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

by Nancy Rubin Stuart

Simultaneously, the former secretary of war’s enterprises were flagging. Lime from his works proved inferior; the salmon fishery had foundered; livestock sickened with diseases; and Maine’s harsh winters had battered his wharves and shipping enterprises. By 1798 Knox’s debts so overwhelmed his assets that neither Bingham nor Baring nor even Jackson dared advance him more loans. To raise more cash, Knox sold some of his vast acreage. Finally, he even mortgaged Montpelier.

  Beneath Knox’s genial image was an increasingly grasping man, one as insistent upon a show of wealth as he was desperate for funds. Theories abound as to why. Perhaps his larger-than-life displays were compensation for the poverty of his youth, the scars of the Fluckers’ original snobbery, or Lucy’s insistence upon an elite lifestyle. Possibly too, the Revolution and its sacrifices had sparked a sense of entitlement, epitomized by his creation of the Order of the Cincinnati and land grab of the Waldo Patent.

  In spite of Knox’s earlier efforts, the disposition of the Waldo lands remained a matter of public controversy in Maine. Among those with counter-claims were eight hundred settlers who had lived for years on the Waldo Patent’s coastal lands. To placate the settlers and raise funds, Knox had offered low-cost mortgages for them to purchase their plots. Simultaneously he tightened his grip upon those living in the patent’s backcountry—squatters, he called them—in reality, poor men and former veterans who, either intentionally or innocently, through the Waldo Patent’s tangled web of century-old claims, had cleared land and built farms and homes. In protest, the backwoodsmen argued that Knox’s possession of those lands was illegal. Between the late 1790s and first years of the nineteenth century, their hostilities increased. Soon after the Knoxes settled at Montpelier, the “squatters” threatened to burn it; several years later they fired at Knox’s surveyors. Their vilifying pamphlet, The Unmasked Nabob of Hancock Country, claimed that the Massachusetts legislature had, “by their train of provisos, said it belongs to . . . such a numerous train of heirs, that they could not confirm the patent.”25

  To protect his benevolent public image, Knox shrewdly distanced himself from the struggle. Covertly he hired men to prowl the backcountry as independent land agents and report on the “banditti of the wilderness” or initiate lawsuits against the squatters.26

  “Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves,” the French Enlightenment author Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed in Of the Social Contract. The same might have been said about Lucy and Henry at Montpelier. Subsequent to the 1796 triple deaths of their youngsters, the Knoxes settled into a superficially serene existence. At night Henry played chess with Lucy, as their trio of remaining daughters, Lucy, Caroline, and Julia, sat nearby reading or busying themselves with needlework. Two years earlier, Knox’s friend Henry Jackson had reported that their difficult son, Henry, was making “cards, wine & women his continual pursuit, at taverns and bad houses,” but by the late 1790s, the young man seemed to have matured.27 In the late 1790s, Knox’s namesake served as a Navy midshipman on the U.S.S. Constitution.

  Then came another blow. In January 1797 the Knoxes’ fourteen-year-old daughter, Julia, fell ill from “rapid consumption” and died. Lucy, by then forty-one, was again pregnant but in September delivered a stillborn.

  Ten of Lucy’s pregnancies and births had come to naught. The here and now—her beloved Henry, her remaining children, young Lucy, Caroline, and Henry Jackson, and her role as gracious hostess—were all that mattered, all that made sense to the devastated matron.

  As Lucy attempted to recover from the loss of four children, Peggy Arnold scrambled to secure funds to educate her five. The years following Arnold’s return from Guadeloupe had remained economically disastrous. Initially, the Standing Committee of the West India Planters and Merchants had recommended that Arnold receive a military appointment. The “ministry,” as Peggy unhappily wrote Jonathan Bliss on December 5, 1795, was “extremely anxious for him to go” but worried about “putting him over the heads of so many old general officers.”28

  In lieu of that appointment the Duke of Portland, Britain’s secretary of state, informed the Canadian president that, in recognition of Arnold’s “very gallant and meritorious service” at Guadeloupe, the Crown had waived a residency requirement and awarded Arnold 13,400 acres of land from the Waste Lands of the Crown in Upper Canada. This included 5,000 acres for Arnold and 1,200 acres for Peggy, their five children, his sons from his first marriage, and sister, Hannah.29 The land, as its title implied, was remote and undeveloped. Bitterly, Peggy wrote Jonathan Bliss that Arnold’s “trip to the West [Indies] gained more credit than money.”30

