Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

by Nancy Rubin Stuart

  After returning to military duty, Knox ordered twenty cannons placed at Dorchester Heights in southern Boston and concealed under a series of hay-covered fortifications. At dawn on March 4, when General Howe peered through his spyglass at Dorchester Heights, he paled at the sight of Ticonderoga’s guns. Behind them filed three thousand Continental soldiers. “My God, these follows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months!” the British general gasped.25 As he summoned the British for an attack, a thick fog rolled into Boston Harbor followed by howling winds and pounding rain, destroying all hopes for a counterattack. At dawn two days later, on March 6, the discouraged Howe decided to evacuate Boston.

  Lucy was ecstatic. Not only had she borne a healthy infant—no easy endeavor in eighteenth-century America—but “her Harry” had become a hero. For a brief few days, life seemed “the very pink of perfection,”26 as contemporary British writer Oliver Goldsmith had put it. Then, just as suddenly, on March 17, Lucy’s life darkened after she learned that the Fluckers had sailed with the British without a letter of farewell. Soon afterwards, Washington ordered the army to leave Boston. Inevitably that included “her Harry.” By April 3, Knox and his artillery corps dutifully marched south towards New York City, the anticipated site of the next British attack. By then, nearly all of Lucy’s frightened Tory friends had either scattered or sailed with the British. Lucy’s one dependable relative was her brother-in-law, William, who was overwhelmed by the British plunder of Knox’s New London Bookstore.

  Boston lay in shambles. During the winter months, shivering redcoats had chopped down trees in the Common and ripped apart old buildings for firewood. The Flucker mansion had been looted. Other homes and shops were abandoned, crumbling, ruinous reminders of Boston’s pre-Revolutionary splendor. Many of the remaining residents, once trapped in the city under Howe’s martial grip, were sickly, malnourished, or dying from epidemics sweeping through Boston.

  “Is my Harry well?” Lucy solicitously wrote her husband from Boston. Self-pityingly she then scrawled, “No, that cannot be when he reflects how wretched he has left me. . . . The remembrance of his tender infant must also affect him when he considers it at so great a distance from its father . . . in a place exposed to an enraged enemy.”27

  Contrary to Washington’s expectations, that “enraged enemy” had yet to appear in New York. After weeks of waiting, Lucy grew impatient. She saw no reason to avoid joining Henry, especially since wives of other officers had planned trips to New York. “Mrs. Greene and Mrs. Morgan set out on Sunday next,” Lucy wrote. “They fully expected me to have gone with them. What is the reason I am not as happy as they . . . loved as well.”28

  Her letter hit the mark, piercing Knox as keenly as a British bayonet. “Although father, mother, sister, and brother have forsaken you, yet my love, your Harry will ever esteem you the best boon of heaven,” he replied.29

  Still, his words were merely paper and ink—not the flesh-and-blood man who would hold her in his arms, dispel her fears, whisper reassurances in the dark of the night. By early June, Lucy had packed the family trunks, bundled up her infant, braved a bumpy carriage ride, and arrived in New York. Reunited with Knox in his Broadway home near Bowling Green, Lucy happily hosted dinners for his colleagues. Intrigued with the port city of twenty thousand, she and Caty Greene toured its streets, shops, and piers. Often, too, they gaped at the sight of the city’s drunks and prostitutes, as well as the “Tory rides” in which tarred-and-feathered Loyalists were paraded through the streets on rails.

  One day the Knoxes visited their friends, the Greenes in Brooklyn; on another they dined with the Washingtons in Richmond Hill. But her visit, Knox continually reminded Lucy, was not safe. A British attack was imminent. It was prudent for her and the baby to leave. To that Lucy paid no mind—until the memorable morning of June 29. As she and Henry ate breakfast at their home overlooking New York harbor, an ominous fleet of white sails appeared over the horizon. The British had arrived.

