Defiant Brides

by Nancy Rubin Stuart

  10

  “My Regret at This Cruel, Dreadful Separation”

  PROBLEMS AS CHILLING AS the snowdrifts around the Dorchester farmhouse preoccupied the Knoxes during the winter of 1784. The first were the couple’s precarious finances; the second, their stalled reconciliation with the Fluckers. Both, the couple realized, could be resolved if Henry could settle the late Thomas Flucker’s estate and inheritances of the Waldo Patent.

  By April 10, Henry had proposed those ideas to Lucy’s brother, Captain Thomas Flucker, adding that he hoped to “secure as much as possible” for the family.1 Thomas had responded warmly but warned that both estates were fraught with legal complexities. Under the Confiscation Act of 1778, Massachusetts had seized his late father’s estate, but some of those assets still belonged to his mother, Hannah. Moreover, the Waldo Patent had other claimants, including the Fluckers’ cousins, the Winslows.

  Gamely, Henry agreed to tackle both estates. To his fifty-eight-year-old mother-in-law, Hannah, he wrote on August 3, “You may rest fully assured that nothing shall be left undone on my part.”2 In a second letter Henry asked his brother-in-law, Thomas, to convey any new information he had on the Waldo estate.

  Unmentioned was Henry’s personal knowledge of the Maine properties, for that summer he traveled through part of the Waldo Patent’s 576,000 acres. The tour had been deliberate, a consequence of his cronyism with friends at the state legislature who had appointed him a commissioner to settle land disputes with the Penobscots of Maine. By autumn, Thomas Flucker had expressed his family’s approval of Henry’s offer, assuring him that “your ideas respecting what should be done with my mother’s property will have the greatest weight.”3 A week later, Lucy’s mother, Hannah, also wrote, thanking Knox for his efforts to “secure as much as possible of my late husband’s estate for the benefit of my family.” After describing the debts surrounding that estate, she added a sentence that must have brought Lucy to tears: “I hope for the pleasure of hearing from you soon that you, my dear daughter & children are well and happy.” Still further down was another, even more poignant line. “I intend writing my daughter soon . . . she will excuse me now, as I have been lately very ill with the bilious cholic”—a vague medical term related to pains and swelling in the abdomen.4

  That November, Lucy gave birth to a daughter, Julia, named after the infant who had died at the Pluckemin Artillery Cantonment. By December 8, the Knoxes had also moved to a newly rented home on Boston’s then-rural Beacon Hill. The “mansion” or “farm,” as its owner, portrait painter John Singleton Copley, called it, was a sprawling, hip-roofed farmhouse overlooking Boston Common and bordered by a dirt path called Beacon Street, two acres west of Governor Hancock’s granite mansion. Behind the farmhouse stood a terraced garden, a fruit orchard, and pastures extending beyond contemporary Charles Street to the tidal flats of Charles River Bay.

  Soon after the Knoxes’ move, a letter arrived from Lafayette explaining that Henry’s brother, William, had suffered a mental collapse in Europe. “It grieves me to think I am going to wound your good heart,” the Frenchman wrote, “yet find it my duty as a friend rather to give you a pain . . . [or] leave you in the cruelest anxiety.” During his emotional crisis, William had crossed the channel to England to live with his friend, London merchant James Webber. Somewhat later, Lafayette received a letter from a Dr. Bancroft reporting that Knox’s brother had improved enough to soon “be able to go out.” To speed his recovery, the Marquis offered to pay Dr. Bancroft “to see that Billy is well attended with physicians.”5

  Another, happier life-changing event for Knox followed when on March 8, 1785, Congress appointed him secretary at war, forerunner of the later and more familiar title, secretary of war. Having longed for that post, Henry proudly wrote Washington on March 24, “I have accepted the appointment and shall expect to be in New York about the 15th of next month.”6 Still, the new position presented challenges, the most immediate being its modest annual salary of $2,450 a year. From earlier financial reversals, Knox knew he had no flair for business. “From the habits imbibed during the war, and from the opinion of my friends that I should make but an indifferent trader, I thought it was well to accept it, although the salary would be but a slender support,” he ruefully admitted to Washington in his March letter.7

  Underscoring Knox’s “indifference” as a trader was the arrival in Boston that April of the British vessel Hero. Its cargo included trunkloads of books William had purchased to restore his brother’s Boston bookstore. The ship had arrived at an unfortunate moment, just after a merchants’ meeting at Faneuil Hall to boycott British goods. Lucy, who was still in Boston, was consequently saddled with crate loads of unsalable books—and Henry with more unpaid bills. The Hero had brought still more bad news—a letter from the Fluckers announcing that Lucy’s brother, Thomas, had died.

