Tag: Evan Portman

Henry Knox and John André: An Unlikely Friendship

On By erwguestIn 1775, British Leadership, Continental Leadership, Emerging Revolutionary War, Memory, Personalities, Revolutionary War5 Comments

Emerging Revolutionary War welcomes back guest historian Evan Portman

It’s often said that politics makes strange bedfellows, but that’s also true of war. On a blistering December night in 1775, Col. Henry Knox found himself sharing a cabin with the unlikeliest of people: the British officer John André.

Henry Knox

Knox was on his way to retrieve captured artillery at Fort Ticonderoga alongside his brother, William. The pair traveled up the Hudson River, facing heavy winds and harsh winter weather along the way. On December 4, a snowstorm hit just as Knox and his brother reached Fort George at the south end of Lake George, about 40 miles from Ticonderoga. Colonel Knox decided to spend the night there