Defiant Brides

by Nancy Rubin Stuart

  By April 16, 1790, Peggy had returned to Saint John. “How difficult is it to know what will contribute to our happiness in this life,” she wrote Betsy the following August. “I had hoped that by paying my beloved friends a last visit, I should insure to myself some portion of it, but I find it far otherwise. The affectionate attention of my friends has greatly increased my love for them, and of course, my regret at this cruel, dreadful separation.”24

  Most wrenching of all was Peggy’s departure from the Burds. “I shall never forget, my dear, my beloved Sister, your tender and affectionate behavior to me, and that of my . . . brother[-in-law], Mr. Burd, who has endeared himself extremely to me.” The time she spent with their children, Peggy added, evoked “an affection almost parental.”25 Especially touching to her was her niece, a little girl the Burds had named Peggy. Poignantly, the former Philadelphian must have compared her sister’s family’s harmonious lives to the troubled one she led in Saint John as Arnold’s wife.

  On May 11, 1790, just after Peggy’s return to Saint John, Hayt called Arnold a “scoundrel,” publicly announcing, “You burnt your own store, and I will prove it.”26 To clear his name and obtain justice, Arnold postponed the family’s return to England. Peggy’s spirits drooped. “There has been a succession of disappointments and mortifications in collecting our debts ever since my return home—but I will not begin to relate grievances,” she confessed to Betsy, “but endeavor to shake off that gloom that has taken possession of me.”27

  It would not be for another eighteen months, on September 7, 1791, that the case, described by Arnold’s defense attorney Ward Chipman as “one of the most hellish plots that ever was laid for the destruction of a man,” was tried in the Supreme Court at Fredericton.28 Two days later, the justices who presided over the case, Joshua Upham and Isaac Allen, found Hayt guilty of willful slander. They also ascertained a value on Arnold’s claim for damages to his reputation. But instead of the £5,000 he had anticipated, the justices awarded Arnold a contemptuous twenty shillings. Gleeful announcements appeared in the newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Ultimately, the Sun Assurance Company paid Arnold the full £5,000, but Hayt’s accusations, the traitor’s past, and his debtors’ resentments sank Arnold’s reputation in Saint John. One night, soon after the trial, late-nineteenth-century historians claimed that a mob appeared before Arnold’s King Street home. According to that undocumented tale, the men smashed windows and doors, then paraded through the house with an effigy tagged with the word “traitor” as a terrified Peggy and her children watched. A street riot followed, becoming so violent that soldiers supposedly appeared from nearby Fort Howe.29

  Whether true or apocryphal, in December 1791 Arnold and his family returned to Great Britain, leaving Hannah and his three oldest sons to manage his remaining enterprises in the British North American colonies. From London, on February 26, 1792, Arnold wrote Jonathan Bliss, “I cannot help viewing your great city as a shipwreck from which I have escaped.”30

  In truth, the recession had contributed to that shipwreck, but Arnold had piloted the ship and ultimately run it aground. A decade after her marriage, Peggy realized that her friends were her only anchor, her compass on the tumultuous seas of her husband’s oceanic ambitions.

  In late January 1787, Knox’s friend Benjamin Lincoln and a militia funded by Boston’s wealthy businessman crushed Shays’s Rebellion in Springfield. “The storm in Massachusetts is over,” a relieved Knox wrote Washington.31 Yet, as Knox confided to Boston shipmaster Stephen Higginson, “some measures will be necessary to prevent a repetition” for “the poor, poor federal government is sick almost to death.”32 Ultimately, those same concerns would lead to the creation of the Constitutional Convention, whose delegates would meet behind closed doors from May through September in Carpenter Hall in steamy Philadelphia. Subsequent to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, in June 1788, the document became a model of government for other nations.

  Contrary to Knox’s support for the democratic ideals embodied in the Constitution, he and Lucy aspired to an aristocratic lifestyle. Disdaining his modest salary, he and Lucy routinely lived beyond their means, entertaining grandly in spite of mounting debts, sustained perhaps by the promise of Lucy’s Maine inheritance. Deprived of luxuries since her marriage, Lucy now felt them her due, both in compensation for the homeless years of the Revolution and her role as wife of America’s first secretary at war. To Henry, high living was “proof” that he had, at last, overcome his humble beginnings and the Fluckers’ initial scorn. Everyone knew them: Henry, the Revolution’s affable artillery genius; Lucy, the widely acknowledged social authority, the Emily Post of her day.

