Defiant Brides (25 page)

As secretary of war, Knox’s hours were long. No sooner had he quelled Southern hostilities between Native Americans and white settlers than skirmishes broke out in the northwest corner of what is today Ohio. Reluctantly, Henry dispatched troops to the borders of the Ohio Territory, insisting as he had in the south that the United States supported a policy of “humanity and justice” to produce a “noble, illiberal and disinterested administration of Indian affairs.”
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Simultaneously, Knox attempted to obtain the two-fifths shares of the Waldo Patent, once owned by the expatriated Fluckers. As his late brother-in-law, Captain Thomas Flucker, had warned, the patent was mired in legalities, some of it claimed by members of the Fluckers’ extended family, others by squatters. To untangle those claims, Henry again traveled to New York, where the old claims were apparently filed. Coincidentally, on July 15, Lucy’s widowed sister-in-law, Sarah Lyons Flucker, arrived in New York from her native home, the British colony of Antigua, to visit relatives and claim her sons’ share of the patent. Impressed with the young widow’s pluck, Henry wrote Lucy, “You will be charmed with and proud of her.”
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Years later the Knoxes’ eldest daughter, young Lucy, described Sarah as plain looking but evinced a “peculiar fascination in her manners, which attracted all with whom she came in contact.”
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Just before Lucy was to meet Sarah, Lucy’s seventeen-month-old son, George Washington, became “violently ill,” forcing Lucy to postpone the sisters-in-law’s rendezvous. After the child’s recovery, the two women at last met and became fond friends. Quite unexpectedly, later that summer, tragedy struck. First came a letter from the headmaster of the Princeton, New Jersey, school that Marcus Camillus II, the Knoxes’ eight-year old son, attended. The boy had tumbled down a flight of stairs and badly injured his cheek, the headmaster announced. A second letter followed with news that the boy had died the next day, having apparently suffered a fatal concussion.

Shock and disbelief swept over the Knoxes. The loss of young children was common enough in eighteenth century America; about 15 percent never reached maturity. But Marcus, the Knoxes’ most promising son, was the fifth of their ten children to die. Privately, Lucy and Henry questioned why they were the victims of so many tragedies.

From Mount Vernon, Washington conveyed his and Martha’s sympathies. “I have heard of the death of your promising son with great concern and sincerely condole you and Mrs. Knox on this melancholy occasion.” In reply, the president wrote that he hoped the “consolations of religion or philosophy” would heal them in time.
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Heartbroken, Knox admitted that “neither philosophy nor reason have their proper office.”
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Five months later, he wrote a friend that Lucy was still “inconsolable.”
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A portrait of Marcus, a handsome lad seated at his writing desk, remained on the walls of the Knoxes’ homes for decades.

By January 1792 Lucy, pregnant for the eleventh time, was again able to attend the plays, balls, and dinners of Philadelphia with members of prominent families, including the Binghams, Morrises, Chews, and Ingersolls. Nearby, too, lived her old friends Martha and George Washington in the Masters-Penn House, which Washington had recently had remodeled.

The results were so stunning that, after attending Martha Washington’s first “levee,” or public reception, New Yorker Sally McKean gushed to a friend, “You could never have such a drawing-room; it was brilliant beyond anything you can imagine; and though there was a great deal of extravagance, there was so much of Philadelphia taste in everything that [it] must be confessed the most delightful occasion . . . ever known in this country.”
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As the prominent wife of America’s first secretary of war, Lucy also hosted levees, offering her guests tea, coffee, and lemonade, as well an opportunity to play cards or chess. Two years earlier, when still in New York City, Abigail Adams had scoffed at Lucy’s concept of entertaining. Though other prominent women opened their homes for levees, Abigail wrote her oldest sister, Mary Cranch, “one only . . . introduces cards and she is frequently put to difficulty to make up a table at whist.”
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That unnamed hostess was undoubtedly Lucy. History has not revealed why she was so passionate about games. Cards had long been accepted as a social amusement in New York, as Becky Franks once complained, but Lucy’s zeal transcended that. Apparently she enjoyed the competition or found it a way to wall off grief, but whatever the cause, it was matched by the vehemence of Henry’s disapproval. “Remember me, my love with all the tenderness I deserve—respect my prejudices as they relate to vile cards,” he pleaded, “and for God’s sake and mine, renounce them altogether.”
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In her defense, the Knoxes’ eldest daughter, Lucy, later insisted to Elizabeth Ellet, author of the 1848
Women of the American Revolution
, that her mother’s love for her family remained her overriding concern. Not only did the elder Lucy have strong “domestic attachments . . . devotion to household and children,” but she “was ready in the noon of life, to give up the delights of society in the metropolis.”
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By that, the younger Lucy referred to her mother’s desire to leave Philadelphia to establish a grand home on her grandfather’s lands in Maine.

