1776: The World Turned Upside Down

By The Associated Press

In collaboration with The Associated Press, Serial Box presents our first nonfiction series, 1776: The World Turned Upside Down, a 12-part month-by-month immersive account of ordinary colonists during America?ÇÖs first year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Realm
• Release date: Dec 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781682107188

Book preview

1776

The World Turned Upside Down

Realm & The Associated Press

1776: The World Turned Upside Down: The Complete Season 1 © 2023 text by Realm of Possibility, Inc.

All materials, including, without limitation, the characters, names, titles, and settings, are the exclusive property of Realm of Possibility, Inc. All Rights Reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part, in any audio, electronic, mechanical, physical, or recording format. Originally published in the United States of America: 2018.

For additional information and permission requests, write to the publisher at Realm, 115 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10006.

ISBN: 978-1-68210-718-8

This literary work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, incidents, and events are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover Illustration by: Charles Orr

Lead Writer: The Associated Press

Editor: Prudence Barton, MLS and MEd 

Executive Producer: Julian Yap

Executive Producer: Molly Barton

Table of Contents

1776 The World Turned Upside Down

1776: The World Turned Upside Down

January 1776

February 1776

March 1776

April 1776

May 1776

June 1776

July 1776

August 1776

September 1776

October 1776

November 1776

December 1776

Editorial Team

1776: The World Turned Upside Down

In collaboration with The Associated Press, Realm presents 1776: The World Turned Upside Down. Our first nonfiction series tells the month-by-month story of the most important year in American history through the eyes of ordinary citizens — failed corset-makers, farmers, and high school dropouts, some of whom became our nation’s most revered heroes. Letters, news articles, and diary entries from this pivotal year, combined with the insights of three of the AP's top journalists reveal the courage, conviction, fallibility, and sometimes base motives of the people who invented America. From the publishing of Common Sense on January 10th to the battle of Trenton on December 26th, this was the year that America began to form the bold, brave and occasionally infuriating identity that we still know today.

Who’s Who

Thomas Paine – Failed corset-maker, former tax collector, and author of the pamphlet Common Sense

Benjamin Franklin – Satirist, inventor, and diplomat

John Adams – Lawyer, revolutionary, and second President of the United States

Benjamin Rush – Physician, philosopher, and Philadelphian free-thinker

January

1776

We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.

– Benjamin Franklin

Setting The Scene

January 1: Four British warships fired on Norfolk, Virginia

January 8: Connecticut troops launch a surprise attack on Charlestown, MA, while British top brass are watching a farce entitled The Blockade at Fanueil Hall.

January 9: An agreement between Britain and Brunswick – Wolfenbuettel is signed to provide mercenary troops to the British in North America.

January 10: Knox and his guns reach the heights of the Berkshires.

January 10: In Philadelphia, Common Sense is published.

January 14: Washington writes: Few people know the predicament we are in.

January 16: Washington holds a council of war with Generals Putnam, Ward, Spencer, Sullivan, Greene, Gates, and Heath regarding the importance of taking Boston.

January 17: News arrives at headquarters about American losses at Quebec.

January 18: Knox arrives in Cambridge

January

The tea had been dumped in Boston Harbor, Paul Revere and four other riders had ridden shouting the famous warning, the Minutemen had rallied at the rude bridge in Concord in ’75. On January 1, 1776, a proclamation called for a new kind of soldier: a Continental soldier. The nascent war effort was stumbling with soldiers who slipped away in the night to harvest their crops or visit their girlfriends. Continental Soldier. It sounded grand, promised pay and, the kicker, the soldier served for three straight years, long enough to actually learn military decorum. Symbolically, a Continental Army would pull together the scattershot militias from 13 colonies into a force that just might be able to hold off the redcoats.

Truth be told, the 13 colonies were not a nation at war. Or even a nation. John Adams was to calculate, and later historians were to alter the proportions only somewhat, that one third of Americans were averse to the Revolution… An opposite third conceived a hatred of the English [and] the middle third, comprising principally the yeomanry, the soundest part of the nation, and always averse to war, were rather lukewarm … and sometimes the whole body united with the first or the last third, according to circumstances.

Emotions were high, but mixed. Ben Franklin said the year before that he had heard no American talk of independence, drunk or sober.

