On July 5, 1804, Daniel Coxe, the friend who advised Peggy on finances after Arnold’s death and often visited her at Bryanston Street, wrote Judge Shippen that his once-lovely daughter “now lies on a sick bed, very painful and alarming . . . looking so ill as to shock me. She was not able to write to you or would have [done] it—She begged me to say for her all duty & affection to you and her sisters.”53
Six weeks later, on August 24, Peggy, forty-four, died.
So it was that two defiant brides of the Revolution met death much as they had lived their lives—one clinging to youthful memories of love, the other with the resignation and steely will of a seasoned martyr.
14
The Brides’ Legacies
AFTER LUCY’S DEATH, HER daughters hoped to memorialize her as one of the legendary patriot wives of the American Revolution.
The name of General Henry Knox was already honored. In 1791, citizens in Eastern Tennessee’s Great Valley had renamed their largest town Knoxville. The 1802 establishment of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, modeled at least in part upon the Pluckemin Artillery Cantonment, also fulfilled one of their father’s earliest dreams. Written accounts of the Revolution had praised Knox for his character as well as for his contributions to the American cause. “To praise him for his military talents alone would be to deprive him of the eulogium he merits; a man of understanding, gay, sincere, and honest—it is impossible to know without esteeming him, or to see without loving him,” wrote the Marquis of Chastellux.1
Chief Justice John Marshall’s five-volume Life of George Washington praised Knox for his “past services and an unquestioned integrity . . . sound understanding.”2 By 1834, William Sullivan’s Familiar Letters on Public Characters and Public Events recalled that Knox’s “face had a noble expression, and was capable of displaying the most benignant feeling. . . . This was the true character of his heart. . . . The mind of Knox was powerful, rapid and decisive. . . . He had a brilliant imagination, and no less brilliant modes of expression.”3
Yet, it would not be until 1848 that a remembrance of Lucy Flucker Knox finally appeared as a chapter in Elizabeth Ellett’s Women of the American Revolution. The author, unable to locate the Knox children, had based her portrait upon information from Maine congressman Lorenzo Sabine, editor of the Eastport Sentinel and author of the 1847 book The American Loyalists. Ellett’s chapter on Lucy Knox was a “brief & somewhat inaccurate account” of their mother, complained daughter Lucy to her sister Caroline in February 1849.4 Although Ellett had extolled their mother’s intellect for its “high order,” she also wrote that Mrs. Knox had said that if she had to live her life over, she would have been “more of a wife, more of a mother, more of a woman.”5 That admission infuriated the Knoxes’ eldest daughter. “Now whatever may have been her fondness in former days for the world & its attractions—I am well assured that they never led her to neglect her own family,” she wrote to Caroline.6
Immediately after the publication of Women of the American Revolution, Lucy wrote to Ellett, who immediately “begged” for more information.7 By then, Lucy’s comments had been incorporated into Ellett’s Godey’s Lady’s Book article, “Sketch of Mrs. Henry Knox.” But once again, Lucy thought that her mother had been unjustly represented. Although Ellett described Mrs. Knox as a “remarkable woman,”8 Lucy wrote her sister, she “said some things which I never thought of saying, such as the influence of my mother . . . over the minds of General & Mrs. Washington, which I certainly never asserted.”9
Privately, Lucy Knox Thatcher blamed herself for not knowing more about her mother’s life. “When our dear mother was yet with us, I did not take the pains, I . . . ought to have done to inform myself of a thousand particulars of her eventual life,” she admitted to her sister. “Anecdotes I have none. Do you recall any?”10
Apparently Caroline had none or, if she did, they never appeared in print. By then, she had been twice widowed. Ultimately Caroline’s marriage to James Swan had been unhappy, terminating with his 1834 death. Two years later, she married Senator John Holmes, with whom she lived happily, if all too briefly, until he died, in 1843.
