“He died with the Effects of the Measles”

Henry Marchant (1741–1796, shown here) was a rising young lawyer in Rhode Island.

Born on Martha’s Vineyard, Marchant grew up in Newport and attended the College of Philadelphia (one of the schools that became the University of Pennsylvania in 1791).

In 1771 Marchant was appointed to be Rhode Island’s attorney general. He set sail for London to observe judicial practices there. His notes on James Somerset’s freedom case are an important document of that episode.

Marchant headed home in November 1772. On arriving in Boston, he received a boatload of bad news, as he told Benjamin Franklin in a letter. One loss was particularly close:

Mr. [Tuthill] Hubbart next informed me of the Death of my Third and only Son a Child of Three years old. He died with the Effects of the Measles, the Day after I left London. My two Daughters had been very ill with the same Disorder but are since happily recovered.

Measles was a common disease in colonial America. Martha Washington and other people at Mount Vernon caught it in 1760, and some of her enslaved workers in 1773. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benny caught measles in 1772, like little William Marchant. In 1788 Henry Knox reported that he had five children going through the disease.

In 1783 Abigail Adams reported that her son Charles had came down with the measles, adding: “it has proved very mortal in Boston. Tis said 300 children have been buried since last March.” Abigail’s sister Mary Cranch included a cousin’s descriptions of his symptoms in a letter in 1790:

I know you Will rejoice to hear that cousin Tom has got comfortable through the Measles. He caught them at Cambridge the day he arriv’d from new york— He came here the Monday after & told me he thought he had them but return’d the next day—promising to return as soon as he felt the Symtoms The Monday following his cousin William brought him home in a close carriage but he did not break out till Wednesday.

he was pretty sick but not very bad till they came out. He had Several faint turns before & sometimes felt as if he did not weigh a pound after they broke out— The rash came first but the measles soon follow’d thick enough, his cough was troublesome & his Fever pretty high but upon the whole I think he has had them light to what people in general have or to what you & I had. There are many People Who have them now extreamly bad & many have died with them—

Measles was overshadowed by smallpox, another disease that produced fever and spots, because smallpox was much deadlier. On the other hand, measles is much more contagious—spreading far more quickly and easily than Covid-19, H.I.V., and other viruses we’ve faced in recent decades.

We don’t have to worry about measles as much as past generations did because in 1954 medical scientists developed a vaccine. Cases in the U.S. of A. dropped precipitously after the government approved regular immunizations in 1963.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy, Jr., has cockamamie ideas about vaccines. In fact, Kennedy was chosen for his cockamamie ideas—he has no other connection to health services. In particular, experts blame Kennedy for promoting a measles epidemic in American Samoa in 2019.

During his confirmation hearings Kennedy made noises about believing in vaccines, pointing out that all his children have been immunized. But as soon as he was in office and a media outlet gives him free rein to talk, Kennedy returned to spouting all sorts of lies about the nature of the vaccine, its effectiveness, and its side effects.

This past month, Kennedy demanded that the Centers for Disease Control adapt to his anti-vaccine beliefs, cancel highly promising research, and curtail the availability of Covid-19 boosters for Americans. When the head of the C.D.C. refused to go along, Kennedy and Trump forced her out, prompting the next level of managers to resign in protest.

There are many ways the Trump administration is harming people and causing deaths around the globe. The effects of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusade, if not stopped, will be among the most damaging. Parents will once again be feeling the same grief as Henry Marchant for no good reason.

“Siege and Liberation of Boston,” 7–8 Aug.

Registration is open for the third Pursuit of History Weekend that I’ve helped to program, this one on “The Siege and Liberation of Boston” on 7–8 August.

Organized with the folks who manage History Camp, these sessions are designed to offer in-depth looks at developments 250 years ago through expert speakers and visits to the actual sites where the history happened.

We’ll start on the slope of Breed’s Hill in Charlestown, exploring what turned out to be the decisive battle of the first campaign of the Revolutionary War. Sam Forman and Mary Adams will introduce two of the leaders of the American forces, Dr. Joseph Warren and John Stark. We’ll walk the battlefield and hear about ongoing investigations of the landscape from Boston City Archaeologist Joe Bagley. Then we’ll take a road trip to other places that the Continental Army fortified, which few visitors see. That day we plan to have meals at two restaurants that go back to the eighteenth century.

On the following day, we’ll move into the North End, collaborating with the Paul Revere House, the Old North Church, and veteran tour guide Charles Bahne to offer an in-depth look at the experience of living inside besieged Boston. Finally, I’ll speak about George Washington as a new commander-in-chief, what he thought his job was, and what he really learned.

The Pursuit of History webpage for this event has a video of me explaining more. Sam Forman and I are also scheduled to talk about the siege and this event in the History Camp discussion series on Thursday, 10 July, at 8:00 P.M.

This Pursuit of History Weekend is not, in fact, on a weekend but on a Thursday and Friday. That’s to allow people to also attend History Camp Boston on Saturday, 9 August, and even the related tours the next day if their history interests are still unsated.

And speaking of History Camp Boston 2025, I’ll be speaking there, too. My topic is related to the end of the Boston siege. That talk is called “Henry Knox, Loyalist?” It offers a new interpretation of that American general’s rise to prominence.

“The Memorialist should apply to that source for relief”

In 1787, the Confederation Congress was meeting in New York, at City Hall and the Fraunces Tavern (shown here).

When Henry Howell Williams asked for more than £3,600 in compensation for losses from Noddle’s Island twelve years earlier, the Congress referred his request to its Board of Treasury. (This must have happened after 10 Apr 1787, when Williams wrote to Secretary of War Henry Knox asking for his help with this petition.)