During each summer’s outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia Lucy and the children fled. Even before their move to the City of Brotherly Love, the Knoxes’ Boston friend Henry Jackson had warned Lucy about “the unhealthy climate of that city in the hot season.”
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To avoid contagion Jackson suggested she and the children spend the summers in his spacious home in Dorchester, Massachusetts. By May 1792, Lucy, who was again pregnant, accepted his invitation and brought her sister-in-law, Sarah Lyons Flucker, and both their children.

In Dorchester Lucy again pined for “her Harry,” imagining him enjoying himself at dinners and galas in her absence. “My evenings cannot possibly be any cause of jealousy. They are stupid indeed,” Henry assured her. “If I dine out which is pretty often, I drink tea . . . come home read the evening paper and about . . . nine go to a solitary and . . . a painful bed, painful from the reflection that the companion of my soul is at a distance—and that I am deprived of the blessed solace of her arms.”
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He longed to join Lucy in Massachusetts but, as America’s new secretary of war, was obliged to remain in Philadelphia. “I am upon my probation,” he reminded her in late July. “A single lapse of public duty at this moment sinks me, never again to rise.”
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Lured by the prospect of retiring to Maine, he again rode to New York to examine legal papers on the Waldo Patent. “I know not how long it will take to bring the cursed affair here to a close,” he wrote. “But I know that I shall not be able to stay here more than three or at most four days. I must be back here [in Philadelphia], Friday or Saturday.”
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Adding to his worries was Lucy’s approaching due date, causing him to “check every post . . . until I shall be informed of your having been safely delivered.”
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The “perils of child-bearing” was only one of Lucy’s challenges.
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Another was the rambunctious behavior of her eldest son, Henry Jackson Knox.

The Knoxes’ earlier indulgence of the boy was at least partially to blame for his behavior. While visiting a friend in Boston, Lucy brought young Henry Jackson with her. As the two women chatted, the boy “disarranged” the books in the hostess’s library. “Henry must not be restrained, we never think of thwarting
him
in anything,” Lucy insisted. Appalled, her friend replied, “But I cannot have my books spoiled, as my husband is not a bookbinder.” Enraged, Lucy stormed out of the house with her son.
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By the time young Henry was twelve, even Lucy and Henry were worried about him. In an effort to improve his behavior, Lucy toured a school in Hingham, Massachusetts, which prepared young men for Harvard. Though the school’s name was not mentioned in Lucy’s letters, it was the Derby School (today’s Derby Academy), then the town’s only secondary educational institution. After learning about it, Knox was impressed. Losing his father when he was twelve had forced Henry to leave Boston Latin School, thus blocking all hopes of attending Harvard. Knox wanted better for his son, and the Derby School seemed to provide that, combining moral training with high educational standards. Without a sound background in both, Knox wrote Lucy, young Henry “will grope through the world, and with bad morals. I love him as I do my life, but I am desirous to devote him to the proper rank of a man by discharging my duty to him.”
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Though her sister, Sarah, who had also toured the Derby School, decided to enroll her own children there, Lucy, in contrast, balked at the idea, feeling guilty about sending her son away from home. On September 16, in the midst of the dilemma, Lucy bore an eleventh child, a girl she named Augusta Henrietta. “I received on Saturday last my beloved Lucy’s letter,” Henry joyously wrote from Philadelphia. “I am delighted . . . what heaven in its mercy grant.”
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As she recovered, Lucy continued to brood about young Henry. “As to our son please to observe finally that I regard your happiness as my supreme object,” Knox tenderly assured her. At the very least, the youth’s attendance at boarding school would relieve her of attempting to shape their difficult son. “If he can be made a better man and receive an education at a distance,” Knox observed, “. . . it’s our duty to afford it to him.”
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Coincidental with those expressed sentiments was the forty-year-old secretary of war’s own questions about time spent away from home. That same September he confided to his fifteen-year-old daughter, Lucy, that he longed to leave his cabinet position. “All my life hitherto, I have been pursuing illusive bubbles which burst on being grasped . . . ’tis high time I should quit public life and attend to the solid interests of my family so that they may not be left dependent on the cold hand of charity.” Nevertheless, he intended to retire “with reputation.” As secretary of war he could not neglect “for a moment, the services belonging to my station,” but he understood that for the sake of his family, he had to “make some exertions for pecuniary objects.”
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Among those “exertions” were Knox’s ventures in land speculation. With his partner, the slimy New York speculator William Duer, Knox naively purchased 2 million acres of Maine land at ten cents an acre from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. No sooner had the two partners paid back the $10,000 than Duer was apprehended for other debts and thrown into prison. Fortunately, Senator William Bingham, Philadelphia’s wealthiest citizen, rescued Knox by purchasing Duer’s shares, advancing a loan, and promising the secretary of war one-third of the profits.