  Within another generation the Knoxes would become iconic figures of the Revolution. “Mrs. Knox,” as Rufus Griswold wrote in his 1855 The Republican Court, or, American Society in the Days of Washington, “had been one of the heroines of the Revolution, nearly as well known in the camps as her husband . . . both were favorites, he for really brilliant conversation and unfailing good humor and she as a lively and meddlesome but amiable leader of society.”33

  According to Griswold’s account, Lucy’s elite background often intimidated others into believing that without her cooperation “nothing could be properly done in the drawing room or the ball-room, or any place indeed where fashionable men and women sought enjoyment.” As a result, he added, “The house of the Secretary . . . in Broadway . . . was the scene of a liberal and genial hospitality.”34

  A description by army chaplain Manasseh Cutler, who attended one of the Knoxes’ dinners, confirmed their lavish entertainments. “Dined with General Knox, introduced to his lady and a French nobleman . . . Several other gentlemen dined with us. Our dinner was served in high style, much in the French taste,” read his diary entry of Saturday, July 7, 1786. “Mrs. Knox is very gross [fat] but her manners are easy and agreeable.”35

  Disapproving of the feminine fashions of the day, Cutler noted that Lucy “is sociable, and would be agreeable, were it not for her affected singularity in dressing her hair. She seems to mimic the military style, which to me is very disgusting in a female. Her hair in front is craped at least a foot high, much the form of a church bottom upward, and topped off with a wire skeleton in the same form, covered with black gauze, which hands in streamers down to her back. Her hair behind is a large braid, and confined with a monstrous crooked comb.”36

  Two weeks later Henry and Lucy hosted a second dinner for forty-five veteran officers. So opulent were the food and drink and so brilliant the conversation that one visitor recalled, “General Knox gave us an entertainment in the style of a prince.”37

  But fine food and wines, high fashion and friends would not forestall the tragedies that relentlessly beset the Knoxes. That August, their eleven-month-old daughter, Caroline, died from an infection. That was only partly mitigated by Lucy’s November 27 delivery of a “fine black-haired, black-eyed boy,” whom the Knoxes named George Washington Knox out of “respect and affection” for the former commander in chief.38

  The combination of repeated pregnancies, nursing, and fine food had swelled Lucy to gargantuan proportions. She and Knox, Griswold later wrote, “were, perhaps, the largest couple in the city.”39 While visiting New York in 1788, “Nabby,” Abigail Adams Smith, also mentioned Lucy’s size. “General and Mrs. Knox have been very polite and attentive to us,” John Adams’s daughter wrote, but she was stupefied by Lucy’s girth.40

  “Mrs. Knox is much altered from the character [appearance] she used to have. She is neat in her dress, attentive to her family and very fond of her children. But her size is enormous: I am frightened when I look at her.; I verily believe that her waist is as large as three of yours at least.”41 One of Knox’s business partners, William Duer, was far less kind. Lucy, he carped, “was eccentric in character and concentric in figure.”42

  Obesity also plagued thirty-seven-year-old Henry, whose doctors, noting his leg and foot problems, had ordered
him to diet. That may have accounted for Nabby’s second comment, “The general is not half so fat as he was.”43

  To celebrate Washington’s inauguration, on April 30, 1791, as the first president of the United States, lower Manhattan was illuminated that evening by a sky booming with fireworks. Lucy and Henry, appointed America’s first secretary of war, hosted a dinner in Washington’s honor. The following Thursday, May 7, guests gathered in the Assembly Rooms on the east side of Broadway for the nation’s first inaugural ball. Sixty-five years later Griswold based his account of that event upon a report that, according to Thomas Jefferson, illustrated “the frenzy which prevailed in New York on the opening of the new government.”44

