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

by Nancy Rubin Stuart

  Simultaneously the U.S. Navy had rendered a negative judgment on the Knoxes’ son, whose dissipated behavior ruined his chances for a commission as a lieutenant. At twenty-one, young Henry Jackson Knox continued to behave as wildly as when in his teens—squandering money, drinking excessively, and evading responsibilities. The young man was an embarrassment, a scar upon Knox’s impeccable public image. Denied promotion in the military and ill-suited for business, young Henry would have to depend upon his parents for support. “My mind can find no other employment for him than to make him our companion,” Knox confided to Lucy. “If he gets a wife . . . let him manage a farm . . . with such assistance as his affairs or necessity may require and we can afford.”15

  Eighteen months later, on May 17, 1803, young Henry married Eliza Taylor Reed, the eldest daughter of Josiah Reed, Thomaston’s town clerk. Personable and intelligent, Eliza was later described as “faithful in the discharge of her domestic duties and a constant attachment to the moral virtues.”16 Those characteristics may not have been so during the first years of her marriage, though. An innkeeper’s bill of March 1805, from the young couple’s three-week trip to Boston, revealed days of heavy drinking. Upon their return to Maine, the Knoxes’ son announced that life at Montpelier was too quiet for the young couple. “The sudden change from a retired life to one continual round of dissipation affected our nerves . . . we are both surprised that you bear it so well thro’ the whole winter.” Disdaining the fact that his parents still paid his bills, Lucy’s son sneered, “What completely unfits us, you thrive upon.”17 Within a few years Henry Jackson’s marriage would dissolve.

  In contrast to their disappointments over their son was the Knoxes’ pride in the engagement of their eldest daughter, Lucy. On January 6, 1804, banns were posted for the pretty twenty-three year old’s wedding to Ebenezer Thatcher, a Harvard graduate and attorney. Adding to their joy was the establishment of the newlyweds’ home in nearby Warren, Maine—and soon afterwards, a granddaughter, Julia, named after the Knoxes’ lost daughters. By late 1805 the couple had had a second child, Henry Knox Thatcher.

  During those same years, Knox’s fortunes also improved. On June 2, 1804, he was appointed to Governor Caleb Strong’s council. A month later, Knox’s sale of land in Hancock and Lincoln counties for over $200,000 enabled him to pay off one of his mortgages. By 1806 Knox had also paid his debts to friends William Bingham and Francis Baring. His earlier prediction to General Cobb, “I shall yet have bright days,” was beginning to come true.

  Even so, at fifty-five years of age, Knox contemplated his mortality. To wealthy Boston merchant Samuel Breck he wrote, in January 1806, “Years roll away, and soon we shall be numbered among those who have been atoms upon this atom of a globe, and very soon after, it will be forgotten that we had here any existences.” Still, the relentlessly upbeat Knox insisted, “But this ought not in the least degree to cloud any of our present enjoyments.”18

  One of those “enjoyments” was his grandchildren. During a dinner in October, his eldest daughter watched Knox “amusing himself with the playful little Julia—who had entwined herself about his heart.” Watching him tease the baby, young Lucy exclaimed, “Oh Father I believe you never will be old.”19

  Nor would he be. Several days earlier, Henry had swallowed a chicken bone. At that time he immediately left the table and sequestered himself in a nearby china pantry to clear his throat. When he returned, he assured his worried wife and daughters that he was fine. But by October 20 Henry felt so ill that he wrote merchant Walter Beale in an uncharacteristically weak hand that he had to postpone their appointment because of “a disposition which will probably prevent my setting out this week.”20 On October 23 Henry was complaining of intense pain—the first time, his eldest daughter recalled, that he had mentioned any discomfort. Alarmed, his wife Lucy summoned a doctor who vainly tended him for two days. On Thursday, October 25, at 8 a.m., in agony and “in full possession of his mind,” Henry died.21

  A subsequent medical report revealed that the swallowed chicken bone had traveled through Knox’s intestines and created internal wounds that had become infected.

  Lucy and her children were stunned. “My best of fathers is no more,” mourned his son. “Everything that could be was tried, but all in vain. He is gone, I trust, to a happier and better place.”22

  Knox’s flabbergasted widow could not be consoled. The loss of “her Harry,” the beloved anchor of her life, set Lucy adrift.