At the same time, Henry continued to struggle with rights to the Waldo Patent. On July 4, 1785, the Massachusetts legislature had confirmed Knox’s stewardship of its 576,000 acres and three adjoining coastal islands. Technically, Massachusetts still owned two-fifths of the patent’s shares from the estate of Lucy’s mother. Since back taxes were owed on the property, Henry realized the lowered value of those shares presented a unique opportunity. In June 1791, he met at the Bunch of Grapes tavern with Boston merchant Joseph Peirce, who managed—and here the details remain murky—to auction off the two-fifths’ shares of the Flucker portion at the bargain rate of $3,000. The winning bidder was Dr. Oliver Smith, a friend of Knox’s brother, William. Six months later, Smith sold the shares to Knox’s agent, Henry Jackson. By late 1793 Jackson quietly signed them over to Henry. Somehow (and again the records are unclear), Henry also purchased the remaining one-fifth of the Waldo Patent from the other Flucker heirs.

Slippery as was Knox’s land grab of the entire Waldo Patent, nepotism and patronage were common in those days. Even the Knoxes’ literary friend, Mercy Otis Warren, whose work praised the “virtue” of the American character, expected Knox to grant favors to her sons. “Though not used to make applications for office,” Mercy explained she had “such a confidence in your friendship as justifies . . . the appointment of collection of customs for the port of Plymouth and Duxbury” for her son, Henry. Could Knox also grant a commission or “arrangement of the military department” for her other son, Winslow? Intent upon maintaining his public image, Knox coolly referred her to Washington.
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By then Henry longed as much as did Lucy for a country estate like those owned by Jefferson and the Washingtons. After achieving full title to the Waldo Patent, he consequently hired housewright Ebenezer Dunton to construct a mansion in the Maine coastal town of Thomaston. Set on a rise above the St. George River, the house was to be surrounded by gardens, a large farm, and a number of industries Knox intended to found to foster “development of the District of Maine.”
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One obstacle to the mansion’s rapid completion was the region’s long winters. Another was Knox’s duties as secretary of war, which required constant attention to national problems. Among these were ongoing tribal disputes in Ohio. No less alarming were hostilities between France and Britain over American shipping, resulting in the unlawful capture of American sailors and ships.

In August 1793, yellow fever again swept through Philadelphia, producing the worst epidemic in the city’s history. Mosquito-borne, its victims spiked high fevers, hemorrhaged from various orifices, became jaundiced, and often died. “Many are taken off with it . . . they have burned tar in the streets and taken many other precautions, many families have left the city,” Elizabeth Drinker penned in her diary.
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Deaths were so frequent that mourners no longer held traditional funerals. Instead, Drinker noted, “many are buried after night, and taken in carts to their graves.”
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By August 10, Alexander Hamilton had fallen ill, and after sixteen government workers died, Washington and Martha left the city for Mount Vernon.