Martha, invited the Knoxes to their Cambridge home. “The General and Mrs. Washington, present their compliments to Col. Knox & Lady, begs the favor of their company at dinner, on Friday half after 2 o’clock,” read their invitation.
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If Lucy’s pregnant belly and Knox’s 250-pound girth surprised Martha, so did the couple’s wit, brains, and charm. By the end of that meal, Lucy had endeared herself to the future First Lady, forging a friendship that would last throughout their lives.

Three weeks later, on an icy February 25, Knox asked an unusual favor from his fellow militia friend Henry Burbeck. Could he position several cannons at Lechmere Point? “These things I should have done myself,” Knox explained, “but Mrs. Knox, being exceedingly ill, prevents my leaving of her.”
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In eighteenth-century parlance, the words “exceedingly ill” often referred to childbirth. The next day Lucy delivered a daughter she and Knox named Lucy.

After returning to military duty, Knox ordered twenty cannons placed at Dorchester Heights in southern Boston and concealed under a series of hay-covered fortifications. At dawn on March 4, when General Howe peered through his spyglass at Dorchester Heights, he paled at the sight of Ticonderoga’s guns. Behind them filed three thousand Continental soldiers. “My God, these follows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months!” the British general gasped.
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As he summoned the British for an attack, a thick fog rolled into Boston Harbor followed by howling winds and pounding rain, destroying all hopes for a counterattack. At dawn two days later, on March 6, the discouraged Howe decided to evacuate Boston.

Lucy was ecstatic. Not only had she borne a healthy infant—no easy endeavor in eighteenth-century America—but “her Harry” had become a hero. For a brief few days, life seemed “the very pink of perfection,”
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as contemporary British writer Oliver Goldsmith had put it. Then, just as suddenly, on March 17, Lucy’s life darkened after she learned that the Fluckers had sailed with the British without a letter of farewell. Soon afterwards, Washington ordered the army to leave Boston. Inevitably that included “her Harry.” By April 3, Knox and his artillery corps dutifully marched south towards New York City, the anticipated site of the next British attack. By then, nearly all of Lucy’s frightened Tory friends had either scattered or sailed with the British. Lucy’s one dependable relative was her brother-in-law, William, who was overwhelmed by the British plunder of Knox’s New London Bookstore.

Boston lay in shambles. During the winter months, shivering redcoats had chopped down trees in the Common and ripped apart old buildings for firewood. The Flucker mansion had been looted. Other homes and shops were abandoned, crumbling, ruinous reminders of Boston’s pre-Revolutionary splendor. Many of the remaining residents, once trapped in the city under Howe’s martial grip, were sickly, malnourished, or dying from epidemics sweeping through Boston.

“Is my Harry well?” Lucy solicitously wrote her husband from Boston. Self-pityingly she then scrawled, “No, that cannot be when he reflects how wretched he has left me. . . . The remembrance of his tender infant must also affect him when he considers it at so great a distance from its father . . . in a place exposed to an enraged enemy.”
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Contrary to Washington’s expectations, that “enraged enemy” had yet to appear in New York. After weeks of waiting, Lucy grew impatient. She saw no reason to avoid joining Henry, especially since wives of other officers had planned trips to New York. “Mrs. Greene and Mrs. Morgan set out on Sunday next,” Lucy wrote. “They fully expected me to have gone with them. What is the reason I am not as happy as they . . . loved as well.”
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Her letter hit the mark, piercing Knox as keenly as a British bayonet. “Although father, mother, sister, and brother have forsaken you, yet my love, your Harry will ever esteem you the best boon of heaven,” he replied.
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Still, his words were merely paper and ink—not the flesh-and-blood man who would hold her in his arms, dispel her fears, whisper reassurances in the dark of the night. By early June, Lucy had packed the family trunks, bundled up her infant, braved a bumpy carriage ride, and arrived in New York. Reunited with Knox in his Broadway home near Bowling Green, Lucy happily hosted dinners for his colleagues. Intrigued with the port city of twenty thousand, she and Caty Greene toured its streets, shops, and piers. Often, too, they gaped at the sight of the city’s drunks and prostitutes, as well as the “Tory rides” in which tarred-and-feathered Loyalists were paraded through the streets on rails.

One day the Knoxes visited their friends, the Greenes in Brooklyn; on another they dined with the Washingtons in Richmond Hill. But her visit, Knox continually reminded Lucy, was not safe. A British attack was imminent. It was prudent for her and the baby to leave. To that Lucy paid no mind—until the memorable morning of June 29. As she and Henry ate breakfast at their home overlooking New York harbor, an ominous fleet of white sails appeared over the horizon. The British had arrived.