A Virginian wrote to a friend: May God put a speedy and happy end to this… contest between the mother and her children. The Colonies do not wish to be independent … They would freely grant the King whatever he pleases to request of their own Assemblies, provided the Parliament has no hand in the disposing of it. That was the rub: the King. Angry as many Americans were at his government, they could not translate that fury to George III himself. Even in Boston, where the redcoats of General William Howe had held the city under siege for six months, as late as this very January, the officers in Washington’s mess toasted the King’s health every evening.

Not that there weren’t some hawks, drunk or sober. In late 1775, the New York Journal reported from Newport, Rhode Island, that: ‘Early last Saturday morning, one Coggeshall, being somewhat drunk or crazy, went on the long wharf and turned up his backside towards the bomb brig in this harbor, using some insulting words, upon which the brig fired two four-pound shot at him; one of which went through the roof of Mr. Hammond’s store … and lodged in Mr. Samuel Johnson’s distill house. Coggeshall was quickly hustled out of town.

The Founding Corset-Maker

Tom Paine had been a dabbler at many things, a failure at all. Some of it he blamed on King George. It rankled even after he left England, so one day he took his quill and decided to put it all down on paper.

On January 9, 1776, in Philadelphia, a pamphlet titled Common Sense was published. It said in public what even most of the red-hot hawks had dared think only to themselves: that the King was a tyrant and the only path for the colonies was independence. It uttered – screamed aloud – the unutterable. Probably more than any one event, more than any one person, Common Sense made it respectable for the general citizenry of the 13 colonies to conceive that their Revolution would be revolutionary; indeed to think of a communal future in independence.

The anonymously published pamphlet and the mystery of the author stoked interest. King George III thought Ben Franklin wrote it; others assumed it was John Adams. No, Thomas Paine had, even though he signed it merely, an Englishman. Thomas Jefferson once said Paine was the only writer in America, who can write better than Jefferson himself. That was a signal compliment coming from a college-trained lawyer who was about to do some significant writing of his own. It is even more surprising considering that Paine was a dropout from school, who failed twice as a corset-maker, twice as a tax collector, had two failed marriages, and was now on his second country, having been in the colonies less than two years. He had not yet dropped out of writing because he had scarcely ever done any. But, he scored a hit almost the first time out.

Tom Paine was 37 when he arrived in Philadelphia in November 1774, bearing a recommendation from Benjamin Franklin, a first-class boat ticket and strong opinions about George III. He had been born in Thetford, north of London, where he may have imbibed some views of democracy in Georgian England. Thetford had 2,000 inhabitants and two members in Parliament although only 31 citizens were eligible to vote for them. For Paine’s father, religion and profession were equally straight-laced: Quakerism and corset making. By scrimping, the father managed to send the son to school for seven years, but Tom was weak in Latin, the requisite passport into the professions. He had, however, developed an interest in the natural history of Virginia and ran off to sea, leaving his apprenticeship behind. His father caught him before the boat could sail, but Tom got away again, this time successfully. He next appeared as a journeyman corset-maker in London, age 20, and eventually drifted to Sandwich, setting himself up in the girdle business with a £10 loan, which he never repaid. Disgusted with the toil and little gain, Paine, now a widower, bade farewell to corsets for good and became an excise tax collector.

Paine spent his evenings arguing at the White Hart Tavern on matters of the day, writing some poetry and a campaign song worth three guineas, for a candidate standing for Parliament. He liked the ladies, one of whom remarked: It is a whimsical weakness in Tom Paine, imagining that every woman who sees him, directly falls victim to his charm. (Except, apparently, his second wife, whom Paine refused to sleep with or explain why.)

In 1765, Paine was sacked from tax collecting for the first time. Briefly he tried school-teaching and then preaching. In 1768 he was given a second chance with the customs service at Lewes, south of London. Paine became enraged at the King in 1772 while in London lobbying for a raise for the excise officers. Concurrently, George III was asking Parliament for £100,000 more a year. George got his; Paine did not. Paine lasted six years as tax man this time; in 1774 he was fired again for negligence and for failing to see the conflict of interest in selling liquor and tobacco at the shop of his second wife, items whose taxation he was paid to enforce.