  Like his former friend and fellow patriot Knox, Arnold continued to live like a wealthy man. Dismissing the steep interest paid on a £10,000 loan to feed the British army in Guadeloupe, which Arnold expected the Treasury Board to reimburse, he moved his family into a splendid townhouse in Gloucester Place. Though surrounded by the trappings of luxury, Peggy worried in silence, suffering from migraines that she described to Judge Shippen as a “violent attack in my head.”31

  Disquieting, too, was the arrival of news in February 1796 that Arnold’s eldest son, Benedict, a captain in the British army, had died. For years, relations between father and son had been strained. During a battle in northern Jamaica one of the young officer’s legs was shattered. Like his father, young Benedict refused amputation but, less fortunately, had died from gangrene. Guilt, sorrow, and rage flooded over Arnold. “His death is much regretted . . . and a heavy stroke on me,” he wrote Jonathan Bliss.32

  Worries over finances also led Arnold to propose several lucrative schemes to his colleagues. The first, presented to his friend and former military colleague Cornwallis, was Arnold’s leadership of five thousand men to liberate the Spanish West Indies. The second, pitched to Lord Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty, placed Arnold at the head of a five-ship fleet in the English Channel during the Napoleonic War. Ultimately, both proposals were rejected. In despair, Arnold turned to the one area where he previously achieved success: investment in privateers.

  Peggy panicked. Aware of Arnold’s mounting debts, England’s inflationary spiral, and the need for funds to support her children’s educations, she wrote Judge Shippen on July 29: “I shall be obliged to you for another remittance, as soon as it is convenient to you, as I assure you that we find it difficult to bring the year about, at the present extravagant rates of every article of life. . . . Everything has risen in proportion to bread and meat; all schools have increased their price accordingly, and in short a thousand a year is not equal to six hundred a little time ago.”33

  Having lived luxuriously under the Shippen and Arnold roofs, Peggy suddenly felt financially pinched. “I am almost sick of the struggle to keep up an appearance, which, however is absolutely necessary, in this country, to bring forward a young family,” she admitted. With pride she referred to her infant William and older children, George, Sophie, James, and Edward. Hesitant to admit disillusionment with Arnold, Peggy’s reaction to news of her younger sister’s wedding spoke volumes. “I should be sorry that my dear sister Lea should ever alter her state, as I think her society a great acquisition to you, and matrimony is but a lottery.”34

  Eleven months passed without a word from Judge Shippen. Just why has never been explained, although some historians attributed his silence to disgust with Arnold or perhaps with both him and Peggy. During those months, the Arnolds’ frail daughter, Sophia, suffered a nervous disorder that left her legs temporarily paralyzed.

  Puzzled by her father’s silence, Peggy finally wrote to him the following May, “I cannot believe that I have given you any cause of displeasure, and fear that illness or misfortune have occasioned your silence.” Alluding again to Arnold’s dire finances, she confessed, “My spirits are much broken and I think I could be contented in a very humble retired situation; but to see my children’s rising prospects blasted, would fill me with the keenest anguish.”35 Just before sending that letter, a packet of
April 6 arrived with Judge Shippen’s bank draft of £140.

  Peggy intuitively sensed she would be solely responsible for her children’s futures. Her two eldest sons, Edward, eighteen, and James, seventeen, had nearly completed their educations and were slated to join the British army. Sophia, George, and William, however, still had years of schooling ahead. To look to “the General” for financial security was foolhardy, for Arnold had raised Peggy’s hopes once too often. The latest disappointment involved the Treasury Board’s approval for partial reimbursement for the Guadeloupe loan, which it then retracted. The explanation? The funds were more urgently needed for Britain’s anti-Napoleonic pact with Austria.

  Nor did Arnold’s privateering ventures improve the family’s finances. One ship had been captured at sea and another seized by Arnold’s creditors. A third, as Peggy had repeatedly warned Arnold, had a captain known for “too free indulgence in his bottle,” who lost £2,500 in profits after its capture.36 On the fourth, a Swedish captain threatened litigation for Arnold’s failure to pay for the cargo. Exacerbating those losses was Arnold’s purchase of the Lord Spencer, whose refitting costs turned out to be exorbitant.

