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

by Nancy Rubin Stuart

  That unnamed hostess was undoubtedly Lucy. History has not revealed why she was so passionate about games. Cards had long been accepted as a social amusement in New York, as Becky Franks once complained, but Lucy’s zeal transcended that. Apparently she enjoyed the competition or found it a way to wall off grief, but whatever the cause, it was matched by the vehemence of Henry’s disapproval. “Remember me, my love with all the tenderness I deserve—respect my prejudices as they relate to vile cards,” he pleaded, “and for God’s sake and mine, renounce them altogether.”14

  In her defense, the Knoxes’ eldest daughter, Lucy, later insisted to Elizabeth Ellet, author of the 1848 Women of the American Revolution, that her mother’s love for her family remained her overriding concern. Not only did the elder Lucy have strong “domestic attachments . . . devotion to household and children,” but she “was ready in the noon of life, to give up the delights of society in the metropolis.”15 By that, the younger Lucy referred to her mother’s desire to leave Philadelphia to establish a grand home on her grandfather’s lands in Maine.

  During each summer’s outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia Lucy and the children fled. Even before their move to the City of Brotherly Love, the Knoxes’ Boston friend Henry Jackson had warned Lucy about “the unhealthy climate of that city in the hot season.”16 To avoid contagion Jackson suggested she and the children spend the summers in his spacious home in Dorchester, Massachusetts. By May 1792, Lucy, who was again pregnant, accepted his invitation and brought her sister-in-law, Sarah Lyons Flucker, and both their children.

  In Dorchester Lucy again pined for “her Harry,” imagining him enjoying himself at dinners and galas in her absence. “My evenings cannot possibly be any cause of jealousy. They are stupid indeed,” Henry assured her. “If I dine out which is pretty often, I drink tea . . . come home read the evening paper and about . . . nine go to a solitary and . . . a painful bed, painful from the reflection that the companion of my soul is at a distance—and that I am deprived of the blessed solace of her arms.”17

  He longed to join Lucy in Massachusetts but, as America’s new secretary of war, was obliged to remain in Philadelphia. “I am upon my probation,” he reminded her in late July. “A single lapse of public duty at this moment sinks me, never again to rise.”18 Lured by the prospect of retiring to Maine, he again rode to New York to examine legal papers on the Waldo Patent. “I know not how long it will take to bring the cursed affair here to a close,” he wrote. “But I know that I shall not be able to stay here more than three or at most four days. I must be back here [in Philadelphia], Friday or Saturday.”19

  Adding to his worries was Lucy’s approaching due date, causing him to “check every post . . . until I shall be informed of your having been safely delivered.”20 The “perils of child-bearing” was only one of Lucy’s challenges.21 Another was the rambunctious behavior of her eldest son, Henry Jackson Knox.

  The Knoxes’ earlier indulgence of the boy was at least partially to blame for his behavior. While visiting a friend in Boston, Lucy brought young Henry Jackson with her. As the two women chatted, the boy “disarranged” the books in the hostess’s library. “Henry must not be restrained, we never think of thwarting him in anything,” Lucy insisted. Appalled, her friend replied, “But I cannot have my books spoiled, as my husband is not a bookbinder.” Enraged, Lucy stormed out of the house with her son.22

  By the time young Henry was twelve, even Lucy and Henry were worried about him. In an effort to improve his behavior, Lucy toured a school in Hingham, Massachusetts, which prepared young men for Harvard. Though the school’s name was not mentioned in Lucy’s letters, it was the Derby School (today’s Derby Academy), then the town’s only secondary educational institution. After learning about it, Knox was impressed. Losing his father when he was twelve had forced Henry to leave Boston Latin School, thus blocking all hopes of attending Harvard. Knox wanted better for his son, and the Derby School seemed to provide that, combining moral training with high educational standards. Without a sound background in both, Knox wrote Lucy, young Henry “will grope through the world, and with bad morals. I love him as I do my life, but I am desirous to devote him to the proper rank of a man by discharging my duty to him.”23