In contrast to his sisters, the Knoxes’ son, Henry Jackson, had led a checkered life. After squandering his small inheritance, he appealed to his father’s old friends, who, taking pity upon him, appointed him a justice of the peace and notary public. By the 1820s he had turned to religion. “You will be much surprised to hear that your Uncle Knox has lately become a pious man—his conversion is one of the most wonderful [surprising] things I have ever met with,” Lucy wrote one of her children.11 In repentance for years of rebellion, Henry Jackson Knox joined the local First Congregational Church and became a proud citizen of Thomaston. He died on October 9, 1832, at fifty-two years of age.
Following her second widowhood, Caroline lived alone at Montpelier, where she struggled to maintain the mansion. After Nathaniel Hawthorne visited Thomaston on Saturday, August 12, 1837, he described Montpelier as “a large, rusty-looking edifice of wood.” The mansion and its environs, he wrote in American Notebooks, “may be taken as an illustration of what must be the result of American schemes of aristocracy. It is not forty years, since this house was built, and Knox was in his glory but now the house is all in decay, while, within a stone’s throw of it, is a street of neat, smart white edifices . . . occupied chiefly by thriving mechanics.” The general’s descendants, Hawthorne noted, “are all poor” and their inheritance “merely sufficient to make a dissipated and drunken fellow of the one of the old General’s sons.”12
Subsequent historical scholarship linked Hawthorne’s portrayal of the grasping Judge Pyncheon in his 1851 House of the Seven Gables to Knox. Both figures, Hawthorne observed, owned vast tracts of Maine lands through an earlier Indian contract with the Massachusetts General Court, an arrangement, coincidentally, that also applied to the mortified author’s own ancestors.
On at least one count Hawthorne was right: the expense of maintaining Montpelier was more than Knox’s children could afford. By 1849, Lucy had confided that to one of her own daughters. The family homestead was “ever lovely and ever must be to me a sacred spot. . . . [But] I sincerely wish my sister could dispose of it. . . . It is wholly unprofitable . . . a great care and bill of expense.” By June 29, 1851, she had written to Caroline, urging her to sell it, “however painful the sacrifice.”13
Four months later, on October 17, Caroline died. Rather than allowing the house to be abandoned, Lucy moved in. There, she too, was confounded by similar “ten thousand associations and reminiscences.”14 Rather than sell Montpelier, she auctioned off some of the surrounding acreage into street lots that she named after family members. Three years almost to the day of Caroline’s death, on October 12, 1853, Lucy Knox Thatcher passed away. Montpelier and the remaining property were then divided among her descendants.
By 1855 Lucy’s son, Admiral Henry Knox Thatcher, had sold the estate for $4,500. Subsequently, Montpelier fell into disrepair. In 1868 the old mansion was demolished to make room for the Knox and Lincoln Railroad. The tombs of Henry and Lucy Knox and several of their children were consequently removed and re-buried in Thomaston’s cemetery.
The residents of Thomaston, nevertheless, continued to honor their famous town father. Each July 25, the Henry Knox Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution celebrated the general’s birthday. By the 1920s, an offshoot of that chapter, the Knox Memorial Association, began a national fund-raising campaign in cooperation with the Knoxes’ great-great grandson, Henry Thatcher Fowler. On July 26, 1929, the Knox Memorial Association broke ground for construction of a replica of the original Montpelier.
Today, a copy of Henry and Lucy Knox’s home stands near the original site in Thomaston as a popular Maine museum and a monument to their colorful lives.
No such memorials exist for Benedict and Peggy Arnold. As the former Philadelphia belle’s letters to her family of 1801–1804 showed, the children were the sole survivors of her
union with Arnold. Through Peggy’s sale of her home, furnishings, and valuable possessions, her youngsters completed their educations, mixed in England’s highest circles, and led lives of character and accomplishment. In various ways, the Arnolds’ four sons and daughter each sought to countermand their father’s notoriety.
Their eldest son, Edward, served in the 6th Bengal Cavalry, rising to the position of its paymaster in 1806. Horrified by the devastation of a famine in Northern India, Edward anonymously donated warehouses of food to the starving residents of Muttra.