  Nevertheless, Peggy continued to sympathize with Arnold’s plight. To her eldest, Edward, she confided that his father was in “the most wretched state of mind that I have ever seen him. Disappointed in his highly-raised expectations, harassed by the sailors who are loudly demanding their prize-money . . . without the health or power of acting, he knows not which way to turn himself.”37 Once again Arnold had appealed to William Pitt for a military commission, but somehow, perhaps intentionally, the prime minister lost his papers.

  During the last months of 1800 and into the spring of 1801, Arnold’s health suddenly flagged. Their father, as Peggy later wrote her stepsons, “never lay two hours of a night in his bed and he had every dreadful nervous symptom, attended with great difficulty of breathing.” Still she thought his illness temporary, convinced that “a favorable change in his circumstances . . . would restore peace to his mind . . . [and] reinstate his health.”38 On May 23, she and Arnold consequently rode to Galleywood, near Chelmsford, to stay at the country house of their friends Ann and Sarah Fitch. Eight days later, just as Arnold’s health began to improve, an urgent notice arrived about the wayward captain of the Lord Spencer. Without further delay Arnold and Peggy returned to London.

  Avoiding details, Peggy later wrote her stepsons that her hopes for Arnold’s returning health “never took place” because of “heavy demands upon him from different quarters.”39 Once the immediate problems were resolved, Peggy expected she and Arnold would return to the country. But before they left, his throat began to swell. By June 8, Arnold collapsed in bed.

  According to the doctor, the former general was suffering from the effects of “repeated gout . . . a general dropsy and a disease in the lungs.” Still, he assured the distraught Peggy there was “no cause for apprehension.”40 Arnold’s condition deteriorated. Before long he could no longer speak or swallow. On June 10, he slipped into a coma. Only occasionally did Arnold awaken and then only to apologize for his failures. “The distressed situation of his family preyed greatly on his mind and he was imploring blessings upon them,” Peggy recalled. At 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, June 14, 1801, as she sat by his bed, Arnold died “without a groan.”41

  “My sister and myself were with Mrs. Arnold when her husband expired,—that we shall not be separated from her for some time,” Ann Fitch assured Judge Shippen on June 29. “She evinces, upon this occasion, as you know she had done upon many trying ones, that fortitude and resignation which a superior and well-regulated mind only is capable of exerting.”42

  On June 21, seven mourning coaches and four state carriages rode solemnly through the streets from Gloucester Place across the Battersea Bridge to the ancient brick- and copper-spired church of St. Mary’s, a favorite burial place for American Loyalists. There Arnold was laid to rest in a crypt adjacent to his expatriate friends, Samuel Fitch, William Vassal, and Nathaniel Middleton.

  The London Times, Gentleman’s Magazine, and Morning Post published brief reports of Arnold’s death. Subsequently, the Post sneered, “Poor General Arnold has departed this world without notice; a sorry reflection this for the Pitts and the Portlands and other turncoats.”43

  As loyal to Arnold in death as she had been in life, Peggy vowed to redeem his reputation as an honorable man.

  13

  “I Do Not Suffer My Spirits to Overcome Me”

  THE TIES OF LOVE and loss bound the Knoxes ever closer during the Montpelier years. Though occasionally separated by Henry’s travels or Lucy’s visits to Boston, their letters radiated devotion as keenly as when they were newlyweds.

  “I long for the moment when I shall be reunited to you, what I hope be before the 10th of next month,” Henry penned in August 1797 from Penobscot Bay.1 Another from 1801 read, “I received, my best beloved, your affectionate cordial of the 16th yesterday. It was indeed a comfort to me.”2 In a third to Lucy in Boston, Knox wrote, “Our affection is the most valued object of my existence.”3

