Band of Giants_The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence

by Jack Kelly

  Knox’s shop, the London Book-Store, was stocked with volumes on weapons, strategy, and tactics, ranging from Caesar’s Commentaries to Maurice de Saxe’s influential Mes Reveries, on the art of war. British officers frequented the shop to brush up on military theory. It was no contradiction that Knox had transformed himself into an expert on war. Both he and Greene had access to information that was out of the reach of most citizens, who could not afford to purchase books. Knox suggested a reading list for his friend, who was compiling a substantial library.

  Knox had grown up during the last war. Greene had experienced the conflict as a teenager, although his Quaker family’s strict pacifism discouraged participation. Both men had come of age during the increasingly contentious and tumultuous years that followed the peace treaty of 1763. Both now sensed that the clash of interests between Great Britain and her American colonies was careening toward armed conflict.

  His father’s bankruptcy and early death had forced Knox to drop out of Boston Latin School, a preparation for Harvard, at age nine. His mother apprenticed him to a firm of booksellers, where an indulgent proprietor let him continue his studies with borrowed tomes. Knox read Plutarch’s lives of great men, taught himself French, and absorbed the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers.

  He knew violence early. Boston had for decades endured riots touched off by hunger and poverty. Forced impressment into the British navy particularly rankled seamen. The economic bust that followed the French and Indian War brought to the city a declining economy, high unemployment, and a flagrant contrast between rich and poor. Boston would come to be called the “Metropolis of Sedition,” a place where inhabitants, British observers noted, had an overblown notion of “the rights and liberties of Englishmen.”

  A yearly occasion for expressing those rights was Pope’s Day, November 5, a date that commemorated the failed 1605 plot by papists to decapitate the English government. The day gave Boston’s poorer inhabitants a chance to shake their fists at alien Catholics and generally let off steam. Working men and apprentices like Knox looked forward to Pope’s Day as a rare respite from work. It was the annual jubilee of the gangs from the city’s North and South Ends. Once, when a wheel came off a Pope’s Day float, the prodigiously strong Knox lifted the axle himself to heave the weighty contraption forward.

  During the celebration, parading crowds of “servants, sailors, workingmen, apprentices and Negroes” invaded the homes of the well-to-do to beg alms and strong drink. They broke the windows of burghers who stinted them. The day culminated in a monumental brawl, to which boys and young men came armed with “Clubs, Staves and Cutlasses” and fought among themselves with gusto. Afterward, the participants destroyed their floats in a huge bonfire. The teenaged Knox gained a reputation as one of Boston’s toughest street fighters, something to brag about in a city populated by fist-hard seamen and muscled dock workers.1

  In August 1765, when Knox was fifteen, Bostonians turned out for a more pointed purpose. Britain had imposed the Stamp Act. This tax on newspapers, legal writs, playing cards, and other documents was the first direct tax on the colonies. The protests took on many of the trappings of Pope’s Day: bonfires blazed and intimidating mobs roamed the city. A “hellish crew” invaded the home of wealthy stamp master Andrew Oliver, smashed a mirror “said to be the largest in North America,” and wrecked the place.2 The mob later burst into the mansion of royal lieutenant governor Thomas Hutchinson and left his home a wrecked shell.

  Boston authorities expected new violence when Pope’s Day itself rolled around that November. Something more ominous greeted them. The North and South End factions, guided and bribed by radical Whigs like John Hancock and Samuel Adams, had made peace. The gangs marched together and gathered at the Liberty Tree, a celebrated elm on Boston Common. Effigies of government officials replaced those of the pope and devil. Oliver worried that “the People, even to the lowest Ranks, have become more attentive to their Liberties.”3

  Riots and gang fighting melded easily into political protest and what Massachusetts governor Francis Bernard called a “general Levelling, and taking away the Distinction of rich and poor.”4 The mob began to think and reason. Boston became the focal point of growing discontent in the colonies. The gangs came to see themselves as “the people out of doors,” the assertive bane of monarchs. The Stamp Act, never enforced, was soon repealed.

