Book describes Knox’s rise to fame, but not fortune

Henry Knox has never been considered one of the more exciting heroes of the Revolutionary War, even though his talents and influence were considerable. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and a few others have received far more attention from historians and the public.

A self-taught artillery expert, his epic march from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston with captured British cannon played a major role in ending the occupation of the city. Ever after, he was a close adviser and friend to Washington, playing major roles at the battles of Trenton, Monmouth, Yorktown and other hallowed ground, and exercising significant influence later as secretary of war.

Thomas J. Lonergan’s new biography, “Henry Knox: George Washington’s Confidant, General of Artillery, and America’s first Secretary of War,” Picton Press, 2003, 231 pages, $22.50) is an adulatory account of one of the men whose courage and idealism constantly astound us today. But even Lonergan feels obliged to ask, “Was Henry Knox, as George Washington believed, a man of infinite capabilities? Or was he, as Thomas Jefferson was to later accuse, a man who knew just one thing – war?”

I don’t think Lonergan ever answers the question, but I’ll side with Jefferson after reviewing Knox’s later years after he moved to Maine in 1795. The family’s downfall is legendary.

Of more interest to many Mainers may be a simpler question: How did Knox’s 19-room mansion and its 24 fireplaces come to dominate a bend in Route 1 in Thomaston?

“It is ironic,” Lonergan notes, “that the man who had been such a large fish in so large a pond for much of the last quarter of the eighteenth century chose to usher in the new century in so small a pond as Thomaston, Maine.”

But it’s not so ironic when one considers that Knox was broke and anxious to make enough money to pay his bills and continue his lavish lifestyle through the medium then open to many men of means: land speculation. Knox acquired hundreds of thousands of acres through the help of his wealthy Federalist friends and his wife’s connections to the vast Waldo Patent lands inherited through her grandfather Gen. Samuel Waldo.

But it was not to be. In a sad letter to Washington in 1797, he wrote, “I am beginning to experience the good effects of my residence upon my lands. I may truly say that it is more than doubled in value since I determined to make it my home. The only inconvenience we experience is the want of society: this will probably lessen daily.”

The reality was that over the years Knox and his loyal wife, Lucy, had lost 10 of their 13 children, and their despondency may explain their tendency to eat and drink to a state of advanced obesity. The Maine woods were not filling up with settlers, as Knox had hoped, and the social life on which the couple had thrived obsessively was not on a par with Philadelphia’s. A few years later, after suffering other humiliations, including the failure of his son to be promoted from midshipman by the Navy because of his drunken behavior, Knox would die insolvent at age 56, having swallowed a chicken bone and developed peritonitis.

Another historian, Alan Taylor, provides a decidedly unflattering portrait of Knox, a welcome adjustment to Lonergan’s account. In “Liberty Men and Great Proprietors,” Taylor describes Knox as a social climber who mistreated the settlers squatting on his vast Maine dominions and mistrusted the common man in general despite the egalitarian principles for which he had fought.

The grimness of this tale must be foreshortened, however, because of a lack of space.

By 1871 the magnificent mansion that had once hosted a party of 400 was a pile of rubble. But what, you say! Then what’s that huge building looming over Route 1?

When I visited the stately edifice some years ago, I was surprised to discover that not only was I not in the original building, but this painstakingly re-created replica, which only could have been accomplished in an era when people truly deified the Founding Fathers, was not even in the original location, a half-mile away on the banks of the St. George River.

I was amazed, but the tour was enjoyable and educational, and this reproduction, which was built for a small fortune in the depths of the Great Depression – thanks to the heroic efforts of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the beneficence of Maine native Cyrus Curtis, the publishing mogul – demonstrated to me for all time that back then people cared about their history a lot more than they do today. Mainers are letting their historic buildings fall down today. A few decades ago, they spent huge sums of money rebuilding important structures that had already collapsed! (Fort William Henry at Pemaquid Beach also comes to mind.)

“The Montpelier of today looks as it did when Knox and his family were alive,” declares the Web site of the General Knox Museum. I want to believe that is true. The building certainly looks like the old photographs of its predecessor, and many of the contents belonged to the Knox family.

Henry Knox may have been born in Boston and acted with questionable scruples like many land developers. He may not have been as brilliant as Thomas Jefferson. But for us Mainers, the current Montpelier, as aberrant as it is architecturally and as misplaced geographically, is our Mount Vernon and our Monticello rolled into one.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War-era diaries and letters, including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.” He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.