That treasury board consisted of three men, all recent Congress delegates:

• Samuel Osgood, a merchant from Andover and Continental Army veteran who had moved to New York. He would later be the first Postmaster General under the new Constitution.
• Walter Livingston of New York, like Osgood a former army commissary.
• Arthur Lee of Virginia, who had studied both medicine and law in Britain, helped John Dickinson to write “The Liberty Song,” and spent the 1770s in Europe as an American lobbyist and diplomat annoying other American lobbyists and diplomats.

These were the same three men who considered Richard Gridley’s request for payment for a horse killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill (fought 250 years ago today).

On 1 Aug 1788 that board told the Congress:

the damage done to the property of the Memorialist, and the articles stated to have been applied to the benefit of the United States, was previous to the formation of an Army, under the authority of the Union.

The Board are therefore of opinion, that if the evidence adduced in proof of the value and quantity of the articles stated to have been applied to the public use was more satisfactory than in fact it is, it would be improper to establish a Precedent, in the present instance, for an admission of numerous Claims, on the merits of which it would be impossible for the Officers of the Treasury to form any competent judgement.

The general fact, of a very valuable property belonging to the Memoralist, having been either destroyed or used for the benefit of the Army assembled at Boston in the month of May 1775, by order of a Board of General Officers, appears by the Certificate of the late Commissioner of Accounts for the State of Massachusets, marked A, to have been well established:

Inasmuch however as the aforesaid property appears to have been applied for the immediate benefit of the State, and as the merits of the Claim can be best ascertained under their authority, The Board are of opinion, that the Memorialist should apply to that source for relief; and should Claims of a similar description be hereafter allowed by the general Board of Commissioners, the State will obtain reimbursement for such sums as shall appear an equitable compensation for the real damage sustained by the Memorialist.

In short, the Congress sent Williams back to Massachusetts since the Battle of Chelsea Creek happened before any Continental Army legally existed.

It’s probably also significant that the Confederation Congress was on its last legs. It didn’t have enough money to pay all its bills. So few delegates were coming to New York that the body often lacked a quorum—hence the use of commissioners for day-to-day administration, and the long delay in actions. By the time this board submitted its report, a new Constitution was being publicly debated.

TOMORROW: Back to Massachusetts.

Visiting Henry Howell Williams on Noddle’s Island

For the last third of the eighteenth century, Henry Howell Williams (1736-1802) leased Noddle’s Island in Boston harbor for farming.

Williams married Elizabeth Bell, daughter of the previous lessee, in 1762, and they moved onto the island. They had a large house on the western end.

The Williamses started raising a family there: six children born between 1765 and 1772, and another due to arrive on 6 July 1775.

Henry Howell Williams’s runaway advertisements in the Boston newspapers showed his household sometimes included other people as well: an eighteen-year-old Irish servant named Joseph Sullivan in 1764; a twenty-three-year-old “Negro Girl Servant, named PHILLIS,” in 1778.

Williams periodically advertised a stallion raised on the island as available “to cover.” That horse was named “the Young Barbe.”

In several summers Williams ran ads chastising people for coming onto the island to shoot birds, enumerating the harm they did:

• “killed a Number of my Sheep” (1768).
• “treading down the Grass on the mowing Ground” (1769).
• “to conceal it, throw the [dead] Sheep into the Wells or Pond Holes” (1769).
• “putting my Family in Danger of their Lives” (1770).
• “bringing on Dogs, and driving my Stock from one End of the Island to the other” (1772).

The apex of these complaints appeared in August 1784:

the 9th Inst. as a number of men were mowing, a scoundrel of a gunner fired his piece and covered one of the men with a shower of small shot, which providentially did but little damage

Williams forbade other people from hunting on Noddle’s Island. Of course, the fact that he kept placing the ads meant people kept ignoring his ban.

I didn’t find any notices about hunting from Henry H. Williams in 1773. But the 26 July Boston Evening-Post ran this news item:

Last Saturday…Afternoon, Mr. Henry Knox, of this Town, Stationer, being a Fowling on Noddles Island, in discharging his Piece at some Game, it burst near the Breech, whereby his left Hand was shattered in a very dangerous manner; his little Finger entirely tore away, and the two adjoining ones were obliged to be cut off at the middle Joints, his Thumb and Fore Finger only remaining, and his Hand being otherwise so much hurt that it is feared whether even these will be saved.

I quoted the letter Knox wrote to one of his surgeons in the following March back here.

It’s possible that Henry H. Williams had given Knox special permission to go hunting on Noddle’s Island that July. And it’s possible Williams heard about the young bookseller’s accident and muttered, “Serves him right.”

Two Revolutionary Symposia Coming Up in New York

The month of May brings two gatherings of Revolutionary War researchers in upstate New York, just a scenic drive away from Boston.

Saratoga 250 will host its fourth annual Turning Point Symposium in Schuylerville on 3 May with these speakers:

• Dr. Phillip Hamilton – “Washington’s Artillerist: Henry Knox Commands the Continental Guns”
• Matthew Keagle – “My Dinner with Andre?: Henry Knox Arrives at Fort George on Lake George”
• Dr. Bruce M. Venter – “Irascible Ethan Allen: He Cared Little About Ticonderoga’s Guns”
• Michele Gabrielson – “American Calliope: The Writings of Mercy Otis Warren and Her Friendship with Henry Knox”
• Dr. Mark Edward Lender – “The Woman at the Gun Reconsidered: Molly Pitcher’s Legendary Performance at Monmouth”

Registration for that day is $89 and includes two meals.

