Henry Knox

Henry Knox was a self-educated Boston bookseller who developed an expert knowledge of artillery and military engineering through voracious reading in his own shop before the Revolution began. Born in Boston in 1750, he had no formal military training, but his mastery of the technical literature of European warfare and his imposing physical presence made him a natural figure of authority. When the war began in April 1775, Knox quickly attached himself to the Patriot cause and came to the attention of George Washington, who recognized in the young bookseller an intellectual depth and practical energy that the Continental Army desperately needed.

In the winter of 1775 to 1776, Washington dispatched Knox on one of the most audacious logistical missions of the entire war: travel to Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point, gather the cannons captured by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, and transport them across frozen wilderness to Boston. Knox accomplished this through a combination of improvised sleds, teams of oxen, and sheer organizational determination, moving roughly sixty tons of artillery — including heavy siege guns — across Lake George, through the Berkshire Mountains, and into Massachusetts over the course of nearly three months. The cannons arrived in January and February 1776 in a condition that astonished Washington and his staff.

In March 1776, Washington used Knox's artillery to fortify Dorchester Heights, the elevated ground overlooking Boston Harbor, in a single night's work. When the British commander General William Howe awoke to find American guns commanding his fleet and the city, he concluded that the position was untenable and evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776 — a moment celebrated in Massachusetts to this day as Evacuation Day. Knox went on to serve as Washington's chief artillery officer throughout the war, fighting at Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, and Yorktown, and later became the first United States Secretary of War under the Constitution he had helped make possible.