In 1775, a young bookseller in Boston with no military experience and a voracious appetite for reading history took on a seemingly impossible mission. General George Washington’s undersupplied Continental Army needed heavy weaponry to drive the British Army out of Boston, and as Lesley Herzberg of the Berkshire Historical Society explains, the job fell to Henry Knox.
“Henry Knox goes and does reconnaissance at Fort Ticonderoga, because all of these arms have been seized at Fort Ticonderoga in May of 1775 by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold and the Green Mountain Boys,” she told WAMC. “And so, all of this artillery is just sitting there, but it needs to get to Boston. So, it needs to get 300 miles across New York and Massachusetts to Boston in order for General Washington to be able to use it. And so, Knox is like, I can do it.”
On paper, Knox was an odd choice for a complicated and vital military scheme. While he’d witnessed the Boston Massacre in 1770, the 25-year-old had never even been to New York before taking on the artillery mission…