  The following Tuesday, October 28, 1806, on a day as sunny as Knox’s disposition had been, crowds gathered at Montpelier for his military funeral. Following a service in the mansion, the local militia, an artillery company, cavalry, and infantry marched to a beating drum across the front lawn to Knox’s favorite oak tree. Nearby, on the St. George River, ship flags flew at half-mast. In Thomaston, Paul Revere’s bell tolled from the church Knox had founded. After a military salute from a minute gun, the Revolutionary War general’s coffin was lowered into the ground, followed by a dramatic blaze of musketry.

  “The great and good General Knox departed this life yesterday,” reported the Columbian Centinel. Added to “his merits as a military chief and public man were joined those qualities which conciliate affection and engage esteem . . . which made him the delight of his family and the promoter of social happiness.” The Centinel added ironically, “The affairs of his fortune which for some years had been perplexed and difficult, had taken a course offering him pleasant anticipations.”23

  Similar expressions of praise resounded through newspapers, letters, and the memories of those who fought alongside him in the Revolution. Among the most famous was Dr. James Thacher’s tribute in his diary, later published as Military Journal of the American Revolution: “Long will he be remembered as the ornament of every circle in which he moved, as the amiable and enlightened companion, the generous friend, the man of feeling and benevolence.”24

  Knox’s will had bequeathed half of his estate to Lucy, its value, exclusive of his lands, worth $100,000. But without Henry, Lucy was lost. One reflection of her profound grief appears in a poem she penciled into the flyleaf of an account book, “’Tis hard to think you cannot come / Your presence like the fading of a flower / Now lingers upon me, and I listen for your step.” The poem continued, “I miss my husband, when morning breaks forth / and the birds carol in the trees.” Other stanzas referred to those times “her Harry” had comforted her: “Where, where was the arm that could pillow my head,” while “other hands did caress me . . . no [care] . . . like thine.”25

  After Knox’s death, Montpelier’s legendary entertainments ceased. Some evenings Lucy invited guests to Montpelier to play cards or chess. One letter from her married daughter suggests that Lucy enjoyed her grandchildren; others, that she turned her attention to insuring that her younger daughter Caroline, fifteen at the time of Knox’s death, would eventually marry well. The girl, though less handsome than her older sister, was also gregarious and popular. A clergyman visiting Thomaston some years later described her as “the lovely Caroline.” When Nathaniel Hawthorne visited Montpelier in 1837, he recalled Caroline, by then fifty-six, as a “mild and amiable woman.”26

  To find the young Caroline a suitable husband, Lucy escorted her to Boston in the winter months and sometimes left her there with affluent friends. Then, on May 21, 1808, after staying with Caroline in Boston, Lucy proposed that they and a friend take a “little excursion into the country for a week for the benefit of my [Caroline’s] health.”27 During the trip they met one of Caroline’s male acquaintances and his friend, James Swan, the curly-haired son of a wealthy Boston family whom Lucy knew. The attraction was immediate.

  For five days, Lucy, her daughter, and her friend traveled along the Connecticut River Valley with the young men. “Surely never were people more supremely happy, than two [in] the party were,” Caroline, nearly eighteen, wrote her older sister on June 17. With Lucy’s blessings, she, Swan, and their friends took a ferry across t
he Hudson one day and were married by a Belleville, New Jersey, minister. “Tell me, my sister, can you conceive of more perfect happiness than that I now enjoyed married to the man of my heart loving and beloved,” the bride coyly wrote.28

  Lucy’s triumph was redoubled when the newlyweds, probably at Caroline’s urging, decided to reside with her at Montpelier. “I always lived with my mother until her death and I never have known the same delightful home feeling since this place has been my own as when she was here to meet me with a welcome and caress,” Caroline reminisced years later.29

  Yet the joy that Caroline’s marriage evoked was soon shattered by news that the Knox’s spendthrift son had been placed in a Boston debtor’s prison. After his release, young Henry enrolled in the Medical School of Dartmouth College, graduated in 1811, and served as a surgeon’s mate on the privateer America. Soon though—and here, again, the details are hazy—his earnings were seized by creditors. By 1818 he had returned to Montpelier and served as his mother’s clerk.

