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

by Nancy Rubin Stuart

  By late April, the Treasury Office had still not responded. Clinton’s payment, Arnold seethed, was “not a full compensation for the loss of my real estate, for risks and services rendered.” Given the additional expense of living in London to reclaim that debt and the “loss of time and difficulty attending it,” Arnold finally withdrew his claim.21 Instead the angry forty-four year old vowed to rely only upon himself. He would do so by establishing an international trading enterprise.

  Peggy could not have approved: separations from her husband were as anguishing as transatlantic crossings were dangerous. And she was again pregnant. Moreover, though surrounded by social acquaintances, she had few close friends. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1754, “the General” was busily completing the final touches on a new brig, the Lord Middlebrook, for his voyage to New Brunswick. There he intended to sell imports to the influx of Loyalists emigrating there from England and America.

  Peggy’s description of her situation must have their worried the Shippens, for by early summer, brother-in-law Edward Burd had arrived in London. Accounts of his visit are brief, only mentioning a shopping trip with Peggy to purchase a china set for his wife. All the while, Burd undoubtedly assessed his sister-in-law. Regardless of the Shippens’ disgust with Arnold (whom Burd had dubbed that “infernal villain”), to Burd, Peggy seemed reasonably content. Not only did she continue to trust Arnold but did so even at the risk of her future security.22 On July 13, with utter disregard for her father’s costly repurchase of Mount Pleasant at auction, Peggy wrote Judge Shippen that “G. Arnold desires you will be so good as to sell it [Mount Pleasant] for as much as you can,” since Arnold was no longer willing “to risk any more money in America.”23

  Two weeks later, Peggy bore a frail baby girl, named Sophia. Once assured that mother and child were stable, Burd returned to Philadelphia. The following October, Arnold sailed to the British North American colonies. For months Peggy waited for his letter. By March 6, 1786, wracked with suspense about him, she poured her heart out to Judge Shippen. “I assure you, my dear papa, I find it necessary to summon all my philosophy to my aid, to support myself under my present situation. Separated from and anxious for the fate, of the best of husbands, torn from almost everybody that is dear to me, harassed with a troublesome and expensive lawsuit, having all the General’s business to transact, and feeling that I am in a strange country, without a creature near me that is really interested in my fate, you will not wonder if I am unhappy.”24

  For the first time, Peggy admitted the sacrifices she had made as Arnold’s wife and her sense of utter aloneness. Ironically that was the same message her mirror opposite, Lucy Flucker Knox, had once sounded across the Atlantic during the long years of the Revolution.

  Events surrounding the proposed peace with Britain meant new challenges for Lucy and Henry Knox. In March 1782, Washington appointed Knox and Gouverneur Morris, the assistant treasurer of the Revolution, as commissioners for a prisoner exchange in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Only reluctantly had Henry complied, for he and Lucy were then watching anxiously over their newborn son, Marcus. In late winter the infant had contracted smallpox and was only slowly recovering. From Elizabethtown, on March 22, Henry anxiously assured Lucy, “Every time I am absent from you I am convinced more & more of the utter improbability of living without you. I hope you and our dear little pledges of love and joy [are well] and that Marcus has entirely recovered of the small pox.”25

  That same day Congress approved Washington’s recommendation for Knox’s appointment as a major general, making him, at thirty-three, the youngest man of that rank in the army. Even that promotion did little to cheer Lucy, whose letters dwelt upon her “unspeakable mortification [disappointment]” at Henry’s absence.26

  By mid-April, the prisoner exchange at Elizabethtown had attracted national attention when a British officer hanged the American prisoner, Captain Joshua Huddy, during his transfer from New York City. The resultant public clamor for American revenge renewed tensions with the British. Washington, consequently, reestablished army headquarters on the Hudson and appointed Knox the new commander of West Point.