The following day, 4 May, Hamilton will conduct a bus tour of the “Sled Tracks of Henry Knox.” That has a separate registration cost.

At the end of the month, the Fort Plain Museum convenes its annual American Revolution Conference in Johnstown. This year’s presenters include:

• Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson – “The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780”
• Maj. Gen. Jason Q. Bohm, U.S.M.C. (Ret.) – “The Birth and Early Operations of the Marine Corps: 250 Years in the Making”
• Alexander R. Cain – “We Stood Our Ground: 250th of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775”
• Abby Chandler – “Choosing Sides: North Carolina’s Regulator Rebellion and the American Revolution”
• Gary Ecelbarger – “The Mammoth of Monmouth: George Washington’s 1778 Campaign in New Jersey”
• Michael P. Gabriel – “Richard Montgomery and the Other Invasion of Canada”
• Shirley L. Green – “Integrating Enslaved and Free: Rhode Island’s Revolutionary Black Regiment”
• Don N. Hagist – “Marching from Peace into War: British Soldiers in 1775 America”
• Patrick H. Hannum – “The Virginia Campaign of 1775-76: Kemp’s Landing & Great Bridge”
• Wayne Lenig – “The Mohawk Valley’s Committee of Safety in 1775”
• James L. Nelson – “Bunker Hill: The First Battle of the American Revolution”
• Eric H. Schnitzer – “Breaking Convention: How a Fussy Detail about British Uniforms Doomed Burgoyne’s Army to Captivity”
• William P. Tatum III, Ph.D., the James F. Morrison Mohawk Valley Resident Historian – “‘To Quell, Suppress, and Bring Them to Reason by Force’: Combatting the Loyalist Threat in New York during 1775”
• Bruce M. Venter – “‘It is infinitely better to have a few good men than many indifferent ones’: Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys Take Fort Ticonderoga”

This program extends from the afternoon of Friday, 30 May, to the morning of Sunday, 1 June. Registration for people not already members of the museum costs $160 and includes lunch on Saturday.

The Fort Plain conference also offers a bus tour—in this case beforehand, on Thursday, 29 May. Alex Cain will guide attendees along the Battle Road in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. So that would be a busman’s holiday for folks coming from the Boston area.

“Secrets on the Road to Concord” via Fort Ti, 9 Feb.

On Sunday, 9 February, at 2:00 P.M., I’ll deliver an online talk about “Secrets on the Road to Concord” in Fort Ticonderoga’s Author Series.

The event description says:

The British march to Concord in April 1775 set off the Revolutionary War, but what exactly were the redcoats looking for? Looking at General Thomas Gage’s papers reveals that his main goal was to destroy four brass cannon that Patriots had spirited out of Boston months before. In the early months of 1775, while the provincials worked to build an artillery force, General Gage used military spies and paid agents to locate those weapons. Those maneuvers led to a fatal clash on the road to Concord.

This event is free for Fort Ti members, $10 for others. The webpage asks people to register by 5:00 P.M. on Friday, 7 February, in order to receive the link.

Fort Ticonderoga has a long history, but many people know it as the source of artillery pieces that Col. Henry Knox brought back to the siege of Boston in 1776. (He also collected cannon from Crown Point and other sites along Lake Champlain.)

Years later, as secretary of war, Knox returned two of Boston’s four brass cannon to Massachusetts. But first he had them engraved with the names “HANCOCK” and “ADAMS,” and this story:

Sacred to Liberty.
This is one of four cannon,
which constituted the whole train
of Field Artillery,
possessed by the British colonies of
North America,
at the commencement of the war.
on the 19th of april 1775.

This cannon
and its fellow
belonging to a number of citizens of
Boston,
were used in many engagements
during the war.

The other two, the property of the
Government of Massachusetts
were taken by the enemy.
By order of the United States
in Congress assembled
May 19th, 1788.

Those engravings made those two cannon unique and easily traceable, which helped my research immensely. At the same time, the words promulgated a false picture of the provincials’ artillery force.

The Massachusetts committee of safety had far more than “four cannon” under its control in April 1775—more than three dozen, in fact. It had only four small brass (bronze) cannon, but it had a bunch of iron guns suitable as “Field Artillery.” Six of those cannon went onto Bunker Hill, and five were lost.

In addition, if we’re talking about “the British colonies of North America,” Rhode Island sent brass field-pieces to the siege under Capt. John Crane—who became one of Knox’s top artillery officers. New Hampshire had artillery from the raid on Fort William and Mary. And I’m not even bothering to count what other colonies had for their militia companies and shore fortifications.

I’m not sure why Knox told the history that way, especially since his audience included veterans and insiders like himself who knew the whole story. That telling does enhance the importance of his own mission to New York.

I also don’t get the distinction Knox made between one pair owned by “a number of citizens of Boston” and the other by “the Government of Massachusetts” since they were all considered Massachusetts militia guns and he was returning the “citizens” guns to the state.

“You will have doubtless have an account of their surprizing Ticonderoga”

One striking feature of Richard Lechmere’s 22 May 1775 letter to Henry Seymour Conway, partially transcribed here, is how well informed the Loyalist merchant was about events outside besieged Boston.

Lechmere wrote to the British politician:

you will have doubtless have an account of their surprizing Ticonderoga in which Fort, there was upwards of One hundred pieces of Cannon, and some Mortars, these they are bringing down, and a Considerable train are expected to arrive from Providence to Morrow...

Col. Ethan Allen had led the takeover of Fort Ticonderoga on 10 May, only twelve days before. Lechmere not only had that news, but also an estimate of how many artillery pieces the rebels would find there.