After meeting Ben Franklin, Paine decided he’d had enough of King and country, and set sail for America with £35 as a separation settlement with his wife, who stayed behind, and within five weeks of his arrival in Philadelphia was off on a new career: journalism!

Dr. John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, said Paine could not write until he had quickened his thought with large draughts of rum and water. Primed or not, Paine had talent. Robert Aitken, a printer, hired him for Aitken’s new publication, The Pennsylvania Magazine; or American Monthly Museum and told Paine to sidestep political topics. This was fine with the new immigrant. I had no thoughts of independence or arms, said Paine. As usual, he did think, however, that Aitken was underpaying him. And Aitken, despite the new magazine skyrocketing to a circulation of 1,500 a month, a colonial high, thought Paine was late in delivering his copy. They split.

And there were sound business reasons to avoid writing about politics at the time. Paine, having been in North America a scant two years, could not fathom the extent of regional differences among the colonies. Unity of thought, purpose, culture or economy had never prevailed in the 13 colonies. They were just that: 13 fingers feeling their own way directed by the mother brain 3,000 miles away. The flinty Yankee, the sybaritic Southern planter, the pious Quaker were not just stereotypes. They lived in different worlds, rooms without a house. And there were rooms within the rooms. The Dutch around Albany clung to their language and culture as did the Germans of Pennsylvania, so much so that Franklin feared half seriously that English might become a dead language. In the North Carolina hills, Highlanders from Scotland, spoke Gaelic. So did some of their slaves. Other slaves were still speaking the languages they brought through the horrific Middle Passage.

Virginians and Marylanders depended on one crop, tobacco. In South Carolina it was rice and indigo. New Englanders would trade anything with anybody, legally or illegally, despite their Puritan heritage. Male property owners in Connecticut and Rhode Island could elect their own governors. Those in other colonies could not.

Differing colonial customs made each colony fearful of entangling alliances with the others. They each had their own relationship with London but little with one another. The currency of English shillings, French pistoles, Spanish dollars, and their own local currencies varied so much in value from colony to colony that a traveler carried a list to tell him what his New England pounds were worth in Philadelphia joes. They were suspicious of each other. A New Englander found Virginia an odd place and its hospitality and politeness exaggerated. Virginians found Pennsylvanians remarkably grave and reserved, and the women remarkably homely, hard-favoured and sour. A Connecticut man complained of frauds and unfair practices by New York merchants, while a New Yorker said he would not send his son to school in Connecticut lest he pick up the low craft and cunning so incident to the people of that country. Note the word country. New York and New Hampshire were close to violence over the disputed land between them that later became Vermont. Pennsylvania was as mad as Quakers could get at Connecticut settlers moving into its Wyoming Valley. They were equally unhappy over Virginian migration into the Ohio Valley.

To Franklin such disunity didn’t make sense. He was a great admirer of the Iroquois Confederacy in the colony of New York. It would be a strange thing, he said, if Six Nations of ignorant savages would be capable of forming a scheme … yet a like union should be impracticable for 10 or a dozen English colonies. Clearly these natives had the upper hand in mutual cooperation.

The idea of nationhood or independence was simply not a consideration. What sort of dish would [such a nation] make? demanded a South Carolina legislator. The Northeast will throw in fish and onions. The middle states flax, feed and flour. Virginia and Maryland will add tobacco. North Carolina pitch, tar and turpentine; South Carolina rice and indigo and Georgia will sprinkle the whole composition with sawdust. Such an absurd jumble will you make if you attempt to form a union from such disordered materials …

As the colonies and mother country painfully moved down the road to Lexington and Concord – and to opposing sides – anger was springing up across the nation: the tarring and feathering of Tory pamphlets, the increasingly outspoken petitions, the burning of the British warship Gaspee, the bloody Boston Massacre, the subversive stevedoring of tea, and yet, George remained King and the colonies were still colonies. But it seemed events had begun forcing a consensus from a commonality of need and enemy.

