Henry Knox to George Washington
Facts: Cannons in the 18th century were considered the kings of the battlefield. George Washington knew— as did virtually everyone on both sides of the conflict—that without artillery, the American cause would be seriously handicapped. Even before the smoke of Lexington and Concord had cleared, the American forces—at this point, little more than a ragged collection of colonial militias— had laid loose siege to Boston, effectively penning up Lieutenant General Thomas Gage and his British troops. The siege line ran around the city from Chelsea to Roxbury, but it left open Boston Harbor. By late May Gage’s forces had been reinforced through this crucial gateway, until there were some 6,000 redcoats in Boston, including Major Generals John Burgoyne, Henry Clinton, and William Howe. The stalemate at Boston continued for months, with the British numbers swelling, and General Howe replacing Gage as commander. With provisions in ever shorter supply for the British, their breakout began to seem like a possibility. Meanwhile, newly appointed commander in chief George Washington—facing the threat of mass desertions as winter approached and the initial wave of patriotic fervor waned—lacked the artillery necessary to drive the British from the city. “The inactive state we lie in,” he wrote in a letter to his brother, “is exceedingly disagreeable.” A 25-yearold Boston bookseller named Henry Knox, a veteran militiaman and avid self-taught student of military history and artillery, had attracted Washington’s attention with his work on the siege lines. Knox was a big man with a commanding presence, and in November Washington charged him with a critical mission: to make the 300-some-mile trek to Fort Ticonderoga, New York—which Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen had captured from the British the previous May—and haul the dozens of cannons there back to Boston.