  Though her sister, Sarah, who had also toured the Derby School, decided to enroll her own children there, Lucy, in contrast, balked at the idea, feeling guilty about sending her son away from home. On September 16, in the midst of the dilemma, Lucy bore an eleventh child, a girl she named Augusta Henrietta. “I received on Saturday last my beloved Lucy’s letter,” Henry joyously wrote from Philadelphia. “I am delighted . . . what heaven in its mercy grant.”24

  As she recovered, Lucy continued to brood about young Henry. “As to our son please to observe finally that I regard your happiness as my supreme object,” Knox tenderly assured her. At the very least, the youth’s attendance at boarding school would relieve her of attempting to shape their difficult son. “If he can be made a better man and receive an education at a distance,” Knox observed, “. . . it’s our duty to afford it to him.”25

  Coincidental with those expressed sentiments was the forty-year-old secretary of war’s own questions about time spent away from home. That same September he confided to his fifteen-year-old daughter, Lucy, that he longed to leave his cabinet position. “All my life hitherto, I have been pursuing illusive bubbles which burst on being grasped . . . ’tis high time I should quit public life and attend to the solid interests of my family so that they may not be left dependent on the cold hand of charity.” Nevertheless, he intended to retire “with reputation.” As secretary of war he could not neglect “for a moment, the services belonging to my station,” but he understood that for the sake of his family, he had to “make some exertions for pecuniary objects.”26

  Among those “exertions” were Knox’s ventures in land speculation. With his partner, the slimy New York speculator William Duer, Knox naively purchased 2 million acres of Maine land at ten cents an acre from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. No sooner had the two partners paid back the $10,000 than Duer was apprehended for other debts and thrown into prison. Fortunately, Senator William Bingham, Philadelphia’s wealthiest citizen, rescued Knox by purchasing Duer’s shares, advancing a loan, and promising the secretary of war one-third of the profits.

  At the same time, Henry continued to struggle with rights to the Waldo Patent. On July 4, 1785, the Massachusetts legislature had confirmed Knox’s stewardship of its 576,000 acres and three adjoining coastal islands. Technically, Massachusetts still owned two-fifths of the patent’s shares from the estate of Lucy’s mother. Since back taxes were owed on the property, Henry realized the lowered value of those shares presented a unique opportunity. In June 1791, he met at the Bunch of Grapes tavern with Boston merchant Joseph Peirce, who managed—and here the details remain murky—to auction off the two-fifths’ shares of the Flucker portion at the bargain rate of $3,000. The winning bidder was Dr. Oliver Smith, a friend of Knox’s brother, William. Six months later, Smith sold the shares to Knox’s agent, Henry Jackson. By late 1793 Jackson quietly signed them over to Henry. Somehow (and again the records are unclear), Henry also purchased the remaining one-fifth of the Waldo Patent from the other Flucker heirs.

  Slippery as was Knox’s land grab of the entire Waldo Patent, nepotism and patronage were common in those days. Even the Knoxes’ literary friend, Mercy Otis Warren, whose work praised the “virtue” of the American character, expected Knox to grant favors to her sons. “Though not used to make applications for office,” Mercy explained she had “such a confidence in your friendship as justifies . . . the appointment of collection of customs for the port of Plymouth and Duxbury” for her son, Henry. Could Knox also grant a commission or “arrangement of the military department” for her other son, Winslow? Intent upon maintaining his public image, Knox coolly referred her to Washington.27

  By then Henry longed as much as did Lucy for a country estate like those owned b
y Jefferson and the Washingtons. After achieving full title to the Waldo Patent, he consequently hired housewright Ebenezer Dunton to construct a mansion in the Maine coastal town of Thomaston. Set on a rise above the St. George River, the house was to be surrounded by gardens, a large farm, and a number of industries Knox intended to found to foster “development of the District of Maine.”28 One obstacle to the mansion’s rapid completion was the region’s long winters. Another was Knox’s duties as secretary of war, which required constant attention to national problems. Among these were ongoing tribal disputes in Ohio. No less alarming were hostilities between France and Britain over American shipping, resulting in the unlawful capture of American sailors and ships.

