Authors: Nancy Rubin Stuart
Time only slowly mended Lucy and, for that matter, Knox. The following February, while congratulating Nathanael Greene on the British evacuation of the southern states, Knox alluded to the late Marcus as a “little angel.”
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Left unsaid was the exciting but potentially worrisome news: Lucy was once again pregnant.
Concerns over Knox’s military “family” simultaneously loomed. In December, when officers met to persuade Congress for reimbursements, they appointed Henry their chairman. By the twenty-ninth, representatives of that committee had presented a draft of Knox’s request for a lump sum pension, asserting, “We are in an unhappy predicament indeed, not to know who are responsible to us for a settlement of accounts.”
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Congress soon insisted they were not responsible: the Articles of Confederation did not mandate that they pay military salaries. That infuriated Knox. He thundered to his friend Gouverneur Morris, a Congressional delegate, that if “the present Constitution is so defective, why do not you great men call the people together and tell them so; that is, to have a convention of the States to form a better Constitution?”
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By March 10, officers at Washington’s headquarters at Newburgh were so frustrated that they circulated a letter calling for a strike. Known as the Newburgh Address, the letter assailed Congress for its neglect. It also urged the soldiers to refuse to defend America, urging them instead to “retire to some yet unsettled country, smile in your turn and mock when their [America’s] fear cometh on.”
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Horrified, Washington called a meeting for Saturday, March 15, at his headquarters. Suspecting that the fractious Horatio Gates had instigated the protest, Washington named him the meeting’s chairman. At noon, the officers glumly filed into the meeting hall. After arriving at the podium, Washington paused and then reached into his pocket to pull out a pair of glasses. “Gentlemen,” the commander in chief began, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country.”
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A gasp went through the audience. The men listened with rapt attention. The letter, Washington suggested in cool, reasoned tones, must have originated with a Loyalist or someone plotting to destroy the link between the army and government. “Let me entreat you, Gentlemen, not to take any measures, which, viewed in the calm light of reason, will lessen the dignity, and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained; let me request you rely upon the faith of your Country, and place a full confidence in the purity of the intentions of Congress.”
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Washington’s heartfelt appeal touched his listeners. Ultimately, as he hoped, the officers rejected the anonymous letter calling for mutiny. Soon afterwards, Congress agreed to grant the officers five years’ pay compounded by six percent interest.
To Knox that was still not enough: the pay did not wholly compensate for the sacrifices made by the officers of the Revolution. To remedy that, he drafted a plan for a hereditary organization called the Society of Cincinnati. Besides honoring veterans and their descendants, its mission was to help any members fallen on hard times. Immediately, social libertarians like Thomas Jefferson, Elbridge Gerry, and Samuel and John Adams objected, insisting that the Cincinnati smacked of a new aristocracy. To the outspoken author Mercy Otis Warren, Knox’s society mocked the “primeval principles of the late revolution.”
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In its defense Knox claimed the Cincinnati was an organization “whose intention is pure and uncorrupted by any sinister design.” Its state chapters must “erect some lonely . . . shelter for the unfortunate against the storms and tempest of poverty.”
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Even Washington, who was a lifelong Mason, agreed that the Cincinnati was an important organization. On May 14, 1783, he became its first president.
During the eight years of the Revolution, the “tempests of poverty” had swept over the Knoxes. After the British evacuation of Boston in 1776, Henry had depended upon his brother William to restore his book business, monitor his privateering investments, and oversee his finances. Failing to achieve that, William had sailed to Europe in search of more lucrative prospects. While visiting London in 1783, he located Lucy’s family—her mother; sister Hannah Flucker Urquart; her brother, Captain Thomas Flucker; and his wife, Sarah. When they met, William was shocked to find the Fluckers in mourning clothes, the consequence, they explained, of the recent and sudden death of Lucy’s father, Thomas. When William reported the news to Lucy, it must have released a flood of emotions in her—relief that William had reconnected with her family and grief over her father’s death.
