Henry Knox (6 page)

Shortly after the battles of Lexington and Concord, Henry and Lucy dressed in disguises and prepared to sneak out of the city. With his size, however, there was little that Henry could do to hide his identity. Lucy sewed his sword into her coat. The couple said good-bye to William and, under the cover of darkness, slipped out of their house and headed for the waterfront, carefully avoiding the posted guards. If detected, they would be arrested and would spend the war in a British prison. They could even be hanged under charges of treason.

They reached the water safely, and Henry helped Lucy climb into a small boat. They pushed slowly from shore, under agonizing tension so as not to make a sound.

As Lucy watched Boston disappear in the night air, she could not help but wonder if she would ever see her family again, her sisters Hannah and Sally and her brother Thomas. She had forsaken everything for Henry and was about to accompany him to the war. Knox wondered how long his business could last. He knew that it almost certainly would be a casualty of the conflict. Everything he had achieved, rising as a fatherless kid from the tough streets of Boston to become a respectable owner of a popular business, was gone. As he rowed the boat across the river, the couple soon became enveloped in darkness, unable to see Boston behind them or the future in front of them.

Henry planned to visit the camp of colonial militiamen surrounding Boston and find a secure place for Lucy to live. She pleaded with Henry to allow her to accompany him, but he was concerned about her safety amid the thousands of rowdy young militia soldiers and backwoods-men who filled the army's ranks. He accompanied her to nearby Worcester, where she was taken in by friends. Knox then walked to the Cambridge encampment, which was being called the "camp of liberty.“
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In the aftermath of Lexington and Concord, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety put out a call for other provincial militias to aid in the siege of Boston. The force quickly grew to 13,600 men. New Hampshire sent 1,200, and Connecticut provided 6,000. Rhode Island planned to send another 1,500.

Knox quickly saw that the "camp of liberty" was a chaotic collection of hunters, farmers, unemployed seamen, and tyros. Many had little if any military training and lacked discipline or order. He found his way to the headquarters of Artemas Ward, who had been named commander in chief of the hodgepodge of militias. The forty-eight-year-old Ward had made his mark as a lieutenant colonel of the Massachusetts militia during the French-Indian War and had been appointed brigadier general in charge of the province's militia in 1775. Ill during the battles of Lexington and Concord, he had risen to take command of the siege of Boston and was frantically trying to organize the army before the British marched out and attacked. Ward was ecstatic to see Knox. Among the thousands of troops under his command, almost no one had any skill as a military engineer. Henry declined a specific commission and instead suggested that he might be more useful in helping design fortifications throughout the army. Ward agreed.

As Knox surveyed the camp around Boston, he realized that the patriot army had erected few obstacles to bar the British from taking the offensive. His first concern was building a line of defenses at Roxbury, a small town along the road leading from Boston Neck, the only land route out of the town. Knox drafted plans for a redoubt on a hill overlooking Roxbury and put men to work digging entrenchments and building fortifications that could help repel a British attempt to leave Boston or prevent enemy troops from circling around and flanking rebel musket men.

Knox walked throughout the camp and noticed men coming and going as they pleased. When he tried to assess the number of men fit for battle, he found that company commanders could only guess at the figures of troops they could depend on. There was no system to channel food and no allowance for hygiene. The camp stunk from the lack of sanitation. Many men had no rifles, and others had only fowling pieces that discharged buckshot. Fights broke out from rivalries within the mosaic of militias.

News arrived in camp that an expedition headed by Ethan Allen, a militia leader from Vermont, and Benedict Arnold, a Connecticut militia captain, had on May 10 captured Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York and its rich supply of munitions, which included 78 serviceable cannons, 6 mortars, 3 howitzers, and 30,000 musket flints. Knox thought that the patriots surrounding Gage's 6,500 men in Boston were sorely in need of those supplies. But Ticonderoga was almost 300 miles away, and the ground in between was rugged, hilly forest.