  In August 1793, yellow fever again swept through Philadelphia, producing the worst epidemic in the city’s history. Mosquito-borne, its victims spiked high fevers, hemorrhaged from various orifices, became jaundiced, and often died. “Many are taken off with it . . . they have burned tar in the streets and taken many other precautions, many families have left the city,” Elizabeth Drinker penned in her diary.29 Deaths were so frequent that mourners no longer held traditional funerals. Instead, Drinker noted, “many are buried after night, and taken in carts to their graves.”30 By August 10, Alexander Hamilton had fallen ill, and after sixteen government workers died, Washington and Martha left the city for Mount Vernon.

  Only one member of the president’s remained: America’s secretary of war, who served as Washington’s proxy in his absence. As the death toll climbed in excess of a hundred a day, Philadelphia grew silent. “The streets are lonely to a melancholy degree. The merchants generally have fled . . . the stroke is as heavy as if an army of enemies had possessed the city without plundering it,” Knox wrote Washington.31

  From New York, Lucy warned Henry to avoid the center of Philadelphia and stay in nearby Schuylkill Falls. “You [are] not to . . . visit to Philadelphia you cannot go even should the evil abate from this time,” she lectured Henry.32 A full month later, she still fretted about Knox, admitting to him that her days were “clouded by the possibility of your being exposed.”33 Implied in this was Lucy’s continued frustration over Henry’s dedication to the United States at still another risk to his life.

  As usual Knox reassured his wife. With the arrival of November’s cooler temperatures, the epidemic had abated and affairs were returning to normal. “There is hope Congress will meet in Philadelphia,” he wrote. The current international tensions made it “of no small national importance, that it should be known abroad that the government is administered and the legislature is sitting in the very place of which such dreadful reports have been . . . circulated.”34 To do otherwise would present a weak face to the warring French and British.

  By mid-December, newspapers announced that the French had captured, imprisoned, and sold a hundred American sailors into slavery in Algiers. A hue and cry arose across the land, resulting in a March 12, 1794, Congressional appropriation of nearly $700,000 to establish a navy. As secretary of war, Knox was ordered to supervise construction of six high-performance frigates—the USS United States, USS President, USS Congress, USS Chesapeake, USS Constellation, and USS Constitution, or “Old Ironsides.”

  By May, Henry felt so hemmed in with duties that he complained to his friend Henry Jackson, “I cannot leave my situation in this critical state of affairs.”35 In July another crisis, an armed protest by the farmers of western Pennsylvania over an excise tax on whiskey, compounded those frustrations.

  After the September 24 birth of Lucy’s twelfth child, Marcus Bingham, Henry finally resolved to retire at the end of the year. “I have never attended to my private affairs, and I have a growing family,” he explained to General Wayne that December of 1794. “I must be more attentive, or an unpleasant old age will be stealing up on me.”36 One can almost hear Lucy’s pleas behind those words, murmuring about their intended bucolic retirement to Maine.

  There, he and Lucy would raise their children without distraction. There too, they might perhaps reform their difficult son, Henry. The Knoxes were not the only ones concerned about the boy. From Hingham in March 1793 Sarah Flucker had written to Lucy that the teenager’s proposed trip to Boston during a school vacation should be discouraged, for there he would likely be “exposed to the temptation of the town which may set aside his present habits of regularity.”37

  Whatever “habits of regularity” young Henry might have acquired at the Derby School did not stick. A year later, he wrote to his father that he had no intention of continuing his education but would make his living as a merchant. Higher education served no purpose, the teenager insisted, other than to understand “mathematics & arithmetic perfectly, which can be obtained without going to college.” “If, sir, I must go,” young Henry threatened, “it will be against my desire.”38

  Although neither knew it, the Knoxes’ unstable finances paralleled the Arnolds’ own. From London on June 26, 1792, the increasingly practical Peggy had shared her concerns with Judge Shippen: “I am extremely anxious to place the little money that we have reserved for my children . . . to give them a good education which in this country [England] is attended with great expense. Will you, my dear sir, give me your advice and assistance to effect this desirable end?”39

  Belying Peggy’s ignorance was her suggestion that her father invest the money she saved from Queen Charlotte’s pension in an annuity. “If I recollect when I was in Philada, your bank produced at least seven percent; and you thought the money perfectly secure,” she wrote to Judge Shippen. Since “bills are now at Par, should they continue so, or rise, and you think it eligible for me to place money in Philadelphia, I beg you will have the goodness to draw upon me for £2,000 Sterling.”40 This was no vapid former Philadelphia belle but a shrewd thinker. Having witnessed a series of Arnold’s financial disasters, she had decided she would now invest on her own.

