Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Short stories of exceptional Americans doing extraordinary things. Fast-paced, entertaining, binge-worthy and historically accurate.
This is my real voice and these are real stories.
New episode every other Wednesday.
Follow me on X for daily stories from American History: https://x.com/HistoryWJacob
Stories of American Legends
Episode 5 - Henry Knox: How a Bookseller Saved Boston
INTRO
British General William Howe stepped out into the morning air and looked up at the hills to the south.
He could not believe his eyes.
American cannons and mortars had appeared overnight on the frozen heights above Boston. Heavy guns. Aimed down at his army. Aimed at his fleet sitting in the harbor.
Where did the guns come from?
The answer was three hundred miles away, across frozen rivers and snowbound mountains.
The answer was a twenty-five-year-old bookseller who took on an impossible journey and changed the Revolutionary War.
This is the story of Henry Knox.
ACT ONE
Henry Knox was not raised to be a soldier.
He was born in Boston in 1750, his father was a shipmaster who died penniless when Henry was just twelve. The boy left school to support his mother by working in a bookshop.
When he was 21, Knox opened his own shop: The London Book Store. It became one of the most fashionable places in Boston with British officers browsing his shelves and patriots like Nathanael Greene coming to talk.
Knox was an avid reader. Especially books on military engineering. He read everything on artillery, cannon and siege craft he could get his hands on.
He was a portly fellow. Six feet tall, well over two hundred pounds. Two fingers on his left hand were missing, blown off by a bursting fowling gun in a hunting accident years before.
At 23, he was married to Lucy Flucker, the daughter of the royal secretary of Massachusetts, from a prominent Loyalist family. Her father disapproved of the patriot tradesmen and tried to buy him off with a British commission. Knox respectfully declined.
10 months after their wedding, the first shots of the Revolutionary War rang out at Lexington and Concord. Henry and Lucy made their choice. They slipped out of British-held Boston in disguise, Henry’s sword sewn into the lining of Lucy’s cloak. She never saw her family again.
Knox volunteered for the American army. His self-taught knowledge was so impressive that George Washington singled out the young bookseller almost immediately.
And Washington had a problem. He had Boston surrounded by land, but the port was kept open by the British navy. Without heavy artillery, the siege could drag on indefinitely.
The guns Washington desperately needed did exist and they were in American hands. But they were three hundred miles away. At Fort Ticonderoga. In the middle of a cruel, northern winter.
ACT TWO
The previous May, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys had captured Fort Ticonderoga. Before dawn, Allen and Benedict Arnold rowed across Lake Champlain, slipped past a lone sentry and stormed the fort while the garrison slept. When the British officer demanded to know by what authority they entered, Ethan Allen thundered:
“In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!”
They seized the fort without firing a shot. And with it, a king’s ransom in artillery.
But moving these guns in winter conditions was considered impossible.
Henry Knox looked at the challenge and volunteered.
He reached Ticonderoga with his 19 year old brother, William, on December 5th. They selected fifty-nine pieces weighing roughly sixty tons. The heaviest gun alone weighed over five thousand pounds, a monster that the men nicknamed Old Sow.
For the mission to succeed, Knox needed a perfect alignment of weather: Lake George open enough for boats, rivers frozen hard enough to bear the weight of guns and snow deep enough for the sleds. He prayed for an interposition of Providence.
The guns were loaded onto boats and sailed down Lake George. Ice was already forming around them. The flat-bottomed scow carrying Old Sow nearly sank, but they made it through just in time.
On shore, Knox had more than forty strong sleds built and assembled teams of oxen and horses. Then they pushed south through New York.
Rivers became nightmares. At the Hudson, Knox’s men poured water on the ice in the freezing darkness to thicken it. Even then, one cannon broke through and plunged into the black water. They cut the struggling horses free just in time and spent the entire day hauling the gun back out. Knox was determined not to leave a single piece behind.
Once across the Hudson, they entered the Berkshire Mountains through brutal winter conditions. Blizzards howled. Trails were icy death traps. Knox himself nearly froze wading through waist-deep drifts.