  By mid-May, Lucy had left the Biddles’ home, where she and her children had been living, and accompanied Henry to Newburgh, ten miles north of West Point. To her delight, their new home was a handsome fieldstone house once owned by miller John Ellison. Beneath its high-pitched roof and tall chimneys stood a central hall with wood-paneled rooms, providing her and Henry with a gracious location for the dinners and social gatherings they soon hosted.

  Like others who had once enjoyed an elite lifestyle, Lucy craved its return and, whenever opportunity arrived, attempted to recreate it. Washington’s orders for a May 31 celebration of the birth of the French dauphin, Louis-Joseph Xavier François, soon provided that opportunity. As he had at Pluckemin, Henry, with Lucy’s guidance, organized the festivities. In preparation for the arrival of hundreds of guests, Knox ordered the construction of a six-hundred-foot colonnade artfully festooned with evergreens, fleur-de-lis, muskets, and bayonets. At noon after a morning of prayers, parades, military displays, and gun salutes, the Washingtons, Governor George Clinton and his Sarah, the Knoxes, and other officers arrived by barge and passed through the Grand Colonnade. A banquet for five hundred guests followed and celebration with “13 toasts, particularly adapted to the festival, were drank, under a discharge of 13 canon,” reported a local paper.27

  After “a few bumpers of wine . . . Gen. Washington, who appeared in unusually good spirits, said to his officers, ‘Let us have a dance!’” reported Captain Edwin Eben. Then “the great commander led the dance, in a ‘gender hop’ or ‘stag dance’ [italics in original] . . . to the favorite old tune ‘Soldier’s Joy.’”28 Another newspaper reported that “Washington attended the ball . . . and with a dignified and graceful air, having Mrs. Knox for his partner, carried down a dance of twenty couple in the arbor on the green grass.”29 By then no one questioned Lucy’s role as the reigning hostess of celebrations, a role she continued to hold in public celebrations during the early Federal period.

  When, however, officers of the Continental army began to complain about Congressional failure to deliver back pay, memories of that celebration quickly faded. Even the army’s beloved drillmaster, Baron Von Steuben, felt the financial strain. “It is been owing to him that a substantial discipline has been established in the American Army,” Knox sharply reminded Congressman Samuel Osgood. Lacking a salary, the dedicated Von Steuben had spent so much of his own savings that he “can no longer live without pay.”30

  By August, the Knoxes faced a new personal crisis. From Philadelphia where their eight-year-old daughter Lucy attended boarding school, the Biddles reported that the child’s health was rapidly declining. Without further delay Lucy and Henry had her brought to Newburgh, whose fresh Hudson River air they thought would be beneficial. As the girl’s condition improved, however, their infant son, Marcus, grew fussy. Initially Lucy and Henry attributed his symptoms to teething, but soon the baby became seriously ill. By August 25, Knox gloomily wrote his brother William that he would probably “never have the pleasure to see him. A few days, perhaps a few hours may decide his fate.”31

  On September 8, Marcus died. “I have the unhappiness, my dear General to inform you of the departure of my precious infant, your god son,” Knox wrote Washington two days later. “In the deep mystery in which all human events are involved, the Supreme Being has been pleased to prevent his expanding innocence from ripening.”32

  For nearly a month, Knox stopped writing others. On September 24 he finally conceded to William Alexander (known as Lord Stirling, from his Scottish inheritance) that he had no choice but to accept the child’s death: “The misery inflicted upon us poor mortals appears frequently to be too great to be borne. Yet we wade on.”33 Two weeks later Henry wrote Gouverneur Morris that he had suffered “private affliction, in the loss of a fine child, and the [sickness of] the rest of my family.”34

&
nbsp; Lucy was profoundly depressed. Having lost two infants in the space of three years, her dreams of a large, happy family had vanished, as seemingly elusive as the reflected light from a candle sconce. He still hoped, Knox wrote Washington, that Mrs. Knox, by leaning upon the “great principles of reason and religion will be enabled . . . to support this repeated shock to her tender affections.”35 For weeks, he sat by Lucy’s side, reasoning with her and assuring her in time all would be well. Death, he confided to his friend, Benjamin Lincoln, “had with a strong and unrelenting hand seized the youngest of my little flock. My utmost attention and philosophy were necessarily exerted to calm the agitated mind of its wretched mother.”36

  Time only slowly mended Lucy and, for that matter, Knox. The following February, while congratulating Nathanael Greene on the British evacuation of the southern states, Knox alluded to the late Marcus as a “little angel.”37 Left unsaid was the exciting but potentially worrisome news: Lucy was once again pregnant.