  “You can scarcely conceive the distress and anxiety that she [Lucy] then had,” Knox wrote his brother William. The city was in an uproar. “Guns firing, the troops to their posts and every thing . . . bustle.” Worst of all, Knox had no time to calm Lucy, for “my country calls loudest.” Anguished, he added, “My God, may I never experience the like feelings again. They were too much.” In the press of his duties, Knox admitted that he “scolded like a fury at her [Lucy] for not having gone before.”30

  Stung by “her Harry’s” outburst, Lucy left for Fairfield, Connecticut. Accompanying her were Caty Greene and Mary Johnson Pollard, whose husband was Knox’s quartermaster. Both women, Knox confided to William, were ill-suited companions for the vulnerable Lucy. Nathanael Greene’s wife, Caty, was moody, a vain, flighty woman who flirted with the army’s handsome young officers. Mary had a “melancholy dumpish disposition . . . a very unfit companion.”31 Worried that the British would seize the coastal towns near New York, Knox begged Lucy to travel further east, to New Haven. And, he added, she should ignore any other army wives whose husbands, like one named Palfrey, encouraged them to return to New York, who selfishly wanted “to see her because she is a woman.”32

  Lucy moved further east. “I will go to New Haven, indeed I will,” she penned from Stamford, Connecticut, in early July, “but first must beg your patience to read this, which I think will show that I am not deserving of the severe censure that I have received. You may remember I left my Harry in a state of mind, that prevented . . . a word to him of the tender kind. . . . This induced me to stay a little time as near as possible, in hopes by some smile of Providence I might be favored with a more affectionate parting.”33

  Especially irksome was Henry’s habit “to remind me of my incapacity of judging for myself. I now assure you that I have [a] sense of my own weakness and ignorance and a very high opinion of the abilities of him in whose eyes mine are so contemptible. I am afraid you do not bestow the time to read my scrawls with any attention.”34

  On July 18, after a week of silence, she received Knox’s reply. “I am grieved and distraught by receipt of your letter,” he began, insisting that he had asked her to leave New York City out of “the most disinterested friendship cemented by the tenderest love.”35

  Relieved by his reassurances of affection, Lucy replied, “I have just received my dear Harry’s letter. . . . It gives me great pleasure, that admidst the hurry of public business he steals so much time for me. If I wanted proof of his affection this would be sufficient, but thank heaven, that is not the case.” Apologetically, Lucy added, “It grieves me that I have ever professed what has given you pain but I [am] sure you will forget, and forgive when you reflect, that my affection for my dear Harry led me into the error.”36

  Paradoxically, the Revolution also created marital tensions for Lucy’s parents. Through Tories who had remained in Boston, William Knox heard about the Fluckers’ flight from their home and relayed the news to Lucy and Henry. Lucy’s father had sailed on the first ship to England. Her mother and sister landed instead in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they shared a small room in a rented house. From London, Thomas Flucker had invited his wife to join him “if she pleases,” suggesting a previous disagreement. Hannah had refused. An argument had apparently ensued. “Thomas won’t say whether he wishes her to come or not.” William wrote Lucy. Her mother, Hannah, “intends tarrying at Halifax till he comes to her.”37

  The news distressed Lucy. “My heart aches for her [Hannah], as I fear she is in great want of ready money” she wrote her husband.38 From a Waldo relative she also learned that the British government still paid her father a handsome salary. “Pappa enjoys his 300 pounds a year as Secretary of the Province. Droll, is it not?” she wrote Henry.39

  More immediately disquieting were reports from Knox about the influx of redcoats and Hessians in New York. From Wallingford, Connecticut, where she and Mary Pollard lived in a borrowed house, Lucy sent Knox fresh clothes. Then, to sate his e
normous appetite, she dispatched supplies of cheese and poultry. Knowing the army needed more gunpowder, Lucy dutifully visited the saltpeter mills of nearby New Haven and dispatched samples to Henry.

