Authors: Nancy Rubin Stuart
Lacking Congressional support, the commander in chief resorted to a desperate plan. On Christmas Day 1776, Washington ordered 2,400 men to McKonkey’s Ferry for a nocturnal crossing of the Delaware. Although the weather remained clear all day, by 11 p.m. Christmas night, high winds and blinding snows slowed the soldiers’ crossing. Through it all, Knox’s booming voice directed pilots of the flat-bottom boats carrying cannons and horses across the swift-running Delaware. “The floating ice in the river made the labour almost incredible,” he later acknowledged.
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At dawn, after an eight-mile march to Trenton, Washington’s forces routed the Hessians in a stunning victory that signaled the turning tide of the Revolution.
The next day, Washington told Knox of his appointment as a brigadier-general. “It was unsolicited on my part though it was not wholly unexpected,” he joyfully wrote Lucy on January 2, 1777. “Will it give you satisfaction or pleasure in being informed that the Congress have created me a general officer, a brigadier with the entire command of the artillery. If so, I shall be happy.”
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Although proud, Lucy sensed that her husband’s new rank would require further sacrifices on her part. Henceforth, she must play mistress to Henry’s marriage to the Revolution. Soon afterwards, and probably not coincidentally, she decided to leave Wallingford, Connecticut, whose residents she found ill-mannered and crude. “Take care, my love, of permitting your disgust for the Connecticut people to escape your lips,” the ever-diplomatic Henry warned her. “Indiscreet expressions are handed from town to town and a long while remembered.”
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His warning probably came too late. Soon afterwards, Knox received an angry letter from the landlord who had rented the Wallingford house to Lucy and her friend Mary Pollard. His complaint? The crockery in the house had been broken and twenty-five gallons of West Indian rum were missing from the cellar. Possibly the two women had drowned their sorrows in alcohol. More likely, though, a group of locals had entered the house and avenged themselves on Lucy after her departure for Boston.
In late February 1777, the military hero Benedict Arnold also arrived in Boston. A former New Haven apothecary and West Indies trader, the newly widowed officer was an attractive, well-built man, about five feet nine inches tall with a dark complexion and strikingly pale blue eyes. The preceding November he had famously staged a strategic coup at Lake Champlain’s Valcour Island that had prevented General Guy Carlton from retaking Ticonderoga. Those who met Arnold rarely forgot his charm and charisma—nor his formidable vitriol, when crossed.
Through Lucy, Arnold met a fifteen-year-old beauty, Elizabeth “Betsy” DeBlois. Enchanted, the warrior showered the brunette with gifts, among them a golden-diamond ring. To advance the romance Arnold begged Lucy to speak in his favor to “the heavenly Miss DeBlois.” Delighted, Lucy presented Betsy with the colonel’s love letter and arranged for delivery of his trunk of fashionable gowns. Meanwhile, Arnold reminded Lucy that he waited “under the most anxious suspense until I have the favor of a line from you.”
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Despite Lucy’s best efforts, Arnold’s suit fell flat. “Miss DeBlois has positively refused to listen to the general, which, with other mortifications will come very hard upon him,” Lucy wrote Henry four days later.
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Among those disappointments was Congress’s reluctance to promote Arnold a major general.
Infuriated, the warrior wrote Washington demanding a trial, which the commander in chief discouraged. “Public bodies” he reminded Arnold, “are not amendable for the actions.” Arnold’s failure to obtain a major generalship, Washington assured him, was “not overlooked for want of merit in you” but rather from an agreement among Congressional delegates that they must award generalships evenly throughout the states.
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Still that seemed unfair, especially when, as Knox later wrote Lucy, five younger men were finally promoted over Arnold. That, he anxiously added, probably “pushes [Arnold] out of the service. I hope the affair will be remedied.”
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Ironically, Arnold’s patriotism probably contributed to Betsy’s refusal of him. According to one account, her meddlesome Tory mother had objected to Arnold’s political views. Soon afterwards, Betsy attempted to elope with a Boston corset maker, but Mrs. DeBlois allegedly stopped them at the altar.