  Two years later, Knox watched as Bostonians marked King George III’s twenty-ninth birthday with a salute from three brass cannon. The concussions, the flashes of fire, and the power of the eruptions kindled his imagination. The seventeen-year-old immediately joined the artillery company, a branch of the provincial militia, and began to drill under Lieutenant Adino Paddock, a chair-maker and staunch Tory.

  The unit attracted many of the same young men Knox knew from the South End gangs, the sons of mechanics and shipyard workers. The handling of great guns, as exacting as it was muscular, engaged both his intellect and his physical prowess. The science of artillery incorporated mathematics, mechanics, geometry, and chemistry. The company, known as the Train, became Knox’s absorbing interest. Drills were rigorous. Paddock passed on techniques learned directly from British artillery officers. Engineering was part of the gunner’s trade, and Knox studied the construction of fortifications and secure gun emplacements.

  A new wave of rioting greeted the 1768 import duties known as the Townshend Acts. A British officer called Boston “a blackguard town and ruled by mobs.”5 Patriots began a boycott of British goods. The British government sent four regiments, nearly two thousand soldiers, to occupy Boston. The order was handed down by General Thomas Gage, the agreeable, cultivated officer who had led the advanced guard across the Monongahela thirteen years earlier. Gage, like Braddock before him, now reigned as military commander of all North America.

  Knox joined the thousands of Bostonians who watched this “invasion,” which contemporary historian Mercy Otis Warren called the beginning of the “American war.” The troops marched up from the Long Wharf with fifes screeching and flags unfurled. One regiment featured black Afro-Caribbean drummers in yellow coats with red facings, a bizarre sight to the locals.

  Intended to quell unrest, the occupation set off a seven-year slide toward war. Radicals encouraged citizens to arm themselves. Artillery drill took on an added urgency. The Train comprised both Whigs and Tories, designations borrowed from British political parties. In America, Whig came to be associated with “patriot,” Tory with “loyalist.” Both factions imagined rolling the great guns into action, one to resist oppression, the other to keep the peace.

  In a city of fifteen thousand residents, the presence of so many soldiers became a festering intrusion. On the night of March 5, 1770, Knox was walking home through dark, frigid streets. He encountered a commotion around the Custom House. Bells were ringing as if announcing a fire. Residents were rushing into the street and shouting. He came upon some rowdy youths—a few years earlier he might have been one of them—taunting a British sentry.

  The boys, backed up by a growing crowd, threw snowballs and jeered. Knox ordered them back and, seeing the sentry load his musket, told him “if he fired he died.” The sentry pointed his gun, the boys dared him to shoot.

  Eight or nine men of the British guard, commanded by Captain Thomas Preston, hurried to the sentry’s aid, bayonets fixed. Knox, watching the situation spin out of control, grabbed Preston’s coat and warned him not to fire on the crowd. “Bloody backs!” the boys continued to scoff. “Lobster scoundrels!” The insult referred to the submission of British soldiers to the lash under the army’s draconian disciplinary regime, a degradation for which Americans felt deep scorn.

  The scene grew chaotic. Bells continued to clang, more snowballs flew, chunks of ice. There were shouts of “You can’t kill us all!” and dares to “Fire!”

  The regulars jabbed at the crowd with their bayonets. A soldier slipped. A shot sh
attered the cold air. After a pause, during which Preston failed to give a decisive command, the rest of the hyped-up soldiers fired a staccato volley. The street became a pandemonium of smoke, shouting, and groans. Five civilians fell dead, six suffered wounds.

  Express riders carried word of the “massacre” through the city and out to the countryside. Thousands of citizens prepared to march on Boston. The colony teetered on the precipice of war, but no war came. Henry Knox testified as an eyewitness during the trial, in which lawyer John Adams successfully defended Preston against a charge of murder.