Slowly but methodically they climbed until Knox wrote he could “almost have seen all the Kingdoms of the Earth.” At times the men collapsed from exhaustion and refused to go on. Showing leadership far beyond his twenty-five years, Knox encouraged them, hired fresh teams from local farms and kept the train moving. They eased the guns down steep slopes a few feet at a time, using ropes, block and tackle cinched around trees to prevent runaway cannon from dragging men and animals to an icy grave.
Progress was agonizingly slow. What Knox hoped would take two weeks stretched into nearly two months. Food ran short. Men and animals grew desperate. But Knox’s iron will kept the expedition alive.
In late January 1776, the Noble Train of Artillery finally emerged from the mountains. As it rolled toward Boston, word spread ahead. Town after town, people braved the cold just to watch the guns pass. John Adams marveled when it passed through Framingham. At Westfield, Knox gave the crowd a show. He primed and loaded Old Sow and fired it. The crowd roared with delight as the sound echoed in their ears.
The Noble Train was coming to Boston.
ACT THREE
In the last week of January, a weary Henry Knox arrived at the American siege lines outside of Boston.
Ten brutal weeks in the frozen wilderness behind him.
He had just accomplished the impossible. 60 tons of artillery. Hauled over 300 miles. In the dead of winter. Across a lake, over freezing rivers, through waist-deep drifts of snow. He had protected the guns, kept the men fed, kept the crews from quitting. He did not stop until he reached Washington’s camp.
And instead of sending a camp aide to greet him, it is said that George Washington walked out and welcomed the bookseller in person.
And according to the story, Henry Knox, overcome with exhaustion and relief, began to weep.
The guns had arrived.
George Washington could drive the British out of Boston.
ACT FOUR
Above the sleeping city of Boston, overlooking Howe’s army and the British fleet, stood the Dorchester Heights. Both sides had threatened to seize the heights, but Washington acted first.
He desperately needed the cannon and mortar on top of those Heights. To inspire his men before they started to work, he reminded them that it was the 6th anniversary of the Boston Massacre. And this was their chance to reclaim their city.
Under a thunderous diversionary bombardment, it began. Over 2,000 men, under orders of absolute silence and aided by hundreds of oxen, hauled the cannons and ingenious, pre-fabricated fortifications up the slope under the cover of darkness. A foggy haze and muffled wagon wheels concealed their presence on the hill.
By dawn, the heights bristled with American cannon trained ominously on Howe and his army below.
In the morning, General Howe looked up in disbelief at guns that had not been there the night before. Guns the British had once owned at Ticonderoga.
He exclaimed “My God! These fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months!”
That night, he prepared to storm the heights, but a fierce storm rolled in, making the attack impossible. Trapped under Knox’s guns, Howe had no choice but to relinquish the city to George Washington.
The British army sailed north, never to return to Boston. Among the Loyalists crowding onto those ships was Lucy Knox’s own family, driven out by the very guns her husband had dragged through the snow.
CLOSING
Henry Knox was just getting started.
He became Washington’s chief of artillery and served at his side through the entire war. Crossing the Delaware at Trenton, enduring the hardships of Valley Forge and commanding the guns at Yorktown. When he was 31, he rose to the rank of major general in the Continental Army. Later, in the Washington Administration, he served as the Secretary of War for the United States of America.
Today his name is immortalized on one of the most famous vaults in the world: Fort Knox.
Not bad for a portly kid from Boston who taught himself soldiering from the books on his own shelves.
When conventional wisdom said the guns could not be moved, Henry Knox found a way.
Showing the world that he wasn’t just a bookseller.
He wasn’t just a fearless leader.
He is an American Legend.
CTA
Thank you for listening to Stories of American Legends. If you liked this story, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review. It really does help.
And come follow me on X at History With Jacob. The handle is @HistoryWJacob. I post stories from American history every day.
Next episode is Caesar Rodney. The vote that would create the United States was deadlocked. And the man who could break the tie was 80 miles away, dying of cancer, on the wrong side of a thunderstorm.
Don’t miss it. But until then… stay legendary.