  Lucy’s letters from that period reflected concerns about her husband’s well-being. One, written in November 1800, refers to Knox’s resolve to restrain his temper while he and his difficult son traveled together. “You left us, my dear Harry, so very suddenly on Sunday that one half of your provision remained behind,” Lucy observed. “This is an addition to my other anxieties respecting your companion, [young Henry]. I am afraid you will lose sight of the line of conduct you had marked for yourself which . . . even before your departure was a little altered.”4 On another trip during bad weather Lucy wrote, “My dearest friend: Last night received your kind note from Portland—where you had just arrived . . . thank you for this mark of attention. . . . I am led to hope the roads are better than our fears painted them.”5

  Sealing their bond were their lost youngsters. After the death of fourteen-year-old Julia, Knox wrote their Philadelphia friend Clement Biddle, in March 3, 1798, “We have only three children out of 13. . . . My wife’s happiness is impaired while she continues on this globe.”6

  Over the years, compassion for Lucy’s ten ill-fated births increased Henry’s tolerance for his affectionate but prickly wife. One public example occurred as Knox ordered horses prepared for an outing with guests. As they gathered, a groom led Lucy’s horse to the door. Enraged that her horse was saddled when she had no intention of riding, Lucy turned to Knox before their guests and demanded an explanation. When he explained that one of their guests was going to borrow her horse, Lucy protested. At that, the red-faced former general turned to the groom and bellowed, “John, put Mrs. Knox’s horse in the stable and do not take it out again until God Almighty or Mrs. Knox tells you to!”7

  Another incident pointed to the couple’s religious differences. One Sunday Knox invited the Reverend Thurston Whiting for dinner, but upon his arrival at Montpelier, Lucy rudely forged ahead and seated herself at the dining table. “Rise, my dear, and the parson will ask a blessing,” Henry asked. Lucy would not budge. Again, Henry repeated his request, but there a smiling Lucy sat. Finally in his most stentorian tones, Henry insisted, “Rise, my dear, the parson is going to ask the blessing!” A third time Lucy refused. Ultimately, the perplexed minister gave his blessing.8

  Such scenes, recalled Harrison Gray Otis, who visited Montpelier, rarely fazed him or other guests, for they knew the Knoxes’ “mutual attachment never waned. It was . . . well-known that they frequently differed in opinion upon the current trifles of the day,” but they always reconciled. In large part that was due to Henry, Otis believed, who “showed his generalship by a skillful retreat.”9

  Another memorable incident occurred after a large dinner. As Montpelier’s servants removed the soiled tablecloths, Knox asked them to also take the undercloths that protected the table. Lucy, “in an audible voice,” protested. The guests fell silent. Turning to them, Henry drolly announced, “This subject of the unde
rcloth is the only one on which Mrs. Knox and I have differed since our marriage.” What followed was “a general merriment” among the guests.10

  Henry’s debts were not as easily resolved. By 1799, his interest payments on loans were so steep that he declared the family could no longer afford to spend winters in Boston. Even so, Montpelier’s hearty patriarch refused to dwell on unhappiness. Even in March 1800, while mourning the December 14 death of his beloved commander, George Washington, he scolded his friend General David Cobb for moroseness. “You mention that your spirits are not good. For God’s sake, bear up against the devil of gloom. Put yourself in motion. Visit even me if you can find nothing better,” Knox urged. “Get Willich, a new author on diet and regimen, but above all, get—on horseback.” Dismissing his own troubles, Knox insisted, “I shall have bright days yet.”11

  Being convinced that his life would improve meant that Knox saw no need to limit his hospitality. Even in late autumn, Montpelier hosted guests, “generally . . . eight or ten per day and commonly from five to ten at night,” as Henry noted in November 1801.12 Indeed by then, he had new reasons for optimism. By the 13th of that month, he had reached agreements with those settled on the Waldo Patent’s coastal lands who had either paid mortgages or provided collateral in lieu of cash. “It confirms my judgment of the measures I have pursued,” Knox crowed to his wife. “This you will call vanity. I own it and rejoice therein. . . . The heart . . . has a well founded claim to dance a little. But this [is] between ourselves.”13

  Another psychological boost was Knox’s election that fall to the Massachusetts General Court. The only disadvantage of the election was the cost of supporting a temporary residence in Boston. A townhouse rental, he warned Lucy, who was again visiting friends in the city, was too expensive. “A lodging [boarding] house will be execrable, and yet feelings must give way to judgment. In either case, we must be economists.”14