Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,864

This is the grave of Henry Knox.

Born in Boston in 1750, Knox grew up in mixed circumstances. His family was upwardly mobile, with a successful shipbuilder as a father. But the business turned and the father just disappeared in 1759, dying in the Caribbean in 1762. So the young Knox had to withdraw from Boston Latin and go to work, which was a big dropoff in financial circumstances. He ended up getting a job as a clerk in a bookstore, liked the work, and later would go into the bookstore business himself. He got really interested in military history and read deeply in it. That was good, because he was also very much a street tough who got in a lot of fights with his buddies. So he connected reading military history with his own exploits.

Knox witnessed the Boston Massacre in 1770 and had to testify at the trial, where he claimed he was trying to defuse tensions. He opened his bookstore the next year, with a specialty in military history. It was probably the best bookstore in Boston and although Knox had clear Patriot sympathies, it was a place where the Tory elite hung out. He liked playing with guns and blew off two fingers of his hand when one went off unexpectedly in 1773. He may have been involved in the Boston Tea Party, but we don’t know for sure. However, he was definitely active in the embargo movement, including making sure tea was not offloaded from ships. He ended up marrying the daughter from a Tory family he met in his bookstore in 1774; her family disowned her for marrying a Patriot.

In 1775, Knox immediately joined the Patriot militia defending Boston after the battles in Lexington and Concord started the American Revolution. His knowledge of military history really mattered here. He was part of the militia involved in the siege of Boston, trying to pressure the British out. As part of this, his bookshop was destroyed. But he had higher plans now. He was involved in Bunker Hill, directing cannon fire. His friend John Adams got him an official commission as a colonel of artillery. He then proposed to George Washington that he go to the forts up around Fort Ticonderoga, capture all the cannon and artillery that the British had abandoned, and bring it to Boston. That was no easy task, but Washington agree and it proved successful. Dragging that stuff across the Berkshires with the roads of the time, dang. This is what forced the British out of Boston.

Knox then was very close to Washington. He was with him through the loss of New York, the crossing of the Delaware, the Battle of Princeton. Later he ran the military’s artillery training school, limited as it was given the resources provided by the Continental Congress. He was part of the military court that convicted John André in 1780, part of the Benedict Arnold treason scandal. Knox played an important role in the Siege of Yorktown and Washington got Congress to promote him to major general for this.

After the war, Washington named Knox commander of the military fort at West Point. Knox was involved in the fight to get Congress to pay pensions to veterans, which it was loathe to do, having wanted a war for independence with no way to pay for it. In 1783, Knox organized the Society of the Cincinnati. Now, Knox was nothing if not a snob and a self-styled elite. Building on ideas of the Roman Republic that these guys were so obsessed with, creating an organization of elite Revolutionary War officers was something that a lot of Americans looked upon with suspicion, even as its initial goal was to provide fundraising for war widows and orphans. But this started the political divides in the new nation, ones that years later would get solidified in the Federalist vs. the Democratic-Republican Parties. A lot of people saw the idea of elite societies antithetical to the society they were attempting to establish, while others such as Knox, Washington, and Alexander Hamilton saw them as providing the kind of stable Roman Republic-esque leadership that they hoped to have for themselves. The fact that it was a hereditary organization is what really freaked a lot of Americans out. Is Henry Knox attempting to create a new American aristocracy that would replace what the now ex-colonists had rejected in leaving England?

Although the proponents of the Society of the Cincinnati had to back down from their ideas of what the organization would be in the face of widespread opposition, Knox was still a leading military figure from the Revolution and still a young man. The nation needed men like him. He was appointed Secretary of War by the Congress in 1785. There wasn’t much to do with a government this abjectly weak, but what he could do was focus on relations with the Tribes, which were terrible. Sure, most of the relevant Tribes had sided with the British during the Revolution and for good reason–they knew that Americans’ talk of liberty was hypocritical self-serving bullshit (which is absolutely was, and remains so today) and that genocide was very much the goal. Keeping the British around was the only thing saved them from ruin, as all these Tribes would learn immediately after the Revolution, with violence and forced land cessions. But no, the thing was that even among the few Tribes that did side with the colonists, such as parts of the Iroquois Confederacy, the same violence and dispossession was the result. Whites simply didn’t care what you had done in the Revolution. The land was going to belong to whites with death to resistors. It’s a true wonder that this nation has elected Donald Trump twice, yes.

So Knox had to deal with this. He remained in that post when George Washington became president in 1789, but now the federal government had more appropriate power to operate as a nation. But a lot of whites were angry at Knox. See, he wasn’t really a believer in genocide. He thought the Tribes needed to be treated fairly. That infuriated those involved in illegal land schemes on Native land (almost everyone with money, including Washington) and those who saw this strictly as a White Man’s Nation. But there really wasn’t much he could do to stop anyone. Knox also saw oversaw building coastal fortifications and professionalizing the militias in his time under Washington.

Knox resigned as Secretary of War at the end of 1794, after rumors that he had personally profited from the construction of frigates after the passage of the Naval Act earlier that year. He moved to Maine, where he decided he would make his fortune. He didn’t do a very good job of that though. His financial situation was unstable and he had to borrow money all the time and when he died, in 1806, he was in pretty sketchy straits, though just finally starting to make money. He was only 56 when he died. He swallowed a chicken bone, which got stuck in his throat and caused an infection. Dang.

Henry Knox is buried in Thomaston Village Cemetery, Thomaston, Maine.

If you would like this series to visit other Secretaries of War, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Timothy Pickering is in Salem, Massachusetts and Samuel Dexter is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.