  By then, outbreaks of smallpox in the army prevented thoughts of Lucy’s return to New York. Immunity developed one of two ways: from contraction of the disease or inoculation with the live virus. The latter, known as a “variolation,” was nearly as dangerous as the illness itself, producing high fevers, pustules, and, occasionally, death. “I wish my dear girl and her babe to be eased of that dread,” Knox wrote. It would be best if she returned to Boston where her brother-in-law, William, would arrange the variolation. After that Lucy could visit him in the army camp “at any time you see proper and it shall be thought prudent so to do.”40

  Fate decreed otherwise. By autumn 1776 Washington’s army had suffered a string of defeats in New York City, Harlem Heights, and White Plains. Added to Knox’s dismay was Lucy’s sudden silence. His next letter of November 1 explained he was “exceedingly afflicted” by the absence of her letters.41

  On November 6, an infuriated Lucy retorted, “You accuse me of neglecting to write by three posts—and impute it to pleasure or negligence . . . [but] neglecting you is a thing I never shall be guilty of.”42 Knox, on the other hand, now seemed completely engrossed in the war. “I imagine by this time that you have almost forgot my very looks and if perchance my name is mentioned you cry what have we to do with women. Out of the last sixteen months we have not been six weeks together. Alas, what a change from the happy days I have seen.”43

  Perhaps her parents’ predictions had been correct.

  By early December, Washington’s ragged men had retreated across the Hudson and through New Jersey to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware. The ranks of the Continental army, diminished by casualties, deserters, and those taken prisoner, had reached its lowest ebb. “Unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place . . . this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of three things. Starve, dissolve, or disperse,” Washington grimly warned Henry Laurens, the new president of the Second Continental Congress.44

  Lacking Congressional support, the commander in chief resorted to a desperate plan. On Christmas Day 1776, Washington ordered 2,400 men to McKonkey’s Ferry for a nocturnal crossing of the Delaware. Although the weather remained clear all day, by 11 p.m. Christmas night, high winds and blinding snows slowed the soldiers’ crossing. Through it all, Knox’s booming voice directed pilots of the flat-bottom boats carrying cannons and horses across the swift-running Delaware. “The floating ice in the river made the labour almost incredible,” he later acknowledged.45 At dawn, after an eight-mile march to Trenton, Washington’s forces routed the Hessians in a stunning victory that signaled the turning tide of the Revolution.

  The next day, Washington told Knox of his appointment as a brigadier-general. “It was unsolicited on my part though it was not wholly unexpected,” he joyfully wrote Lucy on January 2, 1777. “Will it give you satisfaction or pleasure in being informed that the Congress have created me a general officer, a brigadier with the entire command of the artillery. If so, I shall be happy.”46

  Although proud, Lucy sensed that her husband’s new rank would require further sacrifices on her part. Henceforth, she must play mistress to Henry’s marriage to the Revolution. Soon afterwards, and probably not coincidentally, she decided to leave Wallingford, Connecticut, whose residents she found ill-mannered and crude. “Take care, my love, of permitting your disgust for the Connecticut people to escape your lips,” the ever-diplomatic Henry warned her. “Indiscreet expressions are handed from town to town and a long while remembered.”47

  His warning probably came too late. Soon afterwards, Knox received an angry letter from the landlord who had rented the Wallingford house to Lucy and her friend Mary Pollard. His complaint? The crockery in the house had been broken and twenty-five gallons of West Indian rum were missing from the cellar. Possibly the two women had drowned their sorrows in alcohol. More likely, though, a group of locals had entered the house and avenged themselves on Lucy after her departure for Boston.

  In late February 1777, the military hero Benedict Arnold also arrived in Boston. A former New Haven apothecary and West Indies trader, the newly widowed officer was an attractive, well-built man, about five feet nine inches tall with a dark complexion and strikingly pale blue eyes. The preceding November he had famously staged a strategic coup at Lake Champlain’s Valcour Island that had prevented General Guy Carlton from retaking Ticonderoga. Those who met Arnold rarely forgot his charm and charisma—nor his formidable vitriol, when crossed.

  Through Lucy, Arnold met a fifteen-year-old beauty, Elizabeth “Betsy” DeBlois. Enchanted, the warrior showered the brunette with gifts, among them a golden-diamond ring. To advance the romance Arnold begged Lucy to speak in his favor to “the heavenly Miss DeBlois.” Delighted, Lucy presented Betsy with the colonel’s love letter and arranged for delivery of his trunk of fashionable gowns. Meanwhile, Arnold reminded Lucy that he waited “under the most anxious suspense until I have the favor of a line from you.”48

  Despite Lucy’s best efforts, Arnold’s suit fell flat. “Miss DeBlois has positively refused to listen to the general, which, with other mortifications will come very hard upon him,” Lucy wrote Henry four days later.49 Among those disappointments was Congress’s reluctance to promote Arnold a major general.