Dr. Warren and the Committee of Safety also were concerned about the lack of training and skill in the American force and on May 16 recommended that Knox "be applied to for supplying the Colony Army with military books.“
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Henry could do nothing to acquire books while Boston was occupied and could only recommend books from the library at Harvard College. When he could, he visited Lucy, who had moved into the crowded home of John Cook in Watertown, where the
Boston Gazette
publishers Benjamin Edes and John Gill also were staying. After the works at Fort Roxbury were complete, Knox helped train gunners. The American artillery received a boost when 12 cannons, 18-pound and 24-pound pieces, arrived with a company from Providence and four more large guns came with another Rhode Island unit.

Many of the soldiers were frustrated by inactivity. Patriot leaders had ordered Ward to attack only if the British fired first. On June 12, Gage posted an order declaring that all rebels who did not lay down their arms and swear
an oath of allegiance to the crown would be deemed traitors. When it was learned that the British planned to take Bunker Hill, the strategic height overlooking Boston, the American commanders decided to seize the position first. Knox was sent to reconnoiter the sloping hill and the adjacent Breed Hill, which lay about 1,500 yards north of Boston across the Charles River on the Charlestown peninsula. As darkness fell on the evening of Friday, June 16, 1,200 militiamen marched to Breed's Hill to build a line of fortifications. The next day, the British crossed the harbor in 28 barges with about 3,000 men.

The battle opened when the British cannons on Boston Neck rained fire on the Knox-designed works at Roxbury. Knox responded with cannon fire and demonstrated his marksmanship with the heavy guns. Cannonballs came crashing around his men. It became quickly evident that the colonists were no match for the British firepower.

Knox was awed by the precision of the British gunners aboard the battleships, as the 68-gun
Somerset
, the 20-gun
Lively
, the 36-gun
Cerberus
, the 34-gun
Glasglow
, and other war vessels opened thundering fire on the Breed Hill redoubt. The redcoats mounted cannons on Copp's Hill, about a mile opposite of the American entrenchments, and sent accurate shots pounding the position. The patriot line atop the hill stubbornly held, however. Gage lost patience and ordered his gunners to level Charlestown. The English artillery from sea and land sent whistling shots against the buildings, which exploded into flying splinters. British soldiers lit the wooden structures on fire, and the town soon was aflame. The carnage was devastating.

Knox watched as the sea of red-clad troops formed a battle line and began the march up the green slope of Breed Hill. After the British neared the crest, a loud volley from colonial guns shredded their ranks and sent the British in retreat, stumbling among the tall grass and fallen bodies. The king's men made a second assault but were again repulsed by the muskets of colonials. On the verge of abandoning the battle, the British received news that the colonists were out of gunpowder. Gage saw his opportunity and ordered a bayonet charge. The Americans were not equipped with bayonets. The redcoats regained their composure to make one final attempt to take the hill. They raced to the top, stepping over their fallen comrades. The armies clashed in brutal hand-to-hand fighting, the British lunging their bayonets to spear the patriots. The Americans scattered in retreat, and the royal army gave up chase after a few hundred yards, too exhausted to pursue.

In what became known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, the British lost 1,150 men to 441 casualties for the Americans. Among the dead were many of Knox's friends, including Dr. Joseph Warren, who had received a commission as a general just four days earlier.