  Concerns over Knox’s military “family” simultaneously loomed. In December, when officers met to persuade Congress for reimbursements, they appointed Henry their chairman. By the twenty-ninth, representatives of that committee had presented a draft of Knox’s request for a lump sum pension, asserting, “We are in an unhappy predicament indeed, not to know who are responsible to us for a settlement of accounts.”38 Congress soon insisted they were not responsible: the Articles of Confederation did not mandate that they pay military salaries. That infuriated Knox. He thundered to his friend Gouverneur Morris, a Congressional delegate, that if “the present Constitution is so defective, why do not you great men call the people together and tell them so; that is, to have a convention of the States to form a better Constitution?”39

  By March 10, officers at Washington’s headquarters at Newburgh were so frustrated that they circulated a letter calling for a strike. Known as the Newburgh Address, the letter assailed Congress for its neglect. It also urged the soldiers to refuse to defend America, urging them instead to “retire to some yet unsettled country, smile in your turn and mock when their [America’s] fear cometh on.”40

  Horrified, Washington called a meeting for Saturday, March 15, at his headquarters. Suspecting that the fractious Horatio Gates had instigated the protest, Washington named him the meeting’s chairman. At noon, the officers glumly filed into the meeting hall. After arriving at the podium, Washington paused and then reached into his pocket to pull out a pair of glasses. “Gentlemen,” the commander in chief began, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country.”41

  A gasp went through the audience. The men listened with rapt attention. The letter, Washington suggested in cool, reasoned tones, must have originated with a Loyalist or someone plotting to destroy the link between the army and government. “Let me entreat you, Gentlemen, not to take any measures, which, viewed in the calm light of reason, will lessen the dignity, and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained; let me request you rely upon the faith of your Country, and place a full confidence in the purity of the intentions of Congress.”42 Washington’s heartfelt appeal touched his listeners. Ultimately, as he hoped, the officers rejected the anonymous letter calling for mutiny. Soon afterwards, Congress agreed to grant the officers five years’ pay compounded by six percent interest.

  To Knox that was still not enough: the pay did not wholly compensate for the sacrifices made by the officers of the Revolution. To remedy that, he drafted a plan for a hereditary organization called the Society of Cincinnati. Besides honoring veterans and their descendants, its mission was to help any members fallen on hard times. Immediately, social libertarians like Thomas Jefferson, Elbridge Gerry, and Samuel and John Adams objected, insisting that the Cincinnati smacked of a new aristocracy. To the outspoken author Mercy Otis Warren, Knox’s society mocked the “primeval principles of the late revolution.”43

  In its defense Knox claimed the Cincinnati was an organization “whose intention is pure and uncorrupted by any sinister design.” Its state chapters must “erect some lonely . . . shelter for the unfortunate against the storms and tempest of poverty.”44 Even Washington, who was a lifelong Mason, agreed that the Cincinnati was an important organization. On May 14, 1783, he became its first president.

  During the eight years of the Revolution, the “tempests of poverty” had swept over the Knoxes. After the British evacuation of Boston in 1776, Henry had depended upon his brother William to restore his book business, monitor his privateering investments, and oversee his finances. Failing to achieve that, William had sailed to Europe in search of more lucrative prospects. While visiting London in 1783, he located Lucy’s family—her mother; sister Hannah Flucker Urquart; her brother, Captain Thomas Flucker; and his wife, Sarah. When they met, William was shocked to find the Fluckers in mourning clothes, the consequence, they explained, of the recent and sudden death of Lucy’s father, Thomas. When William reported the news to Lucy, it must have released a flood of emotions in her—relief that William had reconnected with her family and grief over her father’s death.