  Infuriated, the warrior wrote Washington demanding a trial, which the commander in chief discouraged. “Public bodies” he reminded Arnold, “are not amendable for the actions.” Arnold’s failure to obtain a major generalship, Washington assured him, was “not overlooked for want of merit in you” but rather from an agreement among Congressional delegates that they must award generalships evenly throughout the states.50

  Still that seemed unfair, especially when, as Knox later wrote Lucy, five younger men were finally promoted over Arnold. That, he anxiously added, probably “pushes [Arnold] out of the service. I hope the affair will be remedied.”51

  Ironically, Arnold’s patriotism probably contributed to Betsy’s refusal of him. According to one account, her meddlesome Tory mother had objected to Arnold’s political views. Soon afterwards, Betsy attempted to elope with a Boston corset maker, but Mrs. DeBlois allegedly stopped them at the altar.

  By then, Betsy had returned Arnold’s trunk to Lucy. Lacking European imports because of the war, Lucy and her friend Caty Greene rifled through its contents. Nathanael’s trim wife found a gown but plump Lucy only a scarf. At the time, Arnold would not let the items go, but the following December Lucy asked for the scarf again. Major David Salisbury Franks, the warrior’s aide de camp and a relative of Becky Franks, explained that Arnold “cannot part with any part of the contents of the trunk you mention until he comes to Boston.” At that point, he would “give you the preference he desires.”52

  Another distraction that spring was Lucy’s sale of her father’s looted townhouse. Since women not could hold property in their own name, Lucy arranged with an attorney to place the £5,500 of proceeds in Henry’s name. “This affair gives me pain (not that Papa will disapprove of it for he must certainly think it a wise step when he knows the circumstances) but for fear that it should be misconstrued,” she wrote Henry on April 3.53 Implied was Lucy’s fear that her father might interpret that as Henry taking permanent possession of those monies rather than sending them to Flucker in London after the war.

  Subsequent to the property transfer, Lucy submitted to the variolation against smallpox. “My heart palpitates at the thought of my dearest Lucy being in the least danger,” Knox wrote from the army camp on the Raritan near Middlebrook.54 On April 30, Lucy cheerfully reported that, after three days’ illness, she was on the mend. Although she had no mirror, she could feel twenty pockmarks on her face. “I am almost glad you do not see it,” she wrote. “I don’t believe I should get one kiss, and yet the doctor tells me it is very becoming.”55

&n
bsp; Still Henry refused to let her visit. “You ask me why I give you no encouragement. Your safety and happiness is the sole object of my heart,” he again explained. “I however anxious to have you with me cannot consent to a step which will most inevitably . . . reiterate . . . the disagreeable situation” of Lucy’s earlier visit to New York.56

  That note infuriated her. Living perilously with Henry was preferable to being lonely with difficult strangers. The latest example, Lucy wrote from Sewall’s Point (contemporary Brookline, Massachusetts), was General William Heath’s twenty-six-year-old wife, Mary Heath, who was “so stiff it is impossible to be sociable with her.”57

  For all his insistence that Lucy remain in Boston, Knox expected her to write more often. “I was . . . mortified [disappointed] beyond description in not having a line from you,” he lectured her. “What in the name of love is the reason? I write you by every opportunity and expect the same from her who is far dearer to me than life, especially at a time when my anxiety is so great upon the account of your recovery.”58

  The only remedy for those anxieties was a visit. No longer did she care about “the luxuries of life,” Lucy insisted. She was “willing to taste nothing but bread and water” if only she could join Henry. Other wives had joined their husbands at Middlebrook. “Happy Mrs. Washington, happy Mrs. Gates. In short, I do not recollect an instance like my own.”59

  By July, Lucy was seething. “I am resolved nothing shall prevent my coming to you in early September, but your positive refusal,” she finally announced in a letter dated July 17. “In which case, I will try to be as indifferent as I shall then think you are.” Later in that letter, Lucy confessed the reason behind her rage—fears that “her Harry” would “fall into the usual error of absent lovers—that indifference will take place of that refined affection, which you have entertained for me.”60