  That night Washington was seated in the Assembly Rooms upon a sofa placed on a rise before whom guests were expected to bow before and after each dance. According to Jefferson’s tale, retold in Griswold’s Republican Court, “Mrs. Knox contrived to come with the President, and to follow him and Mrs. Washington to their destination, and she had the design of forcing from the President an invitation to a seat on the sofa. She mounted up the stairs after them, unbidden, but unfortunately the wicked sofa was too short, that, when the President and Mrs. Washington were seated, there was not room for a third person. . . . She was obliged, therefore, to descend, in the face of the company, and to sit where she could.”45

  That story and its subsequent reprinting, Griswold noted in his book, are “all utterly untrue.”46 Indeed Martha Washington had neither attended her husband’s inauguration nor had yet arrived in New York. Nevertheless, Griswold’s account of that malicious tale in The Republican Court reflected Jefferson’s—and perhaps others’—resentments of the self-important Lucy.

  On June 28, six weeks after the inauguration, the Knoxes’ infant son, George Washington Knox, contracted dysentery. Hoping salt air and sunshine would hasten his recovery, Lucy and Henry took the baby on daily boat excursions to Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Inevitably Henry was summoned back to the Department of War to settle land disputes in Georgia with the Creeks. Speaking before the Senate on Saturday, August 22, Knox reiterated his position towards the Native Americans: “Indian tribes possess the right of . . . all lands within their limits respectively . . . in consequence of fair and bona fide purchases, made under the authority, or with the express approbation of the United States.”47

  A few streets away in the nursery of the Knox’s Broadway home, Lucy hovered over her listless infant, vainly attempting to restore him to health. In spite of her efforts, little George Washington Knox died.

  Still Lucy and Henry hoped to bestow a personal honor upon America’s first president. That opportunity arrived on February 7, 1790, with Lucy’s delivery of another son whom she and Henry again named George Washington. This time, surely, the child would survive.

  PART III

  Shadow Sisters

  11

  “Illusive Bubbles”

  DETERMINATION, THE BENIGN COUSIN of defiance, drove Lucy to continue enlarging her family to compensate for her lost children. Sixteen months after birthing the second George Washington Knox, Lucy delivered a daughter, again named Caroline. “Please to inform Lady Kitty that Mrs. Knox on the 8th instant presented me with . . . another child . . . her tenth,” Henry wrote New York speculator William Duer in July 1791. “This little stranger is a daughter, and the most lovely we have been blessed with.”1

  By then, Henry and Lucy had relocated to the nation’s temporary capital, Philadelphia, and lived two miles from its center at Bush Hill. Designed by Andrew Hamilton, the architect of Independence Hall, the sleek mansion’s former resident was John Adams who was renting it to Knox. One advantage of the house was its distance from the oppressive heat that smothered Philadelphians in summer. “While the inhabitants of this city are gasping for breath like a hunted hare, we experience in the hall at Bush Hill a delightful . . . breeze,” Knox gratefully wrote Adams.2 By autumn though, he, Lucy, and their growing brood moved into a more convenient location near the War Office at Chestnut and Fifth.

  Philadelphia had already regained its pre-Revolutionary elegance, its burnt buildings had been replaced by brick townhouses and shops, its streets were now paved with pebbles and shaded with trees. The city’s cultural life had also rebounded. “Great alterations have taken place since I was last here. It is all gayety and from what I can observe, every lady and gentleman endeavors to outdo the other in splendor and show,” wrote one officer. “You cannot conceive anything more elegant than the present taste.”3 To Abigail Adams, who had visited the French and English courts, Philadelphia society was friendly and agreeable, “its dancing assemblies very good, and the company of the best kind.”4

  Among the city’s legendary hosts was Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who invited fellow cabinet member Knox to dine soon after Caroline’s birth. “I have received your friendly note of this morning for which I sincerely thank you,” Henry replied. “I shall frequently avail myself of your kindness, and I should have done so this day . . . had I not previously engaged to Mrs. Knox that I would dine with her being the first time since [the delivery] of her daughter.”5

  As secretary of war, Knox’s hours were long. No sooner had he quelled Southern hostilities between Native Americans and white settlers than skirmishes broke out in the northwest corner of what is today Ohio. Reluctantly, Henry dispatched troops to the borders of the Ohio Territory, insisting as he had in the south that the United States supported a policy of “humanity and justice” to produce a “noble, illiberal and disinterested administration of Indian affairs.”6