Lechmere understood that ordnance was to be brought to the siege lines around Boston. The Massachusetts committee of safety’s orders for Col. Benedict Arnold also stated that possibility. It wasn’t some wild brainstorm of Henry Knox later in the year.

The letter also refers to “a Considerable train…from Providence.” On 8 May the Rhode Island government had commissioned John Crane as a captain of an artillery company. However, he brought only four small cannon to the siege lines. Those weren’t “Considerable,” even by Rhode Island standards, though they did double the number of brass artillery pieces available to the Continentals. Most artillery in Rhode Island was, I suspect, being held back for privateering.

But that wasn’t all Lechmere had heard about. He had heard news from Pennsylvania:

Mr. [Benjamin] Franklyn & General [Charles] Lee are Arriv’d at Philadelphia the former chosen a Delegate to the Congress & most probably the Latter may be appointed Generalissimo of the Rebel Army. Birds of a feather flock together

Lechmere probably had only a dim awareness, if any, of George Washington from Virginia. Lee, on the other hand, was a celebrated veteran of the British army who had come through Massachusetts the previous year. Lechmere wasn’t the only contemporary to mention him as a candidate to be commander-in-chief.

Lt. Ragg in Captivity

The Battle of Brooklyn on 27 Aug 1776 didn’t end well for the Continental Army. Gen. Sir William Howe’s forces inflicted heavy casualties and drove the Americans off Long Island.

At eight o’clock that evening, Gen. George Washington’s military secretary, Robert Hanson Harrison (shown here), wrote to John Hancock as chair of the Continental Congress:

a Smart engagement ensued between the Enemy and our Detachments, which being unequal to the force they had to contend with, have sustained a pretty considerable loss—At least many of our Men are missing, among those that have not returnd are Genls [John] Sullivan & Lord Stirling—

The Enemy’s loss is not known certainly, but we are told by such of our Troops that were in the Engagement and that have come in, that they had many killed and wounded—Our party brought off a Lieutt, Sergt, and Corporal with 20 privates prisoners.

Sullivan and Stirling were prisoners, but at least they survived. Hundreds of other Americans were dead.

Continental commanders hoped this would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory for the Crown, like Bunker Hill. Gen. Henry Knox wrote to his wife Lucy, “The enemy lost nearly 1000 kill’d among whom was General [James] Grant and Capt. [Andrew] Neilson of the 52d.”

In fact, Gen. Howe reported only 63 dead from the Crown forces, and fewer than 400 casualties in all. Gen. Grant was fine; a lieutenant colonel of the same name died.

Later American writers seeking actions to praise in that battle had to content themselves with gallant ways to lose. The noble sacrifice of the Marylanders holding off the enemy! The sly evacuation across the river to Manhattan!

Among the few solid successes Knox could firmly claim was, “We took a Lt. Ragg whom I knew at Boston and 25 Grenadiers of the marines.” And even that overstated the details slightly. Harrison’s numbers were closer.

Lt. John Ragg had led Sgt. David Wallace, Cpls. Thomas Pike and Edward Gibbon, and twenty marine privates into captivity because he and his superiors had mistaken the Delaware Continentals for Hessians.

Behind the American lines, on 29 August Gen. William Heath ordered Lt. Nathan Umstead to conduct those prisoners of war to Fairfield, Connecticut.

A month later, Thaddeus Burr of the Fairfield committee of inspection wrote back to Gen. Washington, reporting that they had sent Ragg and his servant, Pvt. Benjamin Jones, on to Middletown. The other twenty-one men were taken to Wallingford and “placed in the Parishes in the interior part of the County agreable to Rules of Congress.”

There was just one more thing, Burr told the commander-in-chief: Who would pay for “the charges of marching them”? The committee had fed those prisoners for eleven days and paid “a Sergeant and Six from our Battery…a penny a Mile” to lead them on to Wallingford. How was the town to be reimbursed £14.6.½?

The Washington Papers editors wrote, “No reply to that letter has been found.”

TOMORROW: The last of Lt. Ragg.

“Discovered to be active in exposing our works to the enemy”?

Benjamin Boardman (1731–1802, shown here) graduated from Yale College in 1758, and two years later he became the minister in Middle Haddam, Connecticut.

When Gen. Joseph Spencer led Connecticut troops to the siege of Boston in the spring of 1775, Boardman went along as a chaplain.

He kept a diary from 31 July to 12 November, at least, and that document was published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1892.

Boardman recorded mostly events in the Connecticut regiments’ camp in Roxbury, particularly deaths, and news about big events elsewhere.

The minister’s frustration with rumors comes through in several places. On 9 November, for example, he wrote a detailed account of a British army raid on Lechmere’s Point in Cambridge and the Continental response. Then he added, “The above acct. cant be relied on,” and wrote down different details; “indeed there is no certainty can be come at,” he concluded.

Nonetheless, two entries stood out for me. On 31 August, the chaplain wrote:

I collected this day in cash for the encouragt. of Mr. Bushnels Machine the sum of £13.4.4. in cash out of our regt.

That must refer to the invention of David Bushnell, which turned out to be a small submarine and an underwater bomb or mine. This entry shows that Connecticut men were talking about the inventor’s work in the summer of 1775, even if they didn’t know the top-secret details.

On 31 October, Boardman’s entry was:

Bought me a flanel waistcoat this day, cost 9/2. We hear that Coll. [Joseph?] Gorham with about 40 tories are taken from ye. eastward who went after wood; also that Harry Knox, who married Secretary Fluckers daughter, and offered himself last July as a voluntary engineer to lay out our works, is taken & discovered to be active in exposing our works to the enemy.