On May 14, Knox wrote to Captain Flucker to convey his and Lucy’s condolences and inviting them to reconcile. “The war being over we may hope for a revival of intercourse and mutual goodwill between friends who have been separated. Suffer me to press you to write often and to confide in me in the light of a real brother.”
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In a separate letter Knox also sent his sympathies to Lucy’s mother.
Practical matters as well as propriety had inspired Knox to write. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had already seized Loyalist Thomas Flucker’s personal estate but not the inheritance of the Waldo Patent, vast tracts of land in the district of Maine extending from the Kennebec to the Penobscot rivers. An ancient inheritance from Lucy’s maternal grandfather, General Samuel Waldo, the Patent still belonged to the Fluckers. Once an American-British peace treaty was signed, Lucy and her family could inherit their shares.
Two days after Knox’s letter to the Fluckers, Lucy delivered another son the couple again named Marcus Camillus. Henry anxiously announced the birth to William, adding that the newborn seemed in “poor health.”
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For Lucy, the baby’s uncertain start was all too familiar, a haunting reminder of earlier difficulties.
Eleven weeks after the September 8, 1783, Treaty of Paris, the British prepared to evacuate New York. By the late morning of November 26, Knox and eight hundred soldiers marched from Harlem through McGowan’s Pass (now Central Park), halting at the Bowery and present-day Third Avenue.
At 1 p.m., cannon fire signaled the march of the British to the East River, where they boarded rowboats to reach the royal fleet bobbing in the harbor. In a final sneer, the redcoats had greased the flagpole over Fort George (the site of today’s U.S. Customs House) and left the Union Jack waving in the breeze. Within moments, sailor John Arsdale attached cleats to his shoes, climbed the pole, removed the British flag and raised the Stars and Stripes. Simultaneously, American troops, led by Knox, Washington, Governor Clinton, members of the Common Council, and civilians proceeded down Broadway to the Battery to cheering crowds. That historic moment made a lasting impression on one Manhattan woman:
We had been accustomed for a long time to military display in all the finish and finery of [British] garrison life. The troops just leaving us were as if equipped for a show and with their scarlet uniforms and burnished arms made a brilliant display. The troops that marched in, on the contrary, were ill-clad and weather-beaten and made a forlorn appearance. But then, they were
our
troops and as I looked at them and thought upon all they had done and suffered for us, my heart and my eyes were full.
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For ten days, city residents celebrated with parades, parties, balls, toasts, and dinners, culminating with Washington’s departure on December 4. By midday, the Continental officers had gathered in a low-ceilinged room at the Fraunces Tavern on the Battery as Washington reviewed the previous eight years. “With a heart full of love and gratitude I now take my leave of you,” he said. “I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.” As the men raised their glasses for a toast, Washington asked them one by one to “come and take me by the hand.” Henry Knox, “being nearest to him,” took Washington’s hand, his eyes filling with tears, and was followed by the other officers.
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Later, from a barge in the harbor, Washington waved a final farewell. “Our much loved friend the General has gone from this city to Congress and from thence to Mount Vernon,” Knox subsequently wrote Lafayette.
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By December 30, only five hundred soldiers remained at West Point with another two hundred scattered throughout other key posts. Knox had been charged with the heart-breaking task of dismissing the men, many of whom lacked the funds to return home. “This business has been painful on account of discharging the officers and soldiers at this [severe] season without pay, and in many instances the men are miserably clad,” he unhappily wrote Congressman Osgood that day.
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Six weeks later, Knox returned to his hometown, Boston.
Awaiting him in a rented farmhouse in the Dorchester neighborhood of the city were Lucy and the children. Owned by the Welles banking family, their two-story saltbox sat at the corner of contemporary Welles Avenue and Washington Street. To Lucy, the long-delayed dream for a normal life had become a reality—a home of her own, a brood of children, and her husband by her side.
With the termination of the war, the prediction of “her Harry” had at last come true, a time “when my Lucy and I shall be no more separated, when we shall set down free from the hurry, bustle, and impertinence of the World, in some sequestered Vale where the Education of our children and the preparation on our own parts for a pure & more happy region shall employ the principal part of our time.”