  An alarmed British ministry withdrew their soldiers from Boston and repealed the Townshend taxes on all items except tea. Tensions eased. But the anniversary of the Boston Massacre became an annual focus of patriot rallies and an occasion for incendiary orations.

  * * *

  While Knox had known early the rough world of Boston’s crowded streets, Nathanael Greene had grown up two miles from his nearest neighbors. He had passed his youth working on the family farm and toiling at his father’s successful iron forge on the western shore of Narragansett Bay. Unlike his brothers, he was an avid reader, devoting every slack moment to whatever books he could get hold of.

  While a life of hard work built his strength, Greene suffered from several physical ailments. He walked with a limp. Asthma attacks sometimes kept him struggling for breath night after night. He had dared to receive an inoculation for smallpox—the dangerous protective measure remained controversial—but in addition to conferring immunity, the procedure had left him with a scarred right eye prone to inflammation.

  The domination of Greene’s severe Quaker father shaped his life into his late twenties. At an age when Henry Knox was swinging his fists in street brawls, Greene was still sneaking out to forbidden dances. He did not really come of age until his father died in 1770. That same year, the twenty-eight-year-old Greene fell in love with the well-connected Nancy Ward. She did not return his affection; her indifference broke his heart. He fantasized about winning the lottery: “I intend to turn Beau with my part of the Money,” he explained, “and make a Shining Figure.”6

  Greene regretted his upbringing as a “Supersticious” Quaker, and his lack of formal education. “I feel the mist [of] Ignorance to surround me,” he later wrote.7 On his own he read Enlightenment authors like Voltaire and John Locke. Jonathan Swift, whose satires skewered English policies in Ireland, was a favorite. But the demands of the prosperous business that he and his brothers had inherited consumed his time. Politics remained theoretical. In February 1772, that changed.

  One of the Greene brothers’ ships, the Fortune, with cousin Rufus Greene at the helm, was accosted in Narragansett Bay as it transported a load of West Indian rum and sugar. The commander of the British revenue schooner Gaspee, a “haughty, insolent” man named Dudingston, had become the scourge of Rhode Island traders. He led a boarding party onto the Greenes’ cargo vessel.

  The British sailors slapped Rufus around and confiscated the ship. Import duties were one of the few consistent sources of Crown revenue. The government was determined to prevent traders from sneaking past the customs house at Newport. The myriad of coves and islands in the bay made Rhode Island a smuggler’s paradise. Greene’s cargo may have been legal, but the Gaspee’s captain was going to make sure that the cargo had been taxed. When he heard the news, Nathanael erupted. It was piracy, he declared. He brought a court action against Lieutenant Dudingston, making the officer subject to arrest by Rhode Island authorities. New England merchants cheered the defiant Greene, who became obsessed with the affair. The seizure had brought into sudden focus for him the many issues of rights and liberty that had been percolating in the colonies for years.

  The crew of the Gaspee continued to interdict shipping. In June 1772, chasing a merchantman in the bay, the British schooner ran aground. A gang of citizens, spurred on by the radical patriot group called Sons of Liberty, formed a posse and rowed out in longboats. During their altercation with Dudingston, they shot him in the groin, arrested him, and burned the schooner.

  News of the outrage crackled through the colonies. Boston patriot Samuel Adams thought it could touch off a contest between Britain and America that would “end in rivers of blood.” The British offered a reward and threatened to send the perpetrators to England for trial. With the Gaspee’s captain now in custody, Nathanael Greene, who had a solid alibi for the night of the incident, pursued his lawsuit. He won a judgment of three hundred pounds for the improper seizure of his ship.

  Finding himself in the middle of the great issues of the day, Greene changed. By bringing a lawsuit and by taking an interest in armed conflict, he was veering further and further from his pious upbringing. A year after the incident, he was barred from his Quaker meeting, probably for visiting a Connecticut tavern. More and more, he turned his attention to colonial politics. He frequently traveled the fifty miles to Boston and observed firsthand the contentious affairs of that beleaguered city. He formed a friendship with Henry Knox.