At eighteen, the second son, James, joined the Corps of Royal Engineers to participate in British campaigns in Malta and the West Indies. Among his heroic deeds was an offer to lead a risky attack in Surinam. “No braver man than my father ever lived, but you know how bitterly he has been condemned for his conduct at West Point,” James reminded his commanding officer. “Permit me, I beg you, to do what I can to redeem the same.”15 Appointed a lieutenant-general, James was later knighted by King William IV.
The Arnold’s third son, George, joined the 2nd Bengal Cavalry and held the rank of lieutenant-colonel at the time of his early death in November 1818.
Their fourth son, William Fitch, became a captain in the 19th Royal Lancers and later retired as a justice of the peace to a country seat in Buckinghamshire. He left six children.
During the last years of Peggy’s life, her sons Edward and James had volunteered their royal pensions (as well as allowances from Judge Shippen) to help their younger siblings complete their educations. So apparently had the Arnold’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Sophia. After Judge Shippen’s death, Edward wrote the family asking that Sophia be recompensed. “What must now devolve to her . . . should . . . not only compensate for the loss of her allowance from my grand-father, but add also so considerably to her income.”16 By 1813, the pretty, cultured, and religious eighteen-year-old Sophia had married Captain Pownall Phipps of the aristocratic Mulgrave family at Muttra. Frail from childhood, Sophia died fifteen years later.
After Peggy’s death, her children informed their Canadian stepbrothers about family events. Among those letters was one of October 25, 1813, announcing Sophia’s marriage; another, sent a year later, reported Edward’s death and explained that his will left Richard and Henry £1,500 in “affectionate recollection of you both.”17 On July 30, 1823, during the last years of her life, Sophia wrote to her Uncle Burd that her brother William had just purchased an estate in Buckinghamshire, adding, “We are to pay them a visit, when we leave Bath.”18
Another link between the two sets of children were the Canadian lands awarded by the Crown for Arnold’s service to Guadeloupe. Frustrations over their remoteness later led the fifty-six-year-old James Arnold to write his sixty-eight-year-old stepbrother Richard in 1837 that he wished they could “dispose of it to tolerable advantage.” Though land prices might rise in the future, he said, “we may not be here to enjoy the benefit of it.”19
Equally frustrating to the heirs were their efforts to salvage Arnold’s reputation. To this day, his name is essentially synonymous with “traitor.” Nor is the former Revolutionary War general’s name connected with any of the battlefields preserved by America’s National Park Service.
Only one oblique reference to Arnold’s courage at the Battle of Saratoga exists: the Boot Monument, placed at Saratoga National Historic Park in 1887 by a major general of the New York militia. Behind the statue of a left boot of a Revolutionary War officer an inscription reads, “In memory of the ‘most brilliant soldier’ of the Continental army who was desperately wounded on this spot the sally port of Borgoynes [sic] Great Western Redoubt, 7th October, 1777 winning for his countrymen the decisive battle of the American Revolution and for himself the rank of Major General.”
By the end of nineteenth century, Arnold’s descendants could not find the tombs of Peggy and Benedict. An 1828 letter from Colonel Pownall Phipps indicated that his wife, Sophia Arnold Phipps, and her parents had been “deposited in a vault” within St. Mary’s Church at Battersea, but by 1875, the crypt contained 424 coffins.20 As they decayed, some of the coffins burst open, impelling the church to bury them beneath a foot of concrete.
St. Mary’s had retained a plan of the coffin rows, but many of their identification plates, or plaques, had faded over time. After 1920, church officials presented some of them to the Battersea Central Public Library. Others were placed upon the church crypt’s walls and columns. Yet those of Peggy Arnold, Benedict Arnold, and Sophia Arnold Phipps were missing.
Coffin records at the Battersea Central Public Library under the names “Arnold” and “Phipps” revealed an astonishing lapse. The coffins of Peggy and Sophia had been listed but not the one of Benedict Arnold. Instead, a “Frederick Arnold” had been listed with the death date of June 14, 1801, a mistake or misreading of the former general’s name on his coffin plate, or, perhaps, a deliberate omission.
