Pi Alley - Henry Knox

Pi Alley has gone by many names including Williams Court, Savages Court, Peck's Arch, and Webster's Arch. In the early 1770s Henry Knox had a little bookstore somewhere on this alleyway. He went from bookstore owner to the most senior officer in the army after General Washington himself with quite a few accomplishments tucked under his belt.

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Everybody in Boston knew him, though chiefly as that portly fellow in his mid-twenties who a few years earlier had set up shop with a bookstore grandly named London Book Shop at William’s Court (This alleyway). It was also a fashionable place during the British occupation, not only for its books but also for Knox’s stock of “patent medicines, flutes, bread-baskets, telescopes, dividers, protractors, and wallpaper.”

Just over two years before the siege, eighteen-year-old Lucy Flucker had defied the objections of her parents and had married Henry Knox. Marrying a tradesman with few prospects was bad enough, but Lucy’s father was the Royal Secretary of Massachusetts, an appointee of the Crown and among the most important of the province’s administrators. The king had few families more loyal than were the Fluckers. Lucy’s mother, Hannah Waldo Flucker, was the daughter of a brigadier; Lucy’s brother Thomas was in the British Army; her sister Hannah was married to a British officer. Their lot had always been cast with England. There were whispers that her father, after grudgingly agreeing to Lucy’s marriage, tried to get Henry Knox a commission in the British Army, but Knox had refused. A year after the marriage, very early in the siege, Henry and Lucy had quietly slipped out of Boston.

But nobody would have expected the bookish storekeeper/peddler to turn artilleryman. After all, Knox’s only previous military experience consisted of few years as a militiaman and then as a lieutenant in the militia’s Boston Grenadiers. Knox had specialized in books on military history, tactics, and fortifications. This giant of a man—six feet high and massive in bulk—might have been merely a debt-ridden shopkeeper surrounded by books, but Knox had dreamed of something grander. He had studied how cannons like those now menacing the city had been used in the past and how they might be better used in the future. George Washington gave the young fellow his chance. Washington had sent Knox all the way to Lake George and Lake Champlain, where Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys had captured Fort Ticonderoga. Knox had orders to get Ticonderoga’s captured British guns and haul them 300 miles back to Cambridge—and he did that, in the dead of winter, by commandeering oxen- and horse-drawn sleds from farmers and dragging 60 tons of weaponry through snow and over frozen lakes just in time for Washington to emplace them above Boston. Washington had put Knox in charge of artillery and had made him a colonel! (See Lechmere Point- Fort Ticonderoga)

His leadership shown during the New York and New Jersey campaigns of 1776-77 when he oversaw the logistics for recrossing the Delaware River to surprise the Hessians at Trenton and another victory at Princeton a week later. Knox received a promotion to brigadier general for these feats and later the army’s youngest major general and no one besides Washington outranked him.

General Knox served throughout the war for the Continental Army, including fighting during the Philadelphia Campaign, establishing an artillery school, court-martialed and convicting the spy John Andre (who was in partnership with Benedict Arnold), and directing artillery at the Siege of Yorktown. When the new government formed in 1789, Knox became the 1st United States Secretary of War, a position he held through 1794. On October 25, 1806, Henry Knox died at his home after a chicken bone lodged in his throat causing a fatal infection.

The last link is primarily about Minister Mather Byles – but is very personally written and includes some teasing the minister did of Henry Knox as they had known each other prior to the war.

-Source Links-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_Alley

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/henry-knox

https://www.knoxmuseum.org/henryknox

http://commonplace.online/article/a-loyalist-guarded-re-guarded-and-disregarded/