Knox, Henry

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Knox, Henry

KNOX, HENRY. (1750–1806). Continental general and chief of artillery. Massachusetts. Born at Boston on 25 July 1750 and apprenticed to a bookseller after the death of his father, Knox showed an interest in military matters from an early age. He joined the elite local artillery company at the age of eighteen; opened the London Book-Store in 1771, where he read the military books he stocked for the British officers of the Boston garrison, and became second in command of another elite militia company, the Boston Grenadier Corps, in 1772. In July 1773 he lost the third and fourth fingers of his left hand when a fowling piece burst during a hunting trip. On 16 June 1774, despite her parents' objections, he married Lucy Flucker, the daughter of Thomas Flucker, the provincial secretary of Massachusetts. By 1775 he was a beefy young man with a maimed hand earning a good living as the proprietor of a popular bookstore in Boston. He was also a devoted defender of colonial rights, starting from the time he had witnessed the Boston Massacre (5 March 1770) and tried to restrain the British guard commander from firing into the mob.

LEADING THE CONTINENTAL ARTILLERY

Henry and Lucy Knox fled Boston in June 1775, leaving behind his livelihood and her family; Lucy carried through the British lines sewn into her petticoat the sword Henry would carry throughout the war. Knox served as a volunteer on the staff of Artemas Ward during the Battle of Bunker Hill and the start of the Boston siege. He favorably impressed Washington at their first meeting on 5 July 1775. Five months later, on 17 November, Washington appointed the "portly, genial, and enterprising" twenty-five-year-old military amateur as colonel of the (virtually nonexistent) Continental Regiment of Artillery and assigned him the task of bringing to Boston the artillery pieces that lay at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York. Knox's achievement gave Washington the means to force the British to evacuate Boston in March 1776.

After laying out the defenses for vulnerable points along the coast in Connecticut and Rhode Island, Knox joined Washington at New York City. He and his gunners rendered valuable service at the Battle of Long Island (27 August 1776), in the subsequent retreat through New York and New Jersey, and at Trenton and Princeton. The ability of Knox's gunners to bring their pieces into action at Trenton on the morning of 26 December 1776, in the midst of heavy rain and sleet, was a notable achievement. On 27 December 1776 Knox was appointed brigadier general. Aware of the need to begin creating an armaments infrastructure to support the armed struggle, Knox spent the winter of 1776–1777 at Springfield, Massachusetts, establishing workshops and an arsenal while the main army was in winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey. The arrival of Tronson de Coudray in May 1777 threatened Knox's position as chief of artillery, but Congress found an interim solution until the arrogant foreigner drowned in the Schyulkill River, mourned by no one. Knox's gunners performed well at Brandywine (11 September 1777) and Germantown (4 October), although Knox's advice at Germantown to reduce the Chew House before continuing the advance may have lost Washington a fleeting opportunity for greater success. During the Conway Cabal, Knox was unwaveringly loyal to Washington.

By the spring of 1778 the Continental field artillery had developed from a makeshift organization of inadequate weapons and inexperienced men into a combat arm that very nearly met Washington's needs. Of Knox's achievement, Douglas S. Freeman has written: "if he acquired slowly the fine points of the employment of artillery, he quickly developed high skill in dealing with men. His administration of his arm of the service was quiet and was marred by few jealousies on the part of his subordinates" (Washington, 4, p. 131).

Knox continued to merit Washington's high opinion of him throughout the rest of the war. Knox performed particularly well at the Battle of Monmouth (28 June 1778) and the siege of Yorktown (October 1781), where he placed the cannon that forced Cornwallis to surrender. Knox was appointed major general on 22 March 1782, with rank from 15 November 1781. He took command of West Point on 29 August 1782 and took the lead in creating the Society of the Cincinnati in May 1783 at Newburgh; he served as the society's first secretary-general. He succeeded Washington as commander in chief of the rump Continental army on 23 December 1783 and remained in command of its small successor force until 20 June 1784.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION

Returning for a short time to private life in Boston, he became secretary of war under the Confederation on 8 March 1785, where his duties were mainly clerical in an army that numbered less than one thousand men. He advocated national academies to train officers for the army and navy and the establishment of a national militia system, but Congress approved neither proposal. He retained his post until 28 December 1794, from 12 September 1789 as head of an executive department under the federal Constitution. Knox was the only high officeholder under the Confederation to be continued in office. Initially an ally of secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who had been one of his artillery captains at Trenton, he was angered by his former subordinate's arrogance and high-handedness. His own efforts as secretary bore fruit in the authorization of six frigates to defend American commerce against the Barbary pirates and in the victory Anthony Wayne won over a Native American coalition at Fallen Timbers on 20 August 1794. Knox's luxurious habits and extravagant entertaining earned him the title "Philadelphia nabob," and along with some unfortunate land speculations in Maine with William Duer, starting in 1791, brought him money problems. When war loomed with France in 1798, he was deeply hurt when Washington, appointed by President John Adams to command the provisional army, nominated him to be the third major general, after Alexander Hamilton and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; Knox refused and never wrote to Washington again. Knox died prematurely on 25 October 1806 at the age of fifty-six at Thomaston, Maine, when a chicken bone lodged in his intestines.

Knox possessed significant administrative abilities, loyalty to his chief and the cause, and a sanguine outlook that made him a major figure in the winning of American independence. His service in the Continental army was crucial: he "rendered to Washington the most valuable assistance of any of the general officers of the revolutionary war" (Harry M. Ward in ANB). Washington's close friend and confidant for nearly a quarter century, Knox had a deserved pride in his extensive public service, but he also displayed human shortcomings and faults. He could storm and threaten resignation like any brigadier general when Congress promoted other officers over his head. He was a large man—he weighed 280 pounds by 1783—and lived a contented married life with the "lively and meddlesome but amiable" Mrs. Knox, who weighed 250 pounds and bore him twelve children (only three of whom lived to adulthood).