In 1976, St. Mary’s added four new stained-glass windows to the ground floor of the church. One, donated by Arnold admirer and apologist Vincent Lindner of New Jersey in honor of Benedict and Peggy Arnold and their daughter, Sophia, hangs in the nave’s westernmost south window. At its center stands a portrait of Arnold, beneath which are a display of the arms of General Washington. Four flags flank the portrait. On the left are two, the first representing the Union flag of 1777, replaced with thirteen stars, and the second, a contemporary American flag. To the right is the Union flag of 1776 with the British emblem and modern Union Jack. An inscription reconciles Arnold’s former political loyalties with the contemporary British-American friendship.
It reads: “Beneath this church lie buried the bodies of Benedict Arnold, sometimes general in the army of George Washington And of his faithful and beloved wife Margaret Arnold of Pennsylvania And of their Beloved daughter Sophia Matilda Phipps. The two nations whom he served / In turn in the years of their enmity / Have united in enduring Friendship.”
In 2004 another Arnold admirer, William Stanley of Connecticut, donated a memorial plaque of Peggy and Benedict Arnold to St. Mary’s to replace an earlier one. Upon it their names, as well as their birth and death dates, are listed. Placed in the church basement, the plaque remains visible to anyone entering the door of the church’s day-care center.
To most Americans, Peggy remains an enigmatic and nearly forgotten figure. Early historians depicted the former Philadelphia belle as a Loyalist whose fondness for British officer John André led her to corrupt Arnold’s political views. By the early twentieth century, members of her family attempted to correct that view. Between 1900 and 1902 Shippen descendant Lewis Burd Walker published a series of articles in the influential Pennsylvania Magazine of Biography and History, citing family letters and Peggy’s postwar correspondence to defend her innocence.
Several writers portrayed Peggy as either an innocent victimized by Arnold’s duplicity or as a wily conniver. In 1941, subsequent to collector William L. Clement’s gift of General Henry Clinton’s wartime papers to the University of Michigan, Mark Van Doren published The Secret History of the American Revolution, which exposed Peggy’s royal pension of £500 a year “for her services, which were very meritorious.” Thereafter historians widely agreed that Peggy had been an accomplice in Arnold’s treason.21 Later novels and films depicted Peggy as a sexual siren, Arnold’s coconspirator, and even as the prime instigator of his treason. Among the most recent such portraits was the 2003 A&E drama Benedict Arnold: A Man of Honor, starring Aidan Quinn as Arnold and Flora Montgomery as a seditious Peggy.
As described in the pages above, Arnold had repeatedly voiced his discontent with the leaders of the American Revolution well before his marriage to Peggy Shippen. That the eighteen-year old bride would naturally sympathize with her husband’s complaints is obvious to anyone who has been in love.
Less predictable was the fascination with which we still regard the former Philadelphia belle today.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE CHALLENGE O
F TRACING the elusive lives of Peggy Shippen Arnold and Lucy Flucker Knox could never have been achieved without help and interest from historical experts, scholars, librarians, editors, and colleagues. To all of them I express my deepest appreciation. Peter Drummey, the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Stephen T. Riley Librarian, suggested several little-known resources at that institution one wintery Saturday morning, including a silhouette of Lucy Flucker Knox, the only known representation of her, as well as the ring Benedict Arnold presented to his Boston sweetheart, Betsy DeBlois. As I continued my research, he provided other suggestions, including information about a Massachusetts militia. Numerous other staff members at the society became indispensable to my research, from head of research services Elaine Grublin to reference librarian Tracy Potter and Anna Cook, who gave permission to reprint Catherine Knox Snow’s August 16, 1822, letter to her friend.
The daunting task of reading through over eight thousand letters in the Henry Knox collections was ameliorated by the discovery that the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History had digitized nearly all of General and Mrs. Knox’s correspondence. Special thanks are due to Sandra Trenholm, director of that institute, who tracked down some of the collection’s more obscure letters, suggested other sources, and expressed interest in the evolution of this work. With my appreciation also to Alyson Barrett-Ryan, former reference librarian at the Gilder Lehrman Institute, for help accessing the Henry Knox Papers on that site.
Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married Page 23
