Washington [140]
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 cannon with his own hands. In artillery matters Washington trusted Knox’s judgment implicitly. In turn, Henry Knox rewarded Washington with unconditional devotion and delighted in calling him “Your Excellency,” which some saw as a little too fawning. Even later on, amid widespread grumbling about Washington’s military missteps, the loyal Knox never breathed a syllable of criticism. After the war Knox thanked Washington and expressed his “affection and gratitude to you for the innumerable instances of your kindness and attention to me.”55 In the ultimate tribute to Knox, Washington later told John Adams, “I can say with truth, there is no man in the United States with whom I have been in habits of greater intimacy; no one whom I have loved more sincerely; nor any for whom I have had a greater friendship.”56
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 pinned down below inside Boston. “The commencement of [Washington’s] command was the commencement of inactivity,” wrote Thomas Paine after he later turned into a waspish critic of Washington’s leadership. “If we may judge from the resistance at Concord and afterwards at Bunker Hill, there was a spirit of enterprise at that time, which the presence of