  Simultaneously, Knox attempted to obtain the two-fifths shares of the Waldo Patent, once owned by the expatriated Fluckers. As his late brother-in-law, Captain Thomas Flucker, had warned, the patent was mired in legalities, some of it claimed by members of the Fluckers’ extended family, others by squatters. To untangle those claims, Henry again traveled to New York, where the old claims were apparently filed. Coincidentally, on July 15, Lucy’s widowed sister-in-law, Sarah Lyons Flucker, arrived in New York from her native home, the British colony of Antigua, to visit relatives and claim her sons’ share of the patent. Impressed with the young widow’s pluck, Henry wrote Lucy, “You will be charmed with and proud of her.”7 Years later the Knoxes’ eldest daughter, young Lucy, described Sarah as plain looking but evinced a “peculiar fascination in her manners, which attracted all with whom she came in contact.”8

  Just before Lucy was to meet Sarah, Lucy’s seventeen-month-old son, George Washington, became “violently ill,” forcing Lucy to postpone the sisters-in-law’s rendezvous. After the child’s recovery, the two women at last met and became fond friends. Quite unexpectedly, later that summer, tragedy struck. First came a letter from the headmaster of the Princeton, New Jersey, school that Marcus Camillus II, the Knoxes’ eight-year old son, attended. The boy had tumbled down a flight of stairs and badly injured his cheek, the headmaster announced. A second letter followed with news that the boy had died the next day, having apparently suffered a fatal concussion.

  Shock and disbelief swept over the Knoxes. The loss of young children was common enough in eighteenth century America; about 15 percent never reached maturity. But Marcus, the Knoxes’ most promising son, was the fifth of their ten children to die. Privately, Lucy and Henry questioned why they were the victims of so many tragedies.

  From Mount Vernon, Washington conveyed his and Martha’s sympathies. “I have heard of the death of your promising son with great concern and sincerely condole you and Mrs. Knox on this melancholy occasion.” In reply, the president wrote that he hoped the “consolations of religion or philosophy” would heal them in time.9 Heartbroken, Knox admitted that “neither philosophy nor reason have their proper office.”10 Five months later, he wrote a friend that Lucy was still “inconsolable.”11 A portrait of Marcus, a handsome lad seated at his writing desk, remained on the walls of the Knoxes’ homes for decades.

  By January 1792 Lucy, pregnant for the eleventh ti
me, was again able to attend the plays, balls, and dinners of Philadelphia with members of prominent families, including the Binghams, Morrises, Chews, and Ingersolls. Nearby, too, lived her old friends Martha and George Washington in the Masters-Penn House, which Washington had recently had remodeled.

  The results were so stunning that, after attending Martha Washington’s first “levee,” or public reception, New Yorker Sally McKean gushed to a friend, “You could never have such a drawing-room; it was brilliant beyond anything you can imagine; and though there was a great deal of extravagance, there was so much of Philadelphia taste in everything that [it] must be confessed the most delightful occasion . . . ever known in this country.”12

  As the prominent wife of America’s first secretary of war, Lucy also hosted levees, offering her guests tea, coffee, and lemonade, as well an opportunity to play cards or chess. Two years earlier, when still in New York City, Abigail Adams had scoffed at Lucy’s concept of entertaining. Though other prominent women opened their homes for levees, Abigail wrote her oldest sister, Mary Cranch, “one only . . . introduces cards and she is frequently put to difficulty to make up a table at whist.”13

  That unnamed hostess was undoubtedly Lucy. History has not revealed why she was so passionate about games. Cards had long been accepted as a social amusement in New York, as Becky Franks once complained, but Lucy’s zeal transcended that. Apparently she enjoyed the competition or found it a way to wall off grief, but whatever the cause, it was matched by the vehemence of Henry’s disapproval. “Remember me, my love with all the tenderness I deserve—respect my prejudices as they relate to vile cards,” he pleaded, “and for God’s sake and mine, renounce them altogether.”14