When Britain closed the port of Boston in 1774, other colonies had sent supplies. Israel Putnam, who had fought with the British against the French, personally drove a herd of sheep in from Connecticut. In each colony, similar patterns were emerging. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, South Carolina all had tea parties. In December 1774 Irish-tempered John Sullivan led a raid that stole gunpowder from a British fort at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The following April 21, a group of Charlestonians lifted 1,200 muskets from the royal arsenal. Being Southern gentlemen, of course, they did it at night so as not to embarrass Governor William Bull who was well-liked. And again, when they seized 15,000 pounds of powder from the British at St. Augustine, they delivered a receipt. After the war a Charleston physician wrote that: Even while they were arming themselves, they [were] alleging it was only in self-defense against ministerial [Parliamentary] tyranny. The colonies southward of Boston were not immediate sufferers, yet they were sensible that the foundation was laid for every species of future oppression.

That things were happening was clear; where it would all lead was not; at least not without Tom Paine. As John Adams said later, "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain." But Paine’s stirring invective almost didn’t happen.

After his most recent failure of employment, Paine was contemplating forming a Salt-Peter Association to produce homemade gunpowder; instead, Dr. Benjamin Rush walked into his life. Rush had dropped by Aitken’s one day to chat with Paine who had similar views to his regarding slavery. Rush and Paine were both social mavericks, friends of Franklin and of independence. They somehow had a meeting of minds even though Rush was an early-rising teetotaler and Paine drank at all hours and slept late. Rush told Paine he had written down some of his thoughts and was preparing an address to the inhabitants of the Colonies about it. But I … shuddered at the prospect … of its not being well received.

Furthermore, Rush, while a radical, was well connected in Philadelphia, whereas Paine, a newbie, was not. I suggested to him [Paine] that he had nothing to fear from the popular odium to which such a publication might expose him, for he could live anywhere, but that my profession and connections, where a great majority of the citizens and some of my friends were hostile to a separation of our country from Great Britain, forbade me to come forward as a pioneer in that important controversy.

So, with Rush hiding behind Paine and Paine hiding behind a nom de plume, the pen that became mightier than a sword began to write. O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! cried the anonymous pamphleteer. Paine referred to the Bible, with its book of Kings I and II, to claim that monarchy was an abomination in the sight of the Lord. Nature abhorred kings, he wrote, otherwise she would not so frequently turn [monarchy] into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.

I have heard it asserted by some, that as America has flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness … Nothing can be more fallacious…You may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat. Or, said the ex-corset-maker who could write from experience, that the first 20 years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next 20…

The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘TIS TIME To PART … nothing can settle our affairs so expeditiously as an open and determined DECLARATION FOR INDEPENDENCE…

There it was, finally, in black and white. Paine wanted to call the pamphlet Plain Truth. Rush opted for Common Sense. Rush won. Robert Bell, a printer whose religion was at least doubtful but of liberal views and actions was given the job of setting it in type. Why not? His was the only name to appear. The pamphlet came out on the same day that the King’s declaration to quash the rebellion was published in Philadelphia. Common Sense went for two shillings a copy, and returned £50 in the first week. Paine, being Paine, or rum being rum, wanted to rewrite parts of the second edition. Bell refused, presumably wanting to make hay while the sun shines. So, Paine went to another printer and had 3,000 copies run off at his own expense. Thus did Common Sense have two printers and no known author. I believe the number of copies printed and sold in America was not short of 150,000, Paine the ever confident said later, [which] is the greatest sale that any performance ever had since the use of letters. Despite his self-aggrandizing bluster, Paine gave his half-share of the first edition to buy mittens for the freezing troops of Benedict Arnold in Canada.

And what did the critics say?

Sam Adams, who knew something about making a fuss, said in Philadelphia that Common Sense had fretted some folks here more than a little. Edmund Randolph of Virginia said, "the public sentiment which a few weeks before had shuddered at the tremendous obstacles with which independence was environed overleaped every barrier … [Common Sense] put the torch to combustibles which had been deposited by the different gusts of fury … Ambrose Serle, secretary to Lord Richard Howe, the Admiral of the British fleet in America, believed John Adams had written it and called it: A most flagitious Performance replete with Sophistry, Impudence & Falshood; but unhappily calculated to work upon the Fury of the Times … His Attempt to justify Rebellion by the Bible is infamous beyond Expression."