  * * *

  The instinct that prompts modern booksellers to install coffee bars was not absent in the eighteenth century. Once he opened his own shop, Knox turned it into “a fashionable morning lounge.” His charm and love of humorous stories helped make his London Book-Store one of the most popular hangouts for Boston’s smart set. It also became a hub for Boston radicals.

  The affable proprietor helped organize a new militia unit known as the Boston Grenadier Corps, which absorbed some of the more Whig-oriented members of the Train. As with the British grenadiers, all the men had to be tall. They dressed in fancy uniforms and drilled in the evenings with musket and cannon. Knox, one of the most knowledgeable as well as the tallest, was elected an officer. The unit drew praise, even from British military men, for its spruce appearance.

  In the summer of 1773, while he was hunting ducks in Boston’s wetlands, Knox’s gun burst. The explosion blew off the pinkie and ring finger of his left hand, a graphic reminder that a cannon could rupture in the same way, and with much more grievous effects. Henry self-consciously wrapped his mangled hand in a black silk handkerchief. On parade with his militia unit he “excited the sympathy of all the ladies.”

  One who found Knox intriguing was Lucy Flucker, the plump, comely daughter of Thomas Flucker, royal secretary of Massachusetts, “a high-toned Loyalist of great family pretensions.”8 The seventeen-year-old Lucy was educated, spirited, skilled at chess and card games, and endowed with a wit that matched Knox’s own. Their mutual infatuation grew into a passionate, largely secret, courtship.

  Relations between Britain and her colonies continued to fray. The one remaining tax sparked a confrontation in 1773, when British ministers handed a monopoly on the tea trade to the East Indian Company. Angry colonists responded with a boycott. Knox was one of those who guarded a British tea ship to prevent the crew from unloading its goods. On December 16, 1773, radicals disguised as Indians famously tossed more than forty-five tons of tea into the harbor in an act of rebellion. The government harshly punished this provocation by passing a series of “intolerable” acts, closing Boston Harbor, renewing the military occupation of the city, and imposing martial law.

  In the wake of such unrest, Lucy’s parents were reluctant to approve of Knox. They considered him too low class for their daughter and possessed of dangerous political opinions. Lucy, however, loved him “too much for my peace.” The Fluckers “gave a half-reluctant consent,” but when the lovers were married in June 1774, Lucy’s parents refused to attend the wedding. Tension in the city ratcheted ever higher that summer. Lucy’s father tried to entice his son-in-law with the offer of a commission in the British army. Knox refused.

  * * *

  Around the same time, Nathanael Greene finally gave up his crush on Nancy Ward and fell for Catherine Littlefield, a teenager with “a snapping pair of dark eyes,” whom he had known as a girl. Called
Caty, she was thirteen years younger than the thirty-two-year-old businessman. Their romance blossomed quickly—they were married in July 1774.

  Like Knox, Greene responded to the growing colonial turmoil by forming one of the many militia units springing up around New England. Soon after his marriage, he began to drill with the group that would become the Kentish Guards. Greene smuggled a black-market musket out of Boston and helped recruit British army veterans to train the battalion. The men marched about in red coats trimmed with green. They drank, socialized, and dreamed of violent action.

  Because Greene’s knowledge of military theory outstripped that of his fellow militiamen, he expected to be elected an officer. But his comrades could not countenance a lieutenant with a limp at their head. They voted him down. It was, for the sensitive Greene, a “stroke of mortification.” “Nobody loves to be the subject of ridicule,” he opined. His confidence shaken, he almost quit the unit, but instead decided to soldier on as a lowly private.9

  Over the winter of 1774–1775, the drills became increasingly meaningful. Showing the fist, the British ministry sent their military commander on the continent, General Gage, to Boston as royal governor. He brought four thousand more regulars with him. The ministers hoped that Gage, with his long experience in the colonies and his American wife, could both intimidate and placate the unruly citizens of New England. But speaking privately of his colonies that autumn, King George III conceded his fear that “blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.”