  Nevertheless, Peggy continued to defend Arnold. In the next paragraphs of that letter, written several weeks later, she warned Judge Shippen to ignore newspaper reports of Arnold’s death in a duel as merely rumors. The surrounding circumstances behind the rumors, though, had caused her “a great deal of pain.” The trouble began when a certain Lord Lauderdale “had cast some reflections on his [Arnold’s] political character, in the House of Lords.” Although Peggy had advised Arnold to ignore the insult, “this is a subject upon which of course, he is, to me silent,” she glumly admitted. “All that I can obtain from him, are assurances that he will do nothing rashly.”41

  As a result she summoned “all my fortitude to my aid, to prevent . . . sinking under it, which would unman him and prevent his acting himself.” After Arnold demanded an apology, Lauderdale conceded. The former American general had drafted a formal note for him to sign, but when the noble refused, Arnold challenged him to duel. Arnold’s second was a Lord Hawke, whom Peggy described as “our particular friend.”42 Lauderdale’s second was the colorful Charles James Fox, former British prime minister and head of the Rockingham Whigs.

  At 7 a.m. on Sunday, July 6, 1792, Arnold and Lauderdale stood back to back in a field at Kilbourne Wells, Hampstead, as Peggy cowered in a bed in central London. At a signal, the duelers paced off and turned. Arnold fired and missed, provoking a trembling Lauderdale to insist “he had no enmity to General Arnold.” But still refusing to apologize, the aristocrat invited Arnold to shoot again. Arnold proudly refused, and Peggy explained that Lauderdale had claimed “he did not mean to asperse his character or wound his feelings . . . was sorry for what he had said.”43

  A report in the June 29 Evening Mail confirmed Peggy’s account and chortled over the Lauderdale side for its amateurish preparations for the duel. “Mr. Fox apologized to Lord Lauderdale for his inexpertise in charging his pistols” and even admitted, “I never fired but once in my life.”44

  Nevertheless, the duel and its potentially grim consequences had ripped through Peggy as brutally as a bullet. In the days before it, she had remained silent. “W
hat I suffered for a week is not to be described; the suppression of my feelings, lest I should unman the general almost . . . proved too much for me; and for some hours, my reason was despaired of,” she wrote Judge Shippen a few days later. By the time of her July 6 letter though, she had recovered.45

  The intrigue had galvanized London society. To Arnold’s astonishment, other nobles and highly placed men congratulated him for his courage in the face of public insult. Their approval, Peggy boasted to her father, had been “expressed, universally, and particularly by a number of the first characters in the kingdom.” Nor, she added, “am I displeased at the great commendations bestowed on my own conduct upon this trying occasion.”46

  Three weeks later, William Pitt the Younger, by then the prime minister and chancellor of the Exchequer, asked the Treasury Department to review General Clinton’s compensation for Arnold’s losses in America. Again Arnold insisted that his half-pay pension was “far from being able to provide for and educate a numerous family of children.”47 After a personal meeting with Pitt, the former general wrote Clinton that the prime minister “appeared very much surprised at the small sum I received and asked for ‘a little time to consider the matter.’” The “little time” turned into weeks, then months, though ultimately nothing changed.48

  Still, Arnold, by then fifty-three, would not give up. Gamely, he applied for another military post, but after its rejection, he again decided to strike out on his own. He would do so, he told Peggy, by selling two New Brunswick vessels to fund a privateer with which to attack the French. Filled with enthusiasm, he also wrote his Canadian friend Jonathan Bliss about his plans to sail to the Caribbean for “five or six months” to resume his trade connections.49 Wide-eyed, Peggy, who was again pregnant, listened to her husband’s plans. Nothing she could do or say, she knew, could change them.