“You can scarcely conceive the distress and anxiety that she [Lucy] then had,” Knox wrote his brother William. The city was in an uproar. “Guns firing, the troops to their posts and every thing . . . bustle.” Worst of all, Knox had no time to calm Lucy, for “my country calls loudest.” Anguished, he added, “My God, may I never experience the like feelings again. They were too much.” In the press of his duties, Knox admitted that he “scolded like a fury at her [Lucy] for not having gone before.”
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Stung by “her Harry’s” outburst, Lucy left for Fairfield, Connecticut. Accompanying her were Caty Greene and Mary Johnson Pollard, whose husband was Knox’s quartermaster. Both women, Knox confided to William, were ill-suited companions for the vulnerable Lucy. Nathanael Greene’s wife, Caty, was moody, a vain, flighty woman who flirted with the army’s handsome young officers. Mary had a “melancholy dumpish disposition . . . a very unfit companion.”
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Worried that the British would seize the coastal towns near New York, Knox begged Lucy to travel further east, to New Haven. And, he added, she should ignore any other army wives whose husbands, like one named Palfrey, encouraged them to return to New York, who selfishly wanted “to see her because she is a woman.”
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Lucy moved further east. “I will go to New Haven, indeed I will,” she penned from Stamford, Connecticut, in early July, “but first must beg your patience to read this, which I think will show that I am not deserving of the severe censure that I have received. You may remember I left my Harry in a state of mind, that prevented . . . a word to him of the tender kind. . . . This induced me to stay a little time as near as possible, in hopes by some smile of Providence I might be favored with a more affectionate parting.”
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Especially irksome was Henry’s habit “to remind me of my incapacity of judging for myself. I now assure you that I have [a] sense of my own weakness and ignorance and a very high opinion of the abilities of him in whose eyes mine are so contemptible. I am afraid you do not bestow the time to read my scrawls with any attention.”
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On July 18, after a week of silence, she received Knox’s reply. “I am grieved and distraught by receipt of your letter,” he began, insisting that he had asked her to leave New York City out of “the most disinterested friendship cemented by the tenderest love.”
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Relieved by his reassurances of affection, Lucy replied, “I have just received my dear Harry’s letter. . . . It gives me great pleasure, that admidst the hurry of public business he steals so much time for me. If I wanted proof of his affection this would be sufficient, but thank heaven, that is not the case.” Apologetically, Lucy added, “It grieves me that I have ever professed what has given you pain but I [am] sure you will forget, and forgive when you reflect, that my affection for my dear Harry led me into the error.”
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Paradoxically, the Revolution also created marital tensions for Lucy’s parents. Through Tories who had remained in Boston, William Knox heard about the Fluckers’ flight from their home and relayed the news to Lucy and Henry. Lucy’s father had sailed on the first ship to England. Her mother and sister landed instead in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they shared a small room in a rented house. From London, Thomas Flucker had invited his wife to join him “if she pleases,” suggesting a previous disagreement. Hannah had refused. An argument had apparently ensued. “Thomas won’t say whether he wishes her to come or not.” William wrote Lucy. Her mother, Hannah, “intends tarrying at Halifax till he comes to her.”
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The news distressed Lucy. “My heart aches for her [Hannah], as I fear she is in great want of ready money” she wrote her husband.
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From a Waldo relative she also learned that the British government still paid her father a handsome salary. “Pappa enjoys his 300 pounds a year as Secretary of the Province. Droll, is it not?” she wrote Henry.
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More immediately disquieting were reports from Knox about the influx of redcoats and Hessians in New York. From Wallingford, Connecticut, where she and Mary Pollard lived in a borrowed house, Lucy sent Knox fresh clothes. Then, to sate his enormous appetite, she dispatched supplies of cheese and poultry. Knowing the army needed more gunpowder, Lucy dutifully visited the saltpeter mills of nearby New Haven and dispatched samples to Henry.

By then, outbreaks of smallpox in the army prevented thoughts of Lucy’s return to New York. Immunity developed one of two ways: from contraction of the disease or inoculation with the live virus. The latter, known as a “variolation,” was nearly as dangerous as the illness itself, producing high fevers, pustules, and, occasionally, death. “I wish my dear girl and her babe to be eased of that dread,” Knox wrote. It would be best if she returned to Boston where her brother-in-law, William, would arrange the variolation. After that Lucy could visit him in the army camp “at any time you see proper and it shall be thought prudent so to do.”
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Fate decreed otherwise. By autumn 1776 Washington’s army had suffered a string of defeats in New York City, Harlem Heights, and White Plains. Added to Knox’s dismay was Lucy’s sudden silence. His next letter of November 1 explained he was “exceedingly afflicted” by the absence of her letters.
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On November 6, an infuriated Lucy retorted, “You accuse me of neglecting to write by three posts—and impute it to pleasure or negligence . . . [but] neglecting you is a thing I never shall be guilty of.”
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Knox, on the other hand, now seemed completely engrossed in the war. “I imagine by this time that you have almost forgot my very looks and if perchance my name is mentioned you cry what have we to do with women. Out of the last sixteen months we have not been six weeks together. Alas, what a change from the happy days I have seen.”
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Perhaps her parents’ predictions had been correct.

By early December, Washington’s ragged men had retreated across the Hudson and through New Jersey to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware. The ranks of the Continental army, diminished by casualties, deserters, and those taken prisoner, had reached its lowest ebb. “Unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place . . . this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of three things. Starve, dissolve, or disperse,” Washington grimly warned Henry Laurens, the new president of the Second Continental Congress.
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