  Records about the widowed Lucy’s life became increasingly vague. Determined to maintain her residence at Montpelier but plagued by debts, Lucy subsisted by selling off parcels of Montpelier’s acreage. In September 1817, Lucy invited the Massachusetts governor, John Brooks, to stay at Montpelier during his visit to Thomaston. Brooks accepted at the last minute, creating a flurry of activity among the servants at the deteriorating estate. By 1822 as Caroline warned a friend who planned to visit, “The days of show and profusion are all gone and we are a plain, retired country family.”30

  In late May 1824, Lucy fell ill with an infection that intensified with each passing week. At 3 a.m. on June 20, 1824, she died. Lucy was sixty-eight years of age. During her last moments, Lucy imagined she was again young and attending a ball with “her Harry”—the greatest joy she had ever known.

  Six months before his own passing, Henry had written Lucy from Boston, “It would have afforded me great and sincere satisfaction, were we together.”31

  Perhaps, at last, they were.

  Although Knox’s death shattered Lucy’s zest for life, widowhood had prompted Peggy Arnold to rally. The former Philadelphia belle’s evolution from the fragile, compliant bride of the American traitor to a restrained wife was remarkable enough, but what followed was even more surprising: a revelation of strengths Peggy long held in reserve.

  Her transition was born of necessity. Less than two weeks after Arnold’s death, Peggy’s friend Ann Fitch wrote Judge Shippen about her courage, praising the new widow for her “fortitude and resignation.”32 Peggy, nevertheless, resented that her late husband had left his financial affairs entirely in her hands. She wished, as she wrote her stepsons Richard and Henry, that “your dear Father did not join some male friend of respectability in the executorship.”33 With help and advice from family friend Daniel Coxe, Peggy soon learned the truth: Arnold’s debts outweighed his assets. Horrified, Peggy immediately reduced her expensive lifestyle.

  Essentially, she had been dealt a double blow. In addition to the “loss of a husband whose affection for me was unbounded,” as she wrote her brother-in-law, Edward Burd, she was “left in very embarrassed circumstances with a little dependent family.” The creditors could readily seize her annual pension of £500 and the £110 awarded each of her five children. Reminding Burd that her own brother, Neddy, had lost part of her investment years earlier, she hoped to draw on whatever remained. “I cannot suppose but that my present unhappy situation will be taken into consideration upon this occasion,” Peggy observed. “Have the goodness, my dear Mr. Burd, to tell me candidly what dependence I may reasonably place upon this resource.” Never, she admitted, had she “felt myself so helpless.”34

  Left unsaid was a provision in Arnold’s will that also rocked Peggy to the core—the request for a certain John Sage of New Brunswick, to receive land, an income, and education. The fourteen year old was subsequently assumed to be Arnold’s illegitimate son, sired during his first trip to Saint John with an unnamed Native American of that community. Recently, historian Barry Wilson observed that the date of Sage’s birth mitigates against that since Arnold’s arrival in Saint John in December 1785 was only four months before Sage’s birth on April 14, 1786. Other theories abound. Among them that Sage was the product of Arnold’s liaison with a mistress carried aboard his ship from Great Britain, or that he was Arnold’s grandson and had been sired by seventeen-year-old Benedict Jr., who brought the child to Connecticut.35

  Whether true or not, Peggy was shocked by the discovery of his existence and by Arnold’s remembrance of Sage in his will. “My sufferings are not of the present only,” was Peggy’s one oblique comment about it to her brother-in-law Burd. “Years of unhappiness have passed, I had cast my lot, complaints were unavailing and you and my other friends are ignorant of the many causes of uneasiness I have had.”36

  Nor would she specify the nature of those sorrows with Judge Shippen, who, through deft political maneuvering, had risen in 1799 to become Pennsylvania’s chief Supreme Court justice. Instead Peggy’s letter focused upon her ongoing symptoms of ill health: a certain “confusion in my head resembling what I can suppose would be the sensations of anybody extremely drunk.” Some physicians attributed her indisposition to earlier illnesses, she explained, others to nerves, frayed by a “long loss of rest, anxiety of mind, the irreparable loss of a most tender and affectionate husband, and the total change of my circumstances and mode of living.”37

  Even so, Peggy vowed to fulfill two goals. “I am making every exertion to keep up as much as possible the respectability of the family,” she explained to her son Edward, “determined . . . that the fortunes of my children shall not be marred by the change in our situation.”38

