Washington: A Life

Washington’s other favorite officer was the warm, ebullient Henry Knox, who weighed almost three hundred pounds and was promoted to colonel of the Continental artillery that December. Like many overweight people, Knox walked in a slightly odd, pigeon-toed fashion, with his legs bowed outward and his paunch, big as a ca

Born near Boston Harbor, Knox was the son of a failed shipmaster who deserted the family when Henry was nine, forcing him to drop out of Boston Latin Grammar School to support his mother and younger brother. He clerked in a Boston bookstore and took advantage of every spare moment to read, preferring military history and engineering. In 1771 the twenty-one-year-old Knox opened his own shop, the New London Book Store, which offered a “large and very elegant assortment” of imported works, as Knox claimed in an ad.51 He soaked up military knowledge from the British officers who frequented the shop. All the while he was becoming a convinced patriot. In the last advertisement he placed in the Boston Gazette, he a

Knox’s wife, Lucy Flucker, the daughter of a highborn Tory, was a bright, socially ambitious woman who excelled at chess and loved to gamble at cards. She had a girth to match her husband’s. Abigail Adams reported, “Her size is enormous; I am frightened when I look at her.”52 Perhaps because of her weight and high regard for fashion, Lucy Knox became something of a laughingstock in the Continental Army. Dr. Manasseh Cutler, an army chaplain, made Lucy sound like a ridiculous caricature out of Dickens, with her hair piled “up at least a foot high, much in the form of a churn bottom upward, and topped off with a wire skeleton in the same form, covered with black gauze, which hangs in streamers down her back. Her hair behind is a large braid confined in a monstrous crooked comb.”53 The tall, outrageous hairstyle was actually the modish pouf newly popularized by Marie-Antoinette.

Knox first met Washington and Lee on July 16, when they rode out to Roxbury to appraise the breastworks Knox had helped to engineer. “When they viewed the works,” Knox told Lucy, “they expressed the greatest pleasure and surprise at their situation and apparent utility, to say nothing of the plan, which did not escape their praise.”54 Before long, Washington and Knox formed a bond of fraternal trust. Washington liked Knox’s imagination, candor, and enterprise and the way he shot ca

It says much about Washington’s leadership style that he searched outside the ranks of professional soldiers and gave scope to talented newcomers—a meritocratic bent that clashed with his aristocratic background and grew more pronounced with time. With Greene and Knox, he encouraged two aspiring young men who bore psychological scars from their childhood. He boosted their courage and made them believe in themselves. This effort, of course, was driven by necessity: Washington had to deal with a chronic shortage of good generals, something Knox himself recognized in 1776 when he wrote that “there is a radical evil in our army—the lack of officers . . . the bulk of the officers of the army are a parcel of ignorant, stupid men, who might make tolerable soldiers, but are bad officers.”57 In the end, the generals who succeeded in the Continental Army weren’t grizzled veterans, such as Horatio Gates and Charles Lee, but young, homegrown officers who were quite daring and stayed loyal to George Washington.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Land of Freedom

FORSOMEONE of George Washington’s vigorous nature, nothing disturbed him more than the charge that he had proved timid when he possessed the high ground of Prospect Hill, Cambridge, and Roxbury, with General Gage’s troops pi

The reality was that during the siege of Boston George Washington was restless and all too eager to pounce. Fond of crisp decisions, he wanted to be done with this devilish stalemate and return to Mount Vernon. As he insisted to brother John, “The inactive state we lie in is exceedingly disagreeable.”2 The caution for which he was legendary struggled against a strong, nearly reckless streak in his nature. As the British lobbed bombs futilely over the American camp—one soldier said “sometimes from two to six at a time could be seen in the air overhead, looking like moving stars in the heavens”—Washington felt powerless to retaliate.3 “It would not be prudent in me to attempt a measure which would necessarily bring on a consumption of all the ammunition we have, thereby leaving the army at the mercy of the enemy,” he explained to Richard Henry Lee. So dire was the gunpowder shortage that spears were distributed to save ammunition, and Washington concluded that he couldn’t afford the big, bold action he desired: “I know by not doing it that I shall stand in a very unfavorable light in the opinion of those who expect much and will find little done . . . [S] uch, however, is the fate of all those who are obliged to act the part I do.”4

Washington frequently had Billy Lee remove his mahogany and brass spyglass from its handsome leather case so he could engage in surveillance of his adversary. He discerned signs of a British desperation at least equal to his own. The enemy was hollowing out much of Boston, stripping wooden houses for firewood and removing combustible materials that might erupt in flames should the patriots attack. Washington received a much clearer picture of both British and American fortifications when the young John Trumbull crept through high grass on his belly to sketch some maps. The son of Co