At some later point Boardman returned to that entry, put marks around everything after the semicolon, and wrote: “Mistake of ye. clause in the crotchets.” In other words, never mind that thing about Knox. For that matter, the rumor about Gorham doesn’t seem reliable, either.

Nonetheless, this diary entry shows that some people in the American camp were suspicious about Knox’s family ties in the same month that Gen. George Washington had started angling to get him appointed to command the whole Continental artillery.

That October had started with news of “Doctr. [Benjamin] Church under an arrest for keeping up a correspd. with the enemy in Boston,” as Boardman wrote. Men were deserting both to and from the enemy. So it was easy to be suspicious about someone with such strong ties to the royal government as Knox had. Even if such rumors were quickly deemed to be unfounded.

Henry Knox in Miniature?

One of the big themes of my presentation at the Springfield Armory National Historic Site’s Henry Knox Symposium last weekend was that we shouldn’t keep repeating what older books have said about Henry Knox’s early life.

Instead, we should look at the surviving evidence and think about what makes sense, even if it contradicts statements those books make without offering documentary support.

In that spirit, in my presentation I used this portrait of Knox from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but I labeled it as “miniature said to show Henry Knox.”

That’s because I remembered hearing Matthew Keagle of Fort Ticonderoga, another speaker at the symposium, raise questions about this image a few years back.

I talked to Dr. Keagle again to make sure I get the details correctly as I take the liberty of repeating those questions. Basically, if we don’t repeat what older papers say about this portrait and look at its visual details, what does that evidence show us?

• a plump man in a Continental Army uniform.
• one epaulet, not two.
• red facing lapels, not gold.
• white waistcoat, not gold.

To be sure, it took a while for the Continental Army to develop uniform standards, but getting those details right mattered to Knox. He also the army as a colonel of artillery and was a general by the end of 1776, so the uniforms he wore reflected that high rank. The details of this picture don’t appear to match army standards.

The Met credits this miniature as a watercolor on ivory by Charles Willson Peale, who painted more portraits of Knox (two epaulets, gold facings and waistcoat, frankly fat) at the end of the war. This painting came to the museum as a gift in 1968 from J. William Middendorf, II, who was about to leave investment banking for work as a U.S. ambassador and Secretary of the Navy.

According to this catalogue of Middendorf’s collection as exhibited just before that gift, he had purchased the miniature from the estate of Philadelphia antiques dealer Arthur Sussel in 1959. And that seems to be as far back as the provenance goes. Perhaps there’s more in someone’s files.

Visiting the Roxbury High Fort

Today I’m speaking at the Springfield Armory National Historic Site’s Henry Knox Symposium, so I’ll share one more post about Henry Knox.

Last weekend I took this photo of a monument to Knox that’s less visible and probably much less well known than the series of stones marking the path (in some places, conjectural) of the “noble train” of cannon he brought from Lake Champlain in early 1776.

This is the marker on the hill in Roxbury that Knox helped to fortify in the late spring of 1775, immediately after he came out of Boston. He was working as a gentleman volunteer without an army commission. (He could have enlisted in any company as a private, but he wanted to be an officer, as he had been in the Boston militia regiment.)

On 5 July young Knox met Gen. George Washington and Gen. Charles Lee, who had arrived in Cambridge a couple of days before. They were inspecting the Continental siege lines. They were favorably impressed by the Roxbury fort and by Knox. That was the beginning of his rise in the Continental military and the national government.

The Roxbury fort was also probably where Knox had his first experience with large artillery pieces. There’s a myth that the provincial army didn’t have large cannon until Knox’s mission to Lake Champlain.

In fact, Pvt. Samuel Bixby of Sutton worked on the Roxbury earthworks and wrote in his diary for 1 July 1775:

We are fortifying on all sides, and making it strong as possible around the Fort. We have two 24 lbs. Cannon, & forty balls to each. We have hauled apple trees, with limbs trimmed sharp & pointing outward from the Fort. We finished one platform, & placed the Cannon on it just at night, and then fired two balls into Boston.

Bixby mentioned “the 24 pounder in the Great Fort above the meeting house” again on 2 August. On 21 September and 6 October he described firing an “18 pounder” set up in “the lower fort.”

The largest guns Col. Knox brought back from New York were one 24-pounder and six more 18-pounders. The 24-pounders already in Roxbury were the Continentals’ biggest cannon, and they had been there even before Washington arrived.

Clearly the British inside Boston had a lot more artillery and ammunition. (In response to the single October shot from the 18-pounder mentioned above, Pvt. Bixby recorded, “the enemy returned 90 shots.”) But the provincial army did have some big cannon in Roxbury at the start of the siege.

“O may each bliss the lovely pair surround”

Margaret Draper’s Boston News-Letter was published on Thursdays, and thus couldn’t report on the marriage of province secretary Thomas Flucker’s daughter Lucy to bookseller Henry Knox until a week after the event, in the 30 June 1774 issue.

[I rewrote that sentence to be absolutely clear that the date refers to the newspaper, not the wedding. There’s enough confusion already.]

The News-Letter ran one thing that Boston’s other newspapers didn’t have, however. After the same one-line announcement of the marriage it published this poem:

Blest tho’ she is with ev’ry human grace,
The mein engaging, and bewitching face,
Yet still an higher beauty is her care,
Virtue, the charm that most adorns the fair;
This does new graces to her air inspire,
Gives to her lips their bloom, her eyes their fire;
This o’er her cheek with brighter tincture shows
The lily’s whiteness and the blushing rose.
O may each bliss the lovely pair surround.
And each wing’d hour with new delights be crown’d!
Long may they those exalted pleasures prove
That spring from worth, from constancy and love.