Paine’s inspiration was colored by his own animus to the King. And while he had not read John Locke, he could not have been unfamiliar with the English philosopher’s dismissal of the Divine Right of monarchs to rule, and his argument that humans were born with certain self-evident natural rights, including those to life, liberty and property. Men had joined voluntarily in a compact choosing one to rule over them, but Locke held this authority was only to protect those rights, and once the original compact was broken, men had the right to rebel against the monarch for they, not God, had chosen him.

What part played the demon rum? Aitken had said Paine would never write without that. The first glass put him in a train of thinking, the next illuminated his intellectual system, the third loosened his ideas so that they appeared to flow without any alteration or correction. Whatever the stimulus, it was Tom Paine whose pamphlet was copied by printers all over the colonies. He threw down the idea of independence, which took root in every crossroads pub, village, farm, and the Royal Palace.

After publication, a London newspaper reported: … The Prince of Wales has been discovered by the Queen Mother, reading a copy of Dr. Franklin’s dreadful pamphlet, Common Sense and in response to the Queen’s searching questions, refused to confess how he got the copy. But the Prince’s father got the message.

Bookish, Bold and Jolly: Henry Knox

Paine provided the intellectual and emotional flint to spark colonists’ feelings into flames, Knox provided the physical means for the revolutionary army to start fighting. Henry Knox was a bookworm and also a poor, fatherless boy. To support his mother and his younger brother, by the age of 9 he was apprenticed to Boston booksellers. He was encouraged to read by Mr. Wharton and Mr. Bowes, his employers, but fiction was not his game. The glory of war and particularly the noisiest aspect of war, artillery, fascinated the boy, and he read every book on war, military training, and particularly weaponry stocked in the bookstore. Henry could hold his own in the rough and tumble of Boston alleys, but at the bookshop, he impressed patrons, including Sam and his cousin John Adams, with his intelligence and pleasant manner.

In his free time, he added to his book knowledge of war by observing militia drills and military parades. Eventually, Henry, 16 years old, joined ranks under the command of Loyalist Lieutenant Adino Paddock, where he learned about loading, firing and maintaining artillery pieces. From treatises such as Sharpe’s Military Guide, he absorbed information about designing effective fortifications, transporting heavy cannons, and discerning topographic features that could win or lose a battle. At 21 in 1771, Henry Knox opened his own bookshop with stock purchased and sent from London, as well as stationery, ledgers, and journals. But the trials of the British occupation of Boston inspired him to leave the comfort of a pleasant bookstore proprietorship to embark on a wintry visit to Fort Ticonderoga, which required all his youthful energy, savvy problem-solving, and fending off a few competitors as well.

The story properly begins with Benedict Arnold, who was as great a hero in the first half of the Revolution as he was a villain in the second. Indeed, he has been called the best general on both sides of the war. At 16, Arnold joined a militia, traveling to fight the French in Canada. He was advertised as a deserter in one company, joined another, and finally returned home to New Haven, Connecticut where he opened his own drug and bookstore and married the daughter of the local high sheriff. He was a quick-tempered fellow, and when he heard of the Boston Massacre, chafed, Good God, are the Americans all asleep and yielding up their liberties, or are they all turned philosophers that they do not take immediate vengeance?

When the shot heard ‘round the world echoed in New Haven, Arnold, by then a 34-year-old captain in the militia, dashed to the town powder house and said he would break down the door himself if the town fathers did not give him the keys within five minutes. They did, and Arnold and his company of the Governor’s Foot Guards set off post-haste to Boston in their scarlet, white and black uniforms. At Boston, Arnold remembered Ticonderoga from his teen-age service and volunteered to seize the cannon. The. Massachusetts Committee of Safety said fine, and Arnold was off to recruit a force. At Stockbridge, he heard to his dismay that Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys were already after the cannon.

For some time, Allen and his Boys, when sober enough, had been waging war against New York’s claims to the disputed New Hampshire Grants, territory that later became Vermont. Now Allen headed out from the Catamount Tavern in Bennington, traveling to Fort Ticonderoga. Allen was at least as rash as Arnold and maybe tougher. Made a prisoner by the British after impetuously trying to capture Montreal with scarcely 30 men, Allen showed his fellow POWs a chipped tooth, suffered from biting off one of his handcuffs. One of his astonished spectators exclaimed, damn him, can he eat iron? Aghast that Allen might steal his thunder as well as the cannons, Arnold set off in hot pursuit, a single servant trailing in his dust. When he caught up with Allen, the two argued furiously as to who was authorized as commander of the expedition.

