Free Defiant Brides by Nancy Rubin Stuart Page B

II
Tender Wives

PART III
Shadow Sisters

14
The Brides’ Legacies
    AFTER LUCY’S DEATH, HER daughters hoped to memorialize her as one of the legendary patriot wives of the American Revolution.
    The name of General Henry Knox was already honored. In 1791, citizens in Eastern Tennessee’s Great Valley had renamed their largest town Knoxville. The 1802 establishment of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, modeled at least in part upon the Pluckemin Artillery Cantonment, also fulfilled one of their father’s earliest dreams. Written accounts of the Revolution had praised Knox for his character as well as for his contributions to the American cause. “To praise him for his military talents alone would be to deprive him of the eulogium he merits; a man of understanding, gay, sincere, and honest—it is impossible to know without esteeming him, or to see without loving him,” wrote the Marquis of Chastellux. 1
    Chief Justice John Marshall’s five-volume
Life of George Washington
praised Knox for his “past services and an unquestioned integrity . . . sound understanding.” 2 By 1834, William Sullivan’s
Familiar Letters
on Public Characters and Public Events
recalled that Knox’s “face had a noble expression, and was capable of displaying the most benignant feeling. . . . This was the true character of his heart. . . . The mind of Knox was powerful, rapid and decisive. . . . He had a brilliant imagination, and no less brilliant modes of expression.” 3
    Yet, it would not be until 1848 that a remembrance of Lucy Flucker Knox finally appeared as a chapter in Elizabeth Ellett’s
Women of the American Revolution.
The author, unable to locate the Knox children, had based her portrait upon information from Maine congressman Lorenzo Sabine, editor of the
Eastport Sentinel
and author of the 1847 book
The American Loyalists.
Ellett’s chapter on Lucy Knox was a “brief & somewhat inaccurate account” of their mother, complained daughter Lucy to her sister Caroline in February 1849. 4 Although Ellett had extolled their mother’s intellect for its “high order,” she also wrote that Mrs. Knox had said that if she had to live her life over, she would have been “more of a wife, more of a mother, more of a woman.” 5 That admission infuriated the Knoxes’ eldest daughter. “Now whatever may have been her fondness in former days for the world & its attractions—I am well assured that they never led her to neglect her own family,” she wrote to Caroline. 6
    Immediately after the publication of
Women of the American Revolution
, Lucy wrote to Ellett, who immediately “begged” for more information. 7 By then, Lucy’s comments had been incorporated into Ellett’s
Godey’s Lady’s Book
article, “Sketch of Mrs. Henry Knox.” But once again, Lucy thought that her mother had been unjustly represented. Although Ellett described Mrs. Knox as a “remarkable woman,” 8 Lucy wrote her sister, she “said some things which I never thought of saying, such as the influence of my mother . . . over the minds of General & Mrs. Washington, which I certainly never asserted.” 9
    Privately, Lucy Knox Thatcher blamed herself for not knowing more about her mother’s life. “When our dear mother was yet with us, I did not take the pains, I . . . ought to have done to inform myself of a thousand particulars of her eventual life,” she admitted to her sister. “Anecdotes I have none. Do you recall any?” 10
    Apparently Caroline had none or, if she did, they never appeared in print. By then, she had been twice widowed. Ultimately Caroline’s marriage to James Swan had been unhappy, terminating with his 1834 death. Two years later, she married Senator John Holmes, with whom she lived happily, if all too briefly, until he died, in 1843.
    In contrast to his sisters, the Knoxes’ son, Henry Jackson, had led a checkered life. After squandering his small inheritance, he appealed to his father’s old friends, who, taking pity