There’s no clue about who wrote these lines. Henry Knox himself wasn’t known for writing poetry. Knox biographers say a friend of the couple composed this tribute to the bride, but no one ventures a guess as to which friend.

One possible clue to the poet is that the News-Letter was by then known for supporting the Crown, so Loyalists were more likely to write for the newspaper and read what it published. But that still leaves a lot of possibilities. 

The internet tells me that Whit Stillman borrowed these lines for his movie and novelization Love and Friendship, built off of Jane Austen’s unfinished Lady Susan.

Where Did Lucy Flucker and Henry Knox Marry?

As I wrote yesterday, the marriage of Henry Knox and Lucy Flucker appears on the records of King’s Chapel, Boston’s most upper-class Anglican church, dated 23 June 1774.

The next week’s newspaper reports confirm that the rector of that church, the Rev. Dr. Henry Caner, presided at the wedding.

There’s another disagreement about that marriage, however: where it took place. Writers have come to different conclusions.

The most likely site would seem to be King’s Chapel itself. Nothing in its records suggests the Knoxes’ wedding was any different from others. Most biographers who describe the ceremony state that it happened in the chapel.

However, in The Revolutionary War Lives and Letters of Lucy and Henry Knox Phillip Hamilton wrote that the marriage took place in the building on Cornhill that Henry was renting as his house and shop. Lucy’s older sister Hannah Urquhart and “Aunt Waldo” attended, but her parents didn’t.

Hamilton appears to have relied on Henry Knox’s 29 August letter to his close friend Henry Jackson, which I haven’t seen in full. It’s now in the collection of the Gilder Lehrman Institute. Barring new discoveries, that’s the closest contemporaneous source about the young bookseller’s strained relationship to his new in-laws.

There are also a couple of memoirs written in the nineteenth century by members of the extended family that preserve their understandings about the marriage.

The Massachusetts Historical Society holds a manuscript called the “Winslow Family Memorial.” It was written by Isaac Winslow (1774–1856), a first cousin of Lucy Knox, and his daughter Margaret Catharine Winslow (1816–1890). The oh-so-handy transcript (P.D.F. download) offers this story of the marriage:

they were married at the house of her uncle Mr [Isaac] Winslow in Roxbury. I always understood, that he rather favor’d this union, and aided in its favorable issue. For this friendly disposition Gen Knox, as I have been led to think, from the little I know of the circumstances of the case, evinced more grateful feeling’s towards Mr Winslows family than his lady, who though not unkind to her cousins, yet when living in a good deal of style, after the peace in Boston, did not much notice her cousins, who were then in quite narrow circumstances

Hamilton’s citations show he looked at this manuscript, but he didn’t accept its statement that the Knox wedding took place in Roxbury.

Finally, the “Reminiscences” of the Knoxes’ longest lived daughter, Lucy Knox Thatcher (1776–1854, shown above), is held at the headquarters of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington, D.C. Nancy Rubin Stuart quoted from it in Defiant Brides. It agrees that Lucy’s parents didn’t attend the wedding but says her sister Hannah and their half-sister Sallie did. Again, I’ve seen only a bit of this document and plan to check it out on a future trip.

(The portrait above shows Lucy Knox Fletcher in the mid-1800s. Because there’s no portrait of Lucy Knox, and because of the similarities of the mother’s and daughter’s names, websites often mistakenly present this as a picture of Henry Knox’s wife.)

When Did Henry Knox and Lucy Flucker Marry?

You’d think the date when Lucy Flucker and Henry Knox got married would be well established in all that’s published about them.

After all, Flucker was a daughter of the royal government’s third-highest Massachusetts official. All the Boston newspapers reported on her wedding, followed by the newspapers in Essex County.

As for Knox, he was obscure then, but he came out of the Revolutionary War as one of the most prominent Bostonians in the country and has remained famous.

But if we look in biographies of Henry Knox, they give wedding dates all over the calendar:

• 16 June 1771: Joseph W. Porter, “Memoir of Gen. Henry Knox, of Thomaston, Maine,” Bangor Historical Magazine (1890); Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors (1990), stating that the marriage happened in 1771. 
• 16 June 1774: Francis S. Drake, Life and Correspondence of Henry Knox (1873); Noah Brooks, Henry Knox: A Soldier of the Revolution (1900); Pamela Murrow, Unending Passions: The Knox Letters (2010); Nancy Rubin Stuart, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married (2014).
• 20 June 1774: Mark Puls, Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution (2008); William Hazelgrove, Henry Knox’s Noble Train (2020).
• 23 June 1774: Thomas Morgan Griffiths, Major General Henry Knox and the Last Heirs of Montpelier (1965); Phillip Hamilton, The Revolutionary War Lives and Letters of Lucy and Henry Knox (2017).

In addition, North Callahan’s Henry Knox: General Washington’s General (1958) didn’t state a date, but it quoted a 27 June 1774 newspaper item referring to a wedding “Last Thursday,” and readers with perpetual calendars could do the math.

So let’s start with the earliest biography: Drake’s from 1873. For his information on the wedding Drake credited “the ‘Gazette’ of June 20, 1774.” But he ran into a series of confusions.

Drake almost certainly looked at the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy. Unfortunately, two newspapers from two separate print shops were sharing the Massachusetts Gazette name, and there was also a Boston Gazette. For clarity, I always refer to papers by their unique title, in this case the Boston Post-Boy.

The second unfortunate detail is that the publishers of the Post-Boy, Mills and Hicks, were the only Boston printers to date their issues with a date range rather than the date of issue. In other words, the newspaper they published on 27 June 1774 had this line under its masthead:

From MONDAY, June 20, to MONDAY, June 27, 1774.

