I’m going to cheat this month. (I know, it’s only my second newsletter and I’m already cheating!) For my February newsletter, I’m going to focus on something that technically happened in January. But Henry Knox and his cannon are too important to ignore. What he pulled off that winter quietly changed the direction of the war, and if I skip it just because the calendar says February, you should unsubscribe on principle. Plus, it’s my newsletter, and I can cheat if I want to!! 😊

Here’s the situation. At the start of 1776, the British army is sitting inside Boston feeling pretty secure. They’ve got the best navy in the world parked right beside them. Supplies come in by water. Reinforcements come in by water. If things get ugly, they can leave by water.

Outside the city, George Washington has the makings of an army. Untrained. Unbathed. Not used to being told what to do. But an “army” nonetheless. What he doesn’t have is a way to force the British out. It’s a standoff. Everybody glaring at everybody else. Lots of patriot enthusiasm. Not a lot of big solutions.

Enter twenty-five-year-old Henry Knox, a Bostonian who educated himself about artillery in his London Book Store near the Town House. In December, he traveled to Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, where Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold had captured sixty mortars and cannon weighing about 120,000 pounds. He decided to do the obvious thing: drag them three hundred miles to the army outside Boston.

To put that in perspective, one of those fully loaded Amazon semi-trucks you see on the interstate weighs around 80,000 pounds. Knox wanted to move two of those. But without diesel engines. Or gas stations. He didn’t even have roads most of the way. What he had was forty-two giant sleds pulled by teams of oxen over mountains, through forests, and in freezing rain.

The expedition nearly collapsed several times. Teamsters hired along the way didn’t want to move the artillery down the mountain for fear they’d be crushed. Knox convinced them to do it for their country. When Knox got to the Hudson, the ice was too thin. So, he spent time punching holes in the ice, letting the water refreeze, then doing it again and again until the ice was thick enough to hold the weight. Even then, one of the cannons fell through. Knowing Washington needed every gun, Knox spent a day pulling it out of the river.

Imagine being a soldier who’d spent months watching the enemy sit comfortably in Boston while you froze in the mud in Cambridge. And then one morning you wake up and here comes this parade of artillery like the cavalry in a movie, except it’s frostbitten and swearing. Suddenly, the rebellion has teeth! Cannons mean you can bombard Boston. They mean the British navy in the harbor might not be so relaxed anymore. Cannons mean the stalemate has an expiration date.

It’s one of those moments that truly changed the course of history.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the Second Continental Congress is having a very different February. They are still telling themselves they aren’t declaring independence. But they happen to be running an army, raising revenue, and figuring out how to survive a war with the most powerful empire on earth. Totally different from running a country…. 🤔

The biggest development is the attitude shift of some of the southern delegates. Norfolk, Virginia, had been burned to the ground by the British on New Year’s Day. News had arrived that the British had initiated a “Southern Strategy” by sending approximately 1,500 troops south. This war wasn’t just Boston’s anymore. John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on February 11 that there was a “deep Anxiety” and “Melacholly,” prevailing amongst the delegates from the southern colonies, similar “to what [he] had often observed in Boston….”

So, by February, nobody had voted on independence. Most weren’t even talking about it. But the middle ground was getting slippery. By the end of the month, Washington had artillery, and Congress was running out of ways to pretend they didn’t know where this was heading.