The defeat looked catastrophic for American hopes. Warren had been the most able of the American commanders, and the aging Ward was not up to the task of organizing the army. Optimism was renewed within a few weeks, however. General George Washington, whom the Continental Congress had named to replace Ward as commander in chief, arrived in the Cambridge camp on Monday, July 3, after a twelve-day journey from Philadelphia, accompanied by several New York militia companies and a troop of Philadelphia cavalry. Two days later, on Wednesday, July 5, as Knox walked on an errand to Cambridge, he met Washington and General Charles Lee, who asked him to accompany them to the Roxbury works. As they came upon the line of entrenchments and crescent-shaped batteries, Washington and Lee marveled at Knox's design and breathed a sigh of relief that someone in the disordered Continental Army knew how to build fortifications. Knox reported to Lucy in a letter the next morning: "When they viewed the works, they expressed the greatest pleasure and surprise at their situation and apparent utility, to say nothing of the plan, which did not escape their praise.“
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Washington took an instant liking to Knox even though they came from very different worlds. The general, addressed as "Your Excellency," hailed from the pinnacle of hierarchical Virginia and was a wealthy planter with a large estate and hundreds of slaves. Knox came from the rough side of egalitarian Massachusetts. But they shared a rugged physical quality. Both were tall, energetic, active men. As Washington talked with Knox, he found that Henry possessed an analytical mind and sound judgment as well as a deep understanding of the army's shortcomings. The forty-three-year-old Washington, who was childless, surrounded himself with promising young men whom he treated as surrogate sons. Knox, who was just short of his twenty-fifth birthday, was pulled into this familial circle. From Watertown, Henry wrote in a July 9 letter to Lucy: "General Washington fills his place with vast ease and dignity." He added that he had to rush off to wait on the commander in chief. Two days later, he wrote: "The new generals are of infinite service in the army. They have to reduce order from almost perfect chaos.“
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Washington believed that discipline and corporal punishment were needed to rein in the unruly troops. One soldier was given the penalty of
twenty lashes for "abusive language to Colonel Gridley. The General confirms the sentence, and orders it to be executed after prayer time tomorrow.“
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Another soldier received thirty-nine lashes for robbing the surgeon general of the army. After Colonel William Prescott was found guilty of "threatening and abusing a number of persons," a court-martial sentenced him to the humiliation of riding "the wooden Horse, fifteen minutes.“
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Knox heartily approved of the army crackdown: "I think they are in a fair way of doing it.“
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Knox was pleased to see that Nathanael Greene, the commander of three Rhode Island regiments, had arrived in camp. On June 22, 1775, Congress appointed Greene one of seven brigadier generals in the quickly fashioned Continental Army, with Green being the youngest.
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The record is unclear how Greene jumped from military novice to the youngest brigadier general in the patriot army in merely a year, and whether it was political connections or the result of his ardent study on field strategy, tactics, and engineering.

In Philadelphia, Massachusetts delegate to Congress John Adams believed the reorganization of the army did not include enough New England men among the officer ranks. He recommended to his colleagues that Knox, among others, should be appointed to a lucrative post such as quartermaster general, commissary of musters, or commissary of artillery. Some congressmen felt those appointments should be left up to Washington. Feeling a bout of regional pride, Adams wrote to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety on July 23 with a list of local men, headed with Knox's name, to support for promotion, who "are well qualified for places in the army, who have lost their all, by the outrages of tyranny, whom I wish to hear provided for. . . . They could be made Captains or Brigade Majors, or put into some little places at present I am very sure, their country would loose nothing by it, in reputation or otherwise.“
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Washington, however, was already considering an appointment for Knox within the army. Henry regularly dined with him and generals Charles Lee, Israel Putnam, William Heath, Nathanael Greene, and Horatio Gates. Washington and Lee asked about Lucy and invited her to dine with them. On Friday, September 22, she attended a dinner at Washington's residence, where she displayed the charm and genteel manners that had once made her so popular among her Tory friends.

The next day, Knox was relieved that she had left the camp when the British artillery opened a cannonade on the American position. Henry was not impressed with these grenadiers, who were not as skilled as the gunners aboard the battleships who leveled Charlestown. He wrote to his brother on
September 25 with a sense of bravado: "Let it be remembered to the honor and skill of the British troops, that they fired 104 cannon-shot at [our] works, at not a greater distance than half point blank shot—and did what? Why, scratched a man's face with the splinters of a rail-fence! I have had the pleasure of dodging these heretofore engines of terror with great success; nor am I afraid they will [hit me] unless directed by the hand of Providence."

In Congress, Samuel Adams and John Adams continued to push for New England officers in Washington's army. Other delegates complained about the apparent lack of qualified military men in Massachusetts suitable for promotion. On September 26, Samuel Adams wrote to Elbridge Gerry, a patriot leader in a town about 15 miles up the Atlantic coast called Marblehead: "Until I visited headquarters at Cambridge, I had never heard of . . . the ingenuity of Knox and [Josiah] Waters in planning the celebrated works at Roxbury. We were told here that there were none in our camp who understood this business of an engineer, or anything more than the manual exercise of the gun. This we had from great authority, and for want of more certain intelligence were obliged at least to be silent.“
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