  On June 2, 1802, Peggy thanked Judge Shippen for his financial assistance and his invitation for her to return to Philadelphia, but she had decided to postpone any decision “till I see how this business will terminate.” In any case, she wrote, she would “take no measures that are not directed by prudence.”39

  By autumn 1802, Peggy had reduced expenses by auctioning off her furniture, silver, and other valuable possessions and by renting the townhouse at Gloucester Place. “I am now living in a very small house in Bryanston Street, using furniture purchased from Carolow; who is now a more independent woman than her mistress,” she informed her stepsons.40 Her two eldest sons, Edward and James, she added, had donated their pensions to help finance their younger brothers’ educations.

  The following October, after spending the summer in the country with friends, Peggy wrote her father that she had decided against living in rural England. Without the financial means to socialize with the local gentry, life would be “too lonely for either my dear girl [her daughter Sophia] or myself.” Nor would life in a country town suit her, for its residents were “chiefly composed of card playing, tattling old maids and people wholly unaccustomed to genteel life.” Instead, Peggy would remain in London near friends and those “who know how to manage.” There she could “live as cheap, as in almost any other part of England.” Admittedly that would mean certain sacrifices, the most painful of which was “the want of a carriage.”41

  In a justified—if uncharacteristically self-congratulatory—letter of November 1802 Peggy wrote her stepsons that she had accomplished “the settlement of the most troublesome business that had ever devolved upon a female.” She had paid all of Arnold’s “ascertained debts within a few hundred pounds” (italics in original) and would soon eliminate the rest.42 That letter probably surprised Arnold’s sons. Having remained ignorant of their father’s financial struggles, Peggy continued, they knew “so little his heart, his motives, and his embarrassed circumstances, as to be induced to write him in a style to wound, and distress him.”43

  The “boy who is with you,” as she referred to John Sage, “ought to be taught, by his own labor, to procure his own livelihood. He ought never to have been brought up with any other ideas.” Nevertheless she would arrange for his
receipt of the promised Canadian lands.44 Chagrined that no one in the family—Arnold’s stepsons, his children with Peggy, or herself—“will ever have the value of a guinea from their dear father’s property,” she still believed that repayment of Arnold’s debts would restore his honor.45 Moreover, she also intended to help support her sister-in-law, Hannah. “I will never suffer the sister of my husband to want,” she added, vowing to “supply her from my own little income.”46

  This was a newly empowered Peggy. Nor, she explained, did she have plans to return to Philadelphia. “My anxiety to get your little brothers on in life, will deprive me on this gratification,” she explained.47 Her eldest son, Edward, would serve in the British army in Bengal; her second son, James, an army officer was then stationed in Tinmouth; seventeen-year-old George studied at London’s New Royal Military College; eight-year-old William attended a boarding school; and her frail daughter, Sophia, still lived with her at home.

  And, indeed, within another year Peggy had paid off the rest of Arnold’s debts “and not reserved even a towel or a tea spoon” she wrote Edward. The one remaining problem was her “indifferent”—but actually frightening—state of health.48 Six months earlier, on July 3, 1803, Peggy confided to Betsy that she had consulted two doctors “in the female line.” Their diagnosis was “a complaint of the womb” that obliged her to “keep almost constantly in a recumbent posture.”49 Soon afterwards the physicians refined their diagnosis to “the dreaded evil, a cancer.” Lately, she added, “I have . . . been much worse, in consequence of a very large tumor.”50

  That same July day Peggy explained to her father, Judge Shippen, “To prevent another [tumor] is now the great object, but I am not much encouraged to hope for success.”51 Alarmed, her friends brought her to the countryside as she reclined on a seat in the carriage.

  By May, Peggy’s letter to her sister Betsy was even more piteous: “I have been indeed very near death, my dear sister, and my complaints are such, as to give me but little hope of long continuing an inhabitant of this world.” Opium had become her painkiller. “Nevertheless, I do not suffer my spirits to overcome me,” Peggy insisted. “I have much to be thankful for—most particularly for the very uncommon attention and kindness that I hourly experience from my numerous friends. . . . I have the best advice that London can afford, and am constantly attended by two of the most eminent physicians.”52