Knox

George Washington put increasing trust in an impressive young New Englander, Henry Knox, to whom he was assigned one of the most challenging and grave missions of the war. Colonel Knox was six feet tall, had a booming voice, and was sociable, swift of mind, and highly active. Knox was similar to his friend Nathanial Greene, a man of marked skill, which Washington saw from the start. Under the most trying conditions, Knox proved to be an exquisite leader. Like Greene, he remained consistently faithful to Washington. Henry was the seventh of ten sons of Mary Campbell and William Knox, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. When Knox’s father disappeared, he had to work to support his mother, making he self-educated. He became a bookseller. John Adams recalled Henry Knox as a youth “of pleasing manners and inquisitive turn of mind.” Henry Knox fell in love with a Tory, Lucy Flucker. Washington first met Knox at Roxbury on July 5, checking the defenses, only three days before he had taken command of the army. In addition, apparently he was impressed. Washington put the young officer in charge of the voyage to Boston.

On November 21, the pain within Boston was reportedly extreme. Food was in badly short supply. Deserters from the American side were telling the British that Washington’s army was exhausted and unpaid and most of them were yearning to go home. George Washington was a man of exceptional, excessive self-command, hardly letting he show any of discouragement or despair.

Later in the fall, Washington asked his wife, Martha Washington, to accompany him in Cambridge Martha Washington who had never been so far from home or in the midst of war, saying “I confess I shudder every time I hear the sound of a gun…To me that never see anything of war, the preparations are very terrible indeed. But I endeavor to keep my fears to myself as well as I can.”

On New Year’s Day, Monday, January 1, 1776, the first copies of the speech delivered by King George III at the opening of...