Drake stumbled into an error by reading that issue of the Post-Boy as coming out on 20 June rather than a week later.

The third glitch was that the marriage notices in all the papers didn’t state the date of the wedding but said: “Last Thursday was Married…” Drake counted back from 20 June, making “Last Thursday” 16 June. In turn, his book misled an entire line of later authors. The way-off date in Porter’s Bangor Historical Magazine article is obviously a typo based on Drake.

Puls, it appears, mistook the 20 June date of the newspaper for the date of the wedding itself. Hazelgrove’s passages on Knox’s early life are almost sentence-by-sentence adaptations of Puls, so he replicated that error.

Griffiths, with the detail focus of a genealogist, and Hamilton, the only academic historian in this group [besides Taylor], got the date right. Callahan provided accurate information. Not only do we have the multiple newspapers appearing on 27 and 30 June and referring back to the previous Thursday, but we also have the records of King’s Chapel, available through the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

Henry Knox and Lucy Flucker got married on 23 June 1774.

“Henry Knox Symposium” in Springfield, 6 May

On Saturday, 6 May, Springfield Armory National Historic Site and the Friends of Springfield Armory will host a “Henry Knox Symposium” looking at the bookseller, the artillery officer, the secretary of war.

When the Revolutionary War began, Henry Knox was still in his early twenties and married to the daughter of Massachusetts’s royal secretary. Within a couple of years he was one of Gen. George Washington’s closest colleagues, helping to lead the Continental Army and then the new nation.

Perhaps most importantly, Knox had a quality that’s hard to nail down on paper: lots of people just thought he was fun to be around.

Here’s the lineup of speakers and topics, basically in chronological order:

• J. L. Bell [that’s me], “Henry Knox, Loyalist?”
• Nathan D. Wells, formerly Quincy College, “Henry Knox: A Flawed Brilliant Amateur, A Microcosm of the American Struggle for Independence”
• Matthew Keagle, Curator, Fort Ticonderoga, “Knox Alone?”
• William F. Sheehan, Historical Services Branch, Massachusetts Military Division, “Henry Knox’s Fortnight in Albany: The Knox Expedition Finds Its Footing”
• Maria G. Cole, Boston National Historical Park, “Henry Knox and the Siege of Boston”
• Richard Colton, Springfield Armory (retired), “Henry Knox and the Establishment of ‘The American Foundry’ at Springfield Arsenal, Massachusetts, 1776–1800: Assuring Independence”
• Roger Johnson, Friends of the Springfield Armory, “Henry Knox and the Constitutional Convention: The Knox/Washington Letters”

This event will take place from 9:00 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. Registration is free, but organizers strongly recommend attendees purchase the box lunch for $12 (that’s the “ticket” on Eventbrite) or bring their own meal. There are limited eating options nearby, and the whole point of a symposium is supposed to be spending time talking with other people over food instead of driving around, right?

The “Henry Knox Symposium” will take place on the 7th floor of Scibelli Hall, Bldg 2, at Springfield Technical Community College, One Armory Square, in Springfield.

“Women in War Symposium,” Schuylerville, 6 May

On Saturday, 6 May, the Saratoga County 250th Commission and the Marshall House will host the the 2nd Annual Women in War Symposium, offering perspectives on the various roles women played during the American Revolution.

The scheduled presentations are:

• Don Hagist: “Killed, Imprisoned, Struck by Lightning: British Soldiers’ Wives on Campaign”
• Philip Hamilton: “The Excitement and Perils of War: Henry and Lucy Knox’s Revolutionary War”
• Katie Turner Getty: “In the Greatest Terror: Women and Children in Crisis after Lexington and Concord”
• Alexander Cain: “‘I Have Scarcely a Mouthful of Bread for Myself or Children’: Mary McAlpin and the Plight of Loyalist Women during the Saratoga Campaign”
• Jenna Schnitzer: “After Burgoyne Surrendered: Women of the Convention Army”

This symposium will take place from 9:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. at Saratoga Town Hall, 12 Spring Street, Schuylerville, New York. The $50 registration fee will cover morning refreshments and lunch. For more details and registration, visit this page.

On the day before the symposium, the organizers will offer “Through the Baroness’ Eyes,” a four-hour tour of sites of the Burgoyne campaign as experienced by Frederika von Massow Riedesel, wife of General Friedrich von Riedesel, Commander of the German Division of Burgoyne’s Army. Along with her three young daughters, the baroness accompanied her husband to America and left a journal and letters recording her life with the army.

The tour will follow Riedesel’s path from Fort Edward (The Red House) through Saratoga (now Schuylerville) to the Saratoga Battlefield (Taylor House) and finally the back to the Sword Surrender Site. It involves some walking over uneven terrain. There is a separate $60 registration fee for this event.

“His folio military dictionary with plates”

The Boston Athenaeum has digitized its copy of A New Military Dictionary, or, The Field of War: Containing a Particular and Circumstantial Account of the Most Remarkable Battles, Sieges, Bombardments, and Expeditions, Whether by Sea or Land. Such as Relate to Great Britain and Her Dependencies, Deduced from the Descent of Julius Caesar to the Present Time.

This edition appeared in London in 1760. The anonymous author was the journalist John Almon, ten years before he challenged the British government by printing the “Junius” letters, proceedings of the House of Commons, and the Remembrancer compendium of the year’s news.

The title of that book promises lots of stories, but there’s also a story hidden on the title page.

At the top right is the note “David M[torn] / His Book.”

Below that in a different, larger hand is the initial “K.” As the Athenaeum catalogue says, that indicates this book came from the library of Henry Knox.