  On May 14, Knox wrote to Captain Flucker to convey his and Lucy’s condolences and inviting them to reconcile. “The war being over we may hope for a revival of intercourse and mutual goodwill between friends who have been separated. Suffer me to press you to write often and to confide in me in the light of a real brother.”45 In a separate letter Knox also sent his sympathies to Lucy’s mother.

  Practical matters as well as propriety had inspired Knox to write. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had already seized Loyalist Thomas Flucker’s personal estate but not the inheritance of the Waldo Patent, vast tracts of land in the district of Maine extending from the Kennebec to the Penobscot rivers. An ancient inheritance from Lucy’s maternal grandfather, General Samuel Waldo, the Patent still belonged to the Fluckers. Once an American-British peace treaty was signed, Lucy and her family could inherit their shares.

  Two days after Knox’s letter to the Fluckers, Lucy delivered another son the couple again named Marcus Camillus. Henry anxiously announced the birth to William, adding that the newborn seemed in “poor health.”46 For Lucy, the baby’s uncertain start was all too familiar, a haunting reminder of earlier difficulties.

  Eleven weeks after the September 8, 1783, Treaty of Paris, the British prepared to evacuate New York. By the late morning of November 26, Knox and eight hundred soldiers marched from Harlem through McGowan’s Pass (now Central Park), halting at the Bowery and present-day Third Avenue.

  At 1 p.m., cannon fire signaled the march of the British to the East River, where they boarded rowboats to reach the royal fleet bobbing in the harbor. In a final sneer, the redcoats had greased the flagpole over Fort George (the site of today’s U.S. Customs House) and left the Union Jack waving in the breeze. Within moments, sailor John Arsdale attached cleats to his shoes, climbed the pole, removed the British flag and raised the Stars and Stripes. Simultaneously, American troops, led by Knox, Washington, Governor Clinton, members of the Common Council, and civilians proceeded down Broadway to the Battery to cheering crowds. That historic moment made a lasting impression on one Manhattan woman:

  We had been accustomed for a long time to military display in all the finish and finery of [British] garrison life. The troops just leaving us were as if equipped for a show and with their scarlet uniforms and burnished arms made a brilliant display. The troops that marched in, on the contrary, were ill-clad and weather-beaten and made a forlorn appearance. But then, they were our troops and as I looked at them and thought upon all they had done and suffered for us, my heart and my eyes were full.47

  For ten days, city residents celebrated with parades, parties, balls, toasts, and dinners, culminating with Washington’s departure on December 4. By midday, the Continental officers had gathered in a low-ceilinged room at the Fraunces Tavern on the Battery as Washington reviewed the previous eight years. “With a heart full of love and gratitude
I now take my leave of you,” he said. “I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.” As the men raised their glasses for a toast, Washington asked them one by one to “come and take me by the hand.” Henry Knox, “being nearest to him,” took Washington’s hand, his eyes filling with tears, and was followed by the other officers.48

  Later, from a barge in the harbor, Washington waved a final farewell. “Our much loved friend the General has gone from this city to Congress and from thence to Mount Vernon,” Knox subsequently wrote Lafayette.49

  By December 30, only five hundred soldiers remained at West Point with another two hundred scattered throughout other key posts. Knox had been charged with the heart-breaking task of dismissing the men, many of whom lacked the funds to return home. “This business has been painful on account of discharging the officers and soldiers at this [severe] season without pay, and in many instances the men are miserably clad,” he unhappily wrote Congressman Osgood that day.50 Six weeks later, Knox returned to his hometown, Boston.

  Awaiting him in a rented farmhouse in the Dorchester neighborhood of the city were Lucy and the children. Owned by the Welles banking family, their two-story saltbox sat at the corner of contemporary Welles Avenue and Washington Street. To Lucy, the long-delayed dream for a normal life had become a reality—a home of her own, a brood of children, and her husband by her side.