  Heightening those tensions was Knox’s letter from New York, announcing he had leased a new home in a rural section of the city. The confluence of bad news was too much for Lucy. On May 4, she wrote her husband that his rental “of a house out of town . . . almost makes me shudder.” She had, after all, been raised in Boston and had only recently begun to enjoy urban life again, meeting with old friends, playing cards and chess, and even hiring a French milliner. Could not Congress find their new secretary at war a more convenient home in the center of the city? Then, apparently realizing her shrill tone, Lucy caught herself. Self-piteously, she closed by explaining that she would soon retire to her “lonely bed.” Life, she wrote, “is such a blank without you. . . . Witness my tears upon this paper.”8

  Henry replied in anger, prompting Lucy’s subsequent apology for having “given him pain.” To placate her usually patient husband, she stiffly replied, “I am pleased with the house you have taken as a summer residence. Perhaps I may like it in the winter. At any rate I will not find fault with it.” Then, more tenderly: “Believe me my love, to be with you and to see you happy, constitutes the sum total of my earthly felicity.”9 Gradually, the twenty-nine-year-old Lucy was evolving from a self-involved drama queen into a more sensitive adult.

  That summer Lucy dutifully moved with Henry and their children into the former Bowery home of celebrated English beauty Lady Anne Poellnitz. As she suspected, the “Bouwerie,” as the Dutch once called it, was a country road surrounded by grain fields, gardens, and wildflowers. A retreat for well-heeled New Yorkers in the summer, the Bowery was far less populated in the winters. Intensifying Lucy’s sense of isolation on the Bowery that winter was a letter from the Fluckers in January 1786 announcing the death of her mother the previous December. More than a decade had passed since Lucy had seen or even heard directly from her mother. Now it was too late for the hoped-for reconciliation.

  Though Henry felt for his wife, Hannah Flucker’s death meant Lucy would inherit one-fifth of the Waldo Patent; the rest would be divided with her sister, Hannah Flucker Urquart, and the sons of her late brother, Thomas. In 1786, acting as the American overseer of the Fluckers’ properties, Henry consequently obtained a quit-claim title on the Waldo properties. Afterwards, he and Lucy began dreaming of the day they would establish a grand home on their share of the Maine lands.

  After that year in the Bowery, Knox finally moved the family to a house on Broadway in lower Manhattan. There, in late September 1786, Lucy delivered a baby girl named Caroline. Anxiously, as usual, Henry announced the birth to his Boston friend Henry Jackson, who predicted “the child will do well, although appearances may at present be against it.”10

  Simultaneously, appearances also mitigated against a resolution of a civil uprising in western Massachusetts that seemed a mockery of the democratic ideals of the Revolution. Organized by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, and thus called Shays’s Rebellion, the protest had attracted poor farmers and former soldiers who owed funds to the debt-heavy Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Residents were required to pay their taxes and debts in specie—gold and silver coins difficult to obtain i
n rural western Massachusetts. When residents failed to do so, the commonwealth had seized their homes and farms, placed the men in debtor prisons, and left their families homeless. By September 28, Knox’s friend Henry Jackson reported that seven thousand armed rebels had appeared in Springfield near the national arsenal intending to close down the state supreme court. “What will be the result of this, time must determine,” Jackson observed.11

  Immediately Knox rushed from New York to Massachusetts, assigned men to protect the Springfield arsenal, and collaborated with Governor James Bowdoin to crush the rebellion. In October Knox wrote Washington that the turmoil emanated from America’s awkward “political machine, composed of thirteen independent sovereignties . . . perpetually operating against each other and against the federal head ever since the peace.” High taxes and the demand for payment in specie were only its superficial spark; at its core, Shays’s Rebellion was a power struggle between the haves and have-nots. The latter, Knox wrote, “see the weakness of government; they feel at once their own poverty compared with the opulent.” Their protests are a “formidable rebellion against reason, the principle of all government and against the very name of liberty.” To remedy it, Knox suggested, “Our government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives and property, even though the early leaders of the nation believed they could govern by benign consent.” Instead, he went on, “we find that we are men—actual men, possessing all the turbulent passions belonging to that animal, and that we must have a government proper and adequate for him.”12