Knox became the commander of the Continental artillery in late 1775, installed over the heads of all the regiment’s existing officers. Here’s a memory from Susan Smith, daughter of David Mason, who had started the war as third-in-command of that regiment:

As an instance of his good will to Knox, he lent him his folio military dictionary with plates, by Chambers, which he had some time before sent to London for and for which I think I have heard him say he paid ten guineas [£10.10s.]. This valuable book he kept through the war, and to this day, although my father frequently requested him to return it to him, but he always said he could not get along without it and another could not then be procured in the country.

That passage appeared in Smith’s profile of her father published in the Essex Institute Historical Collections.

Henry Knox Symposium in Springfield, 6 May

Springfield Armory National Historic Site and the Friends of Springfield Armory N.H.S. are organizing a one-day public symposium on Henry Knox, to be held on 6 May 2023.

As commander of artillery for the Continental Army, Knox recommended making Springfield the site of an arsenal and laboratory. That facility remained a federal armory in the early republic while Knox rose to be secretary of war.

The organizers have announced, “We invite scholars, historians, archivists, curators, and other interested parties to submit abstracts for short presentations that address Henry Knox and his role in American history.” These can include explorations of less admirable facets of this “complex and controversial man,” not just heroic portraits.

Presentations will be thirty minutes long (fifteen double-spaced pages when typed out) with ten minutes for questions. Up to eight proposals will be selected for the symposium.

Prospective presenters should send an abstract of no more than 500 words about their topic, including the presenter’s full name, contact information (name, title, organization, address, phone, email), and a 100-word biography. To send proposals, use the “email us” link on this page.

The due date for proposals is 8 March. By 22 March, the organizers will notify prospects if their proposals have been accepted. The presentations will be due on 19 April in order to ensure they will be ready for 6 May.

Keagle on “Henry Knox” in Lake George, 19 Dec.

On Monday, 19 December, the Lake George Battlefield Park Alliance and the Warren County Historical Society will host a talk on “Henry Knox and the Hunt for Heavy Artillery” by Dr. Matthew Keagle, Curator at the Fort Ticonderoga Museum.

The event description says:

Keagle will explore the Continental Army’s need for heavy cannon in 1775 and how it informed not only Henry Knox’s famous 300-mile expedition from Ticonderoga to Boston, but the broader plans for the campaign of 1775 in the Lake George and Lake Champlain region.

The presentation will explore questions such as: did Knox think up the plan to get cannon from Fort Ticonderoga? did he strip the fort of its artillery? and how did Benedict Arnold aid Knox’s efforts and anticipate the Continental Army’s ongoing needs?

This may be a spoiler, but the answers to the first and third questions are related.

This program will begin at 7:00 P.M. at the Holiday Inn Lake George, 2223 Canada Street. It is free and open to the public. To register for a seat, email info@lakegeorgebattlefield.org.

“Last Monday evening Miss Hannah was married to Mr. Fluker”

On 27 Dec 1750, Boston ministers announced that Hannah Waldo and Thomas Flucker (shown here) intended to marry.

The Rev. Jonathan Mayhew presided over the wedding on 14 Jan 1751 at the West Meetinghouse.

In reporting that wedding, the Boston Evening-Post called the bride “a Lady of great Beauty and Merit.” The Boston Post-Boy said she was “an agreable and virtuous young lady.”

That coverage strongly implies most people sympathized with Hannah in her decision to call off her engagement to Andrew Pepperrell the preceding fall after he had delayed their wedding one too many times. They didn’t blame her as the fickle one.

Flucker was a young merchant, seven years older than his bride. He had previously married a sister of James Bowdoin and been widowed in May 1750. Aside from his daughter named Sally born out of wedlock on a date I don’t know, Hannah and Thomas appear to have had a solid genteel New England marriage, with their first baby, also named Hannah, arriving at the end of 1751. Flucker went on to become the province’s royal secretary.

Andrew Pepperrell’s cousin William Tyler sent him the news:

I inform you that last Monday evening Miss Hannah was married to Mr. Fluker and appeared a bride at the West Church, New Boston, brought in her chariot. The talk is almost over, for everybody thinks and tells me they believe it is what you wanted, but more of this when I see you.

Pepperrell doesn’t appear to have pined after his lost fiancée. He went back to his mansion in Kittery, Maine, and his rural social life. While returning from a ball in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in February, he caught a cold. That became pneumonia. The Boston Evening-Post announced that he died on 1 March “after a short Indisposition.” The local minister preached a sermon in his memory.

Later authors wrestled with why Andrew Pepperrell had strung Hannah Waldo along for so long. Was he prone to ill-timed “despondency” or depressions? Was he interested in someone else? Did he resent and resist his father’s arrangements? Most of Andrew’s papers were destroyed, making it even harder to know. (Not knowing the facts didn’t bother other authors who exaggerated the young man’s death, suggesting he went mad or died of a broken heart two days after Hannah Waldo’s send-off.)

Sir William Pepperrell was left without a son to carry on his name. He made the eldest son of his daughter Elizabeth Sparhawk heir to his fortune and baronetcy on the condition that that young man take the surname Pepperrell. The first Sir William Pepperrell died in 1759. The second became a Loyalist exile.

Hannah’s father, Samuel Waldo, also died in 1759 while overseeing his property in Maine. Most of his descendants became Loyalists, but one exception was Thomas and Hannah Flucker’s daughter Lucy, who married Henry Knox. Through careful management of family claims, the U.S. Secretary of War gained (nominal) control of most of the Waldo Patent.

And that couldn’t have happened except for the long, unhappy engagement of Hannah Waldo and Andrew Pepperrell.