By then, Betsy had returned Arnold’s trunk to Lucy. Lacking European imports because of the war, Lucy and her friend Caty Greene rifled through its contents. Nathanael’s trim wife found a gown but plump Lucy only a scarf. At the time, Arnold would not let the items go, but the following December Lucy asked for the scarf again. Major David Salisbury Franks, the warrior’s aide de camp and a relative of Becky Franks, explained that Arnold “cannot part with any part of the contents of the trunk you mention until he comes to Boston.” At that point, he would “give you the preference he desires.”
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Another distraction that spring was Lucy’s sale of her father’s looted townhouse. Since women not could hold property in their own name, Lucy arranged with an attorney to place the £5,500 of proceeds in Henry’s name. “This affair gives me pain (not that Papa will disapprove of it for he must certainly think it a wise step when he knows the circumstances) but for fear that it should be misconstrued,” she wrote Henry on April 3.
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Implied was Lucy’s fear that her father might interpret that as Henry taking permanent possession of those monies rather than sending them to Flucker in London after the war.
Subsequent to the property transfer, Lucy submitted to the variolation against smallpox. “My heart palpitates at the thought of my dearest Lucy being in the least danger,” Knox wrote from the army camp on the Raritan near Middlebrook.
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On April 30, Lucy cheerfully reported that, after three days’ illness, she was on the mend. Although she had no mirror, she could feel twenty pockmarks on her face. “I am almost glad you do not see it,” she wrote. “I don’t believe I should get one kiss, and yet the doctor tells me it is very becoming.”
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Still Henry refused to let her visit. “You ask me why I give you no encouragement. Your safety and happiness is the sole object of my heart,” he again explained. “I however anxious to have you with me cannot consent to a step which will most inevitably . . . reiterate . . . the disagreeable situation” of Lucy’s earlier visit to New York.
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That note infuriated her. Living perilously with Henry was preferable to being lonely with difficult strangers. The latest example, Lucy wrote from Sewall’s Point (contemporary Brookline, Massachusetts), was General William Heath’s twenty-six-year-old wife, Mary Heath, who was “so stiff it is impossible to be sociable with her.”
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For all his insistence that Lucy remain in Boston, Knox expected her to write more often. “I was . . . mortified [disappointed] beyond description in not having a line from you,” he lectured her. “What in the name of love is the reason? I write you by every opportunity and expect the same from her who is far dearer to me than life, especially at a time when my anxiety is so great upon the account of your recovery.”
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The only remedy for those anxieties was a visit. No longer did she care about “the luxuries of life,” Lucy insisted. She was “willing to taste nothing but bread and water” if only she could join Henry. Other wives had joined their husbands at Middlebrook. “Happy Mrs. Washington, happy Mrs. Gates. In short, I do not recollect an instance like my own.”
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By July, Lucy was seething. “I am resolved nothing shall prevent my coming to you in early September, but your positive refusal,” she finally announced in a letter dated July 17. “In which case, I will try to be as indifferent as I shall then think you are.” Later in that letter, Lucy confessed the reason behind her rage—fears that “her Harry” would “fall into the usual error of absent lovers—that indifference will take place of that refined affection, which you have entertained for me.”
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Implied was the threat of the women of the Continental army’s baggage train, who served as the army’s cooks, seamstresses, nurses, and laundresses and trailed a mile or two behind the regiments in carts and crude wagons. Some were married and others single and still others were willing to provide sexual favors in exchange for cash. In his war diary, private Joseph Plumb Martin penned a common slur about the baggage train: “‘Tag, Rag and bobtail . . . some in rags and some in jags,’ but none in velvet gowns.’”
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Fears about his fidelity were ridiculous, according to Henry. “There never was a purer . . . affection than what I profess for you,” he wrote. He was “indifferent indeed to all the rest of your sex.”
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War councils, drills with his artillery corps, and letters to Congress filled his waking hours, especially during the last discouraging months of 1777. On September 11, General Howe had defeated the Continentals at Brandywine, staged a standoff at Germantown, and, on the twenty-sixth, occupied Philadelphia.
Two weeks later news arrived from upstate New York that marked a change in the course of the Revolution—the patriots’ triumph over General Burgoyne at Saratoga. Euphoric, Henry wrote Lucy about his consequently celebratory cannonade. “They [Howe’s men] have been very angry for our
feux de joie . . .
and say that by and by [we] shall bring ourselves into contempt for propagating such known falsehood. Poor fellows! Nothing but Britain must triumph.”