  Ironically, those same turbulent passions had also prompted Benedict Arnold to commit treason. A mere three weeks before Shays’s Rebellion, the New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine reported that the American traitor had “paid a visit, in company with an English officer, to the eastern flank of this Commonwealth, and in a very friendly manner waited on Col. Allan at Dudley-Island [Maine].” Nevertheless, Arnold had “tarried only a few hours, judging it more expedient to sojourn in Nova-Scotia, than in a country ever inimical to parricides [traitors].”13

  As Peggy had implied in her March 1786 letter to Judge Shippen, Arnold’s silence from the North American British colonies meant trouble. Towards the end of that voyage, the former American general had suffered another attack of gout, becoming so ill in Halifax that he hired a pilot and captain to complete his journey across the Bay of Fundy to the seaport city of Saint John, New Brunswick. But crossing the tidal flats of the harbor on December 2, 1785, the Lord Middlebrook ran aground. For days afterwards, as the vessel sat listing on the St. John River, scavengers stole “considerable quantities of flour, beef, butter and pork,” reported the Saint John Gazette, dashing all hopes of profits from sale of those goods.14

  Nevertheless, other profits were waiting to be made from the thousands of Loyalists who had arrived in Saint John between 1783 and 1785, swelling its population to twelve thousand. To capitalize upon rising land values, Arnold had snatched up hundreds of acres of forest, waterfront property, and town lots. In addition he had purchased a wharf, a warehouse, a general store, a lumberyard, and a residence in Saint John, thus enhancing his rise as one of its most prominent citizens. Filled with ambition, Arnold finally wrote Peggy that he intended to postpone his return to England and would do so only after establishing trade contacts in the West Indies.

  On Thursday, June 1, Saint John residents gazed at Arnold’s launch of the 300-ton white-oak Lord Sheffield. “The General’s laudable efforts to promote the interests on this infant colony, had been very productive of its commercial advantage and as such desire the praise of every well-wisher to its prosperity,” gushed the Royal Gazette.15

  In anticipation of his long months at sea, Arnold needed trusty assistants in Saint John. His three sons from his first marriage—Benedict Jr., Richard, and Henry—were nearly grown, prompting Arnold’s invitation for them to leave Connecticut, where they had returned after his defection, to settle with their aunt Hannah, Arnold’s sister, in New Brunswick. The oldest, eighteen-year-old Benedict Jr. joined his father and Connecticut Loyalist Munson Hayt in an enterprise called Arnold, Hayt, and Arnold. By August, young Benedict was managing the general store as his father sailed first to the West Indies and then to London. The family, Arnold announced to his lonely wife, Peggy, must emigrate to Canada the following spring.

  Whatever doubts she had about still another relocation were silenced by a new pregnancy. Another incentive for agreement was Arnold’s promise that once the family was established in Saint John, Peggy could visit the Shippens in Philadelphia. By June 1787, Peggy, Arnold, their children, and their American Loyalists friends the Jonathan Sewalls, sailed aboard the general’s newest ship, the Peggy, to Saint John.

  Connubial duty, loyalties, desperation, or perhaps a blend of all three steeled Peggy, then in the last weeks of pregnancy, to the Atlantic crossing. Six weeks after their arrival in Saint John, on September 5, 1787, she delivered a son, George, named for England’s reigning monarch.

  The Arnolds’ clapboard home on the corner of King and Cross (now Canterbury) streets was less stately than their London townhouse but, by Saint John standards, still impressive. Two and a half stories high with a gambrel roof, it symbolized Arnold’s status as a town father. Within it stood the family’s London furnishings, blue-damask sofas, matching curtains, mahogany chairs, cabinets and chests, Wedgwood dishes, giltware, and a globe. Initially, as it had in England, life went well. Surrounded by Loyalist refugees from America and England, Peggy hosted dinners, attended galas, and enjoyed riding horses into the countryside with her friend Elizabeth Hazen Chipman.