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PROBLEMS AS CHILLING AS
the snowdrifts around the Dorchester farmhouse preoccupied the Knoxes during the winter of 1784. The first were the couple’s precarious finances; the second, their stalled reconciliation with the Fluckers. Both, the couple realized, could be resolved if Henry could settle the late Thomas Flucker’s estate and inheritances of the Waldo Patent.
By April 10, Henry had proposed those ideas to Lucy’s brother, Captain Thomas Flucker, adding that he hoped to “secure as much as possible” for the family.
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Thomas had responded warmly but warned that both estates were fraught with legal complexities. Under the Confiscation Act of 1778, Massachusetts had seized his late father’s estate, but some of those assets still belonged to his mother, Hannah. Moreover, the Waldo Patent had other claimants, including the Fluckers’ cousins, the Winslows.
Gamely, Henry agreed to tackle both estates. To his fifty-eight-year-old mother-in-law, Hannah, he wrote on August 3, “You may rest fully assured that nothing shall be left undone on my part.”
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In a second letter Henry asked his brother-in-law, Thomas, to convey any new information he had on the Waldo estate.
Unmentioned was Henry’s personal knowledge of the Maine properties, for that summer he traveled through part of the Waldo Patent’s 576,000 acres. The tour had been deliberate, a consequence of his cronyism with friends at the state legislature who had appointed him a commissioner to settle land disputes with the Penobscots of Maine. By autumn, Thomas Flucker had expressed his family’s approval of Henry’s offer, assuring him that “your ideas respecting what should be done with my mother’s property will have the greatest weight.”
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A week later, Lucy’s mother, Hannah, also wrote, thanking Knox for his efforts to “secure as much as possible of my late husband’s estate for the benefit of my family.” After describing the debts surrounding that estate, she added a sentence that must have brought Lucy to tears: “I hope for the pleasure of hearing from you soon that you, my dear daughter & children are well and happy.” Still further down was another, even more poignant line. “I intend writing my daughter soon . . . she will excuse me now, as I have been lately very ill with the bilious cholic”—a vague medical term related to pains and swelling in the abdomen.
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That November, Lucy gave birth to a daughter, Julia, named after the infant who had died at the Pluckemin Artillery Cantonment. By December 8, the Knoxes had also moved to a newly rented home on Boston’s then-rural Beacon Hill. The “mansion” or “farm,” as its owner, portrait painter John Singleton Copley, called it, was a sprawling, hip-roofed farmhouse overlooking Boston Common and bordered by a dirt path called Beacon Street, two acres west of Governor Hancock’s granite mansion. Behind the farmhouse stood a terraced garden, a fruit orchard, and pastures extending beyond contemporary Charles Street to the tidal flats of Charles River Bay.
Soon after the Knoxes’ move, a letter arrived from Lafayette explaining that Henry’s brother, William, had suffered a mental collapse in Europe. “It grieves me to think I am going to wound your good heart,” the Frenchman wrote, “yet find it my duty as a friend rather to give you a pain . . . [or] leave you in the cruelest anxiety.” During his emotional crisis, William had crossed the channel to England to live with his friend, London merchant James Webber. Somewhat later, Lafayette received a letter from a Dr. Bancroft reporting that Knox’s brother had improved enough to soon “be able to go out.” To speed his recovery, the Marquis offered to pay Dr. Bancroft “to see that Billy is well attended with physicians.”
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Another, happier life-changing event for Knox followed when on March 8, 1785, Congress appointed him secretary at war, forerunner of the later and more familiar title, secretary of war. Having longed for that post, Henry proudly wrote Washington on March 24, “I have accepted the appointment and shall expect to be in New York about the 15th of next month.”
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Still, the new position presented challenges, the most immediate being its modest annual salary of $2,450 a year. From earlier financial reversals, Knox knew he had no flair for business. “From the habits imbibed during the war, and from the opinion of my friends that I should make but an indifferent trader, I thought it was well to accept it, although the salary would be but a slender support,” he ruefully admitted to Washington in his March letter.
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