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Nevertheless, in early December, after Howe’s skirmish at White Marsh, New Jersey, Washington ordered his eleven thousand men to retreat into the countryside northwest of Philadelphia. “The situation of our army on account of clothing is such as to render a winter’s campaign impossible,” Henry morosely wrote Lucy. “We have a mind to put an end to the war by starving all the soldiers.”
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During his trip to New England to recruit soldiers and order munitions that winter, Knox visited Lucy, but their reunion was interrupted by a February 26 note from Nathanael Greene. “The army has been in great distress since you left,” Knox’s friend wrote to him from Valley Forge. Many of the soldiers had worn out their clothes and were nearly naked. And they were starving. The soldiers were “seven days without meat and several days without bread.”
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In his haste to return to that camp, Knox conceded that Lucy could join him at Valley Forge the following spring.
On May 1, Arnold returned to New Haven and a hero’s welcome. The previous September 7, while leading a bold offensive at Freeman’s Farm, Saratoga, the Hessians shot Arnold’s horse and pierced the warrior’s left leg with a musket ball. As the horse fell, it landed on Arnold’s wounded limb and splintered his thigh bone. Even before that his leg was in bad shape, having been badly injured a year earlier at Quebec. Now it was so badly shattered that doctors urged an amputation. Though writhing in pain, the warrior refused. For the next five months, Arnold lay in Albany’s General Hospital with his leg encased in a wooden contraption.
By December Washington, who considered Arnold his favorite fighting general, conveyed wishes for his speedy recovery and promised that, once recovered, he would be awarded with a new field command. A week after Arnold’s return to New Haven, Washington sent him a set of French epaulettes and a sword knot in “testimony of my sincere regard and approbation of your conduct.”
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Arnold consequently decided to visit Washington in Valley Forge, even though his crippled leg meant he had to travel by carriage. Somehow—and here the details become hazy—the war hero agreed to transport Lucy and her toddler with him.
Privately, Arnold still seethed with resentments. After Saratoga, his blustery rival, General Horatio Gates, had claimed sole responsibility for the triumph. Arnold’s men knew the truth, that their leader had pounded the enemy at Freeman’s Farm without Gates’s permission while that general tarried behind. Yet neither the nicknames the soldiers conferred upon Arnold—the “Hero of Freeman’s Farm” and the “Eagle of Saratoga”—deflated Gates’s boasts or convinced Congress to recognize Arnold’s critical contribution. The final insult arrived at Arnold’s hospital bedside in December: a notice from Washington that he had been appointed a major general. Congress had not announced it publicly. Instead, the commander in chief was to inform Arnold privately about his change in rank.
Personally, Arnold was also in a funk. That spring he learned that his former Boston sweetheart, Betsy DeBlois, was still unwed. With soaring hopes he wrote to her again:
Twenty times have I taken my pen to write to you, and so often has my trembling hand refused to obey the dictates of my heart. . . . Long have I struggled to efface your heavenly image from it. . . . Dear Betsy, suffer that heavenly bosom . . . to expand with friendship at last and let me know my fate.
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In response, the Boston belle asked him to stop writing to her.
By mid-May 1777, Arnold, Lucy Knox, and her toddler set off from New Haven. Each snap of the coachman’s reins upon the horses brought Lucy closer to Knox. Arnold, meanwhile, brooded over his forthcoming visit to Washington.
On May 20, two days after John André’s Mischianza in Philadelphia, the unlikely threesome arrived at Valley Forge.
“
BOTH LUCYS ARRIVED IN
perfect health and are situated in my hut in the center of the park, perhaps better situated than any other ladies in Camp,” Henry Knox boasted in a letter to his brother William May 27, 1778. The “park” was Valley Forge, at whose center stood Knox’s log hut, adjacent to his artillery center in which stood cannons, howitzers, and field pieces.
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While Knox spent his days training his men, Lucy visited with wives of other officers, watched her daughter play with their youngsters, and helped Martha Washington sew shirts and knit stockings for soldiers. She also admired the portrait of “her Harry,” painted by the artist Captain Charles Willson Peale, along with those he had done of Washington, Nathanael Greene, and Clement Biddle, commissary general at Valley Forge. Evenings were spent with officers and their wives in communal song fests. Yet, as Knox predicted to William, neither Lucy nor their toddler could enjoy camp life for long, “because the army was preparing for action.”
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