  Nevertheless, Saint John had evolved from its boom days of Arnold’s first arrival. During his absence, the North American British colonies, like those of the United States, had slipped into recession, leaving local residents with little cash or ability to pay their debts. Renters failed to meet their payments; suppliers howled for cash for the goods Arnold bought on credit. Shortfalls appeared in his ledger books. Tenaciously, the former general pressed for payment and, when that failed, initiated lawsuits—some nineteen by spring 1791—against his debtors. Added to that crisis were debts of £2,555 that had been accrued by Arnold’s partner, Hayt, straining the partnership nearly to the breaking point. In search of new profits, Arnold reverted to the seas, shuttling between the British North American colonies and the West Indies.

  As she had been in London, Peggy was again alone, left to raise her growing brood of youngsters with her sister-in-law, Hannah. Out of necessity, the nearly thirty-year-old mother of four became increasingly independent. But in contrast to her patriotic shadow, Lucy Flucker Knox, Peggy continued to endure separations from her husband without complaint.

  Nor would financial shortfalls deter Peggy from a planned trip to Philadelphia to visit her family. “I am much gratified by your earnest solicitation for me to pay you a visit, and hope to accomplish so desirable an event in the fall,” she wrote her sister Betsy (Elizabeth) in early 1789. “Independent of the happiness it will afford me, I feel it a duty to . . . comply with the wishes of parents for whom I feel the highest respect and tenderest affection.”16

  Within her letter Peggy confessed she and Arnold were so disappointed in Saint John that they planned to return to England. “When I leave you, I shall probably bid you adieu forever. While his Majesty’s bounty is continued to me,” she explained, “it is necessary I should reside in his dominions.”17 Discreetly, Peggy avoided describing the details of those disappointments. Among the most harrowing had been the night of July 11, 1788, when Arnold’s warehouse went up in flames. His youngest son, Henry, and his brother, Richard, both of whom slept in the office as guards, had been badly burned and both had barely escaped with their lives. In the wake of those fires, Arnold assured Peggy, he would recoup his losses through his insurance policies with the Sun Assurance Company. Then his now-estranged partner, Hayt, accused Arnold of perpetuating a fraud. The former general, he insisted, set those fires himself t
o collect the £5,000 value from an over-inflated insurance policy. The two men argued bitterly until finally, as the Saint John Gazette announced, “the co-partnership of Arnold, Hayt being dissolved by mutual consent, all persons being indebted to said firm are requested to settle accounts with Munson Hayt.”18 After accusing Hayt of slander, Arnold hired his attorney friends Ward Chipman (then New Brunswick’s attorney general and solicitor general) and Jonathan Bliss to represent him. “It is not in my power to blacken your character, for it is as black as it can be,” Hayt publicly announced.19 Predictably the accusation disquieted the Sun Assurance Company, whose agents insisted that Arnold’s policy would not be paid off until the origin of the fire was resolved.

  In August 1789, as the controversy simmered, Peggy prepared to sail to Philadelphia. “I feel great regret at the idea of leaving the General alone . . . but as he strongly argues a measure that will be productive of so much happiness to me, I think there can be no impropriety in taking the step,” she wrote Elizabeth in apparent guilt. Intensifying Peggy’s decision to return home was news that her mother had suffered a stroke. Though hoping to avoid putting “Mamma to the least additional trouble on my account,” she added that she could not “conveniently go without one maid and a child.”20 On December 3, 1789, Peggy, little George, and an African American slave finally arrived in Philadelphia.

  Once there, family members rushed to meet her. Within a few days, Peggy was immersed in a whirl of teas, dinners, and receptions. To her sister Betsy, Peggy gossiped as if she were still a frivolous belle, “The little anecdotes of my friends and acquaintances afford me great amusement, and I feel interested in all their little love scenes. I am convinced that Mrs. A. will never think seriously of Mr. Marsden, though she may carry on a little flirtation with him.”21 Behind Peggy’s back, though, some Philadelphians regarded her with contempt. One account revealed that the twenty-nine-year-old matron was treated with “so much coldness and neglect that her feelings were continually wounded.”22 Another observed, “The common opinion was, that, as her presence placed her friends in a painful position, she would have shown more feeling by staying away.”23