What shall I do with the damned rascal? Allen demanded of his Boys, some of whom wanted to take a shot at Arnold.

Better go side by side, replied a cooler head. So they did, Arnold marching with the sullen Allen at the head of the column, but agreeing to give no orders. As dawn broke May 10, 1775, Arnold and Allen, each trying to shoulder his way in front, stormed into the sleeping fort. Allen stabbed a sentry, whose musket misfired and awakened a dazed Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham of His Majesty’s Twenty-Sixth Foot, who stood bewildered, his pants in his hand.

Come out, you damned rat, roared Allen, and out came the garrison commander, Captain William Delaplace. Asked by whose authority he was acting, Allen roared again: In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress! In fact, the dovish Congress was highly embarrassed when it learned what Allen and Arnold had done, and for a time ordered the crumbling old fort to be abandoned lest the British think the colonies were overly belligerent. Congress lamely explained that Fort Ti was taken to forestall an invasion from Canada, although there wasn’t a redcoat within miles except for Delaplace, his garrison and 24 women and children. There were British in Boston, however. The problem was how to get the cannon to where the war was.

Henry Knox was in Boston, and he had long dreamt about cannons. At 230 pounds, Knox was something of a cannonball himself. Henry was a convivial man, throwing his girth into the frenzy of militia mustering days and Guy Fawkes parades, and despite his weight, he was brawny enough to hold up a wagon when it lost a wheel during one of the revelries. Guns and gunpowder were the stuff of Knox’s dreams. His one shyness seems to have been the loss of two left fingers, blown off in a hunting accident. In public, Knox wrapped the mutilated hand in a handkerchief.

Arnold, born in 1741, was nine years older than Knox, and his childhood was also cut short by the abandonment of his father. Knox’s father went to sea and Arnold’s father drank himself into a stupor. Both young men dropped out of school and were apprenticed, Knox to the bookstore and Arnold to an apothecary. Knox fared better than Arnold. His master Nicholas Bowes became a surrogate father to young Knox and encouraged Henry to educate himself, loaning him books to take home. Bowes’ kind treatment of his apprentice fostered Knox’s own generous nature. Arnold, on the other hand, was left more to his own devices and turned out to be something of a lout. Both men were practicing for their military future in local militias by the age of 16, Arnold in Connecticut, Knox in Boston. Ironically, when some British artillerymen bound for Quebec were held up in Boston by weather, they helped train Knox’s company, little realizing the trouble they were sowing. Knox and Arnold each started businesses. Interestingly, while Arnold set up his own apothecary shop in the 1760s, he also sold books. Knox stuck mainly to books. Americans at the time had perhaps the highest literacy rate in the world with white males having approximately a 90 percent literacy rate, white females, 40 percent literate. Books were rather a luxury when there were forests to be cleared, wool to be carded, and butter to be churned. The emphasis was on how to practicality. Knox offered his readers such useful tomes as Manning’s On Female Diseases, and L.W.C.’s A Very Perfect Discourse in Order How to Know the Age of a Horse. And the books helped influence radical thinking; from the native best-seller John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which stated the colonial case in reasoned terms, to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which was something of a bible among the colonial radicals.

Thus Knox had become a comfortable member of the leather apron set, shopkeepers and artisans who worked in the tiny shops along Boston’s twisting streets and lived upstairs. Knox’s shop became a fashionable morning lounge where Paul Revere might drop in to chat, or the blacksmith, Nathanael Greene, when he was in town from Rhode Island.

Between chatting up customers, Knox was also reading all he could lay his hands on about artillery. The Boston Grenadier Corps whose members had to be at least five feet ten inches tall to best show off their splendid uniforms, gave Knox, six feet or more, the post of second in command. Knox, a genial sponge, absorbed all he could of the military arts.

In addition to artillery power, he was captivated by the political confrontations and strife around Boston. He had been present at the Boston Massacre and had tried to prevent the British troopers from firing into the crowd. He had fallen in love with Lucy Flucker, daughter of the Loyalist Secretary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Thomas Flucker, the father, offered his influence to get Knox a commission in the British Army, but Knox refused. The family’s opposition to the marriage caused one Boston wit to rhyme:

"But whoever heard

Of a marriage deterred,

Or even deferred

By any contrivance so absurd

As holding the boy and caging his bird?"

Stout Knox and the equally stout Lucy were wed notwithstanding, and she never saw her parents again. Meanwhile, Knox was spending more time with Nathanael Greene studying military science. When Revere stopped by to talk politics, the two would feign an argument to avert suspicion anytime a Loyalist entered the shop. After Lexington and Concord, Knox bundled himself and his sword beneath a cloak and by dark of night slipped over Roxbury Neck. Knox promptly offered to help design fortifications around Boston for the defending American rabble, and when Washington and Charles Lee, his third in command, inspected the work, they expressed the greatest pleasure and surprise. Washington had found a lifelong friend and his chief of artillery. Knox was only too happy, but where were the cannon? Then Knox remembered: Ticonderoga. Even before Congress, more militant now, approved the mission, Knox had set off with his younger brother, William, for New York. No trouble or expense [should] be spared to obtain them, Washington said in parting.

One story has it that Knox spent the night at Fort George on the way north where he met British Major John Andre, who had been captured by General Richard Montgomery. True or not, Knox five years later sat on the court martial that condemned Andre to death for his role in Benedict Arnold’s treason.

At Ticonderoga, Knox decided most of the captured guns were too worn for much use, and sorted out 59 cannons ranging from 4- to 24-pounders (the weight of the ball they fired). One was a fat mortar they nicknamed The Old Sow, which hove bombs to an amazing distance. By December 9, Knox had the guns aboard a selection of lake boats and set out down Lake George against the ice and snow. High waves sank William Knox’s boat luckily near shore … [so that] we were able to bail her out. Henry Knox, up ahead, had reached the southern end of the lake and went ashore and warmed ourselves by an exceeding good fire in a hut made by some civil Indians who were with their ladies abed. They gave us some venison, roasted after their manner, which was very relishing. Knox, the gourmand, even in the wild.

Now began the overland trek, hauling the cannons, which weighed up to 5,500 pounds apiece, through the snow and along roads that never bore a cannon before, wrote Knox, and never have borne one since. These were the forests, marshes, and streams that later impeded British general Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne in his quest to sweep down from Canada and wipe out the Continentals. General Philip Schuyler, a senior American officer and wealthy landholder in the Albany area, sent fresh men and horses. Knox had organized well, writing ahead to Committees of Safety along the route to have food and fresh oxen ready. He told Colonel Alexander McDougall, in New York, to be sure to have some 13-inch shells in Boston for the Old Sow to hove at the British. And to Washington, Knox wrote: Three days ago it was very uncertain whether we should have gotten them until next spring, but now, please God, they must go … trusting we shall have a fine fall of snow which will enable us to proceed further and make the carriage easy – if that should be the case, I hope in 16 or 17 days to be able to present your Excellency a noble train of artillery.

It took 40 days.

Farmers were reluctant to supply teams at the 12 shillings per day Knox was offering. Squire Palmer, between Saratoga and Albany, wanted 24 shillings, whereby the treaty broke off abruptly and Mr. Palmer was dismissed. Knox spent Christmas Day breaking a trail on foot through snow over his knees, finally reaching Albany almost perished with the cold. He and his men devoted New Year’s Day 1776 to cutting holes in the ice across the frozen Hudson to flood and refreeze the ice to make it thicker for their crossing. The exhausted Knox had just sat down for dinner with Schuyler when someone rushed in saying that a cannon had drowned, crashing through the ice. Citizens and teamsters pitched in to fish the cannon up. A grateful Knox christened it the Albany. Knox’s men stood by the traces with axes to cut the oxen free should another gun go through. Another did. Some Albany folk paid for the privilege of helping to retrieve it. Now on the east bank of the Hudson, one of Knox’s massive sleds mashed a handsome pleasure boat. Knox pushed on, with the idea that the country would pay all the damages … the only sympathy we had at that time to bestow on the owner.

The caravan began climbing through evergreen forests into the Berkshires over a crude road, then over a pass where there was no road at all. Across broken country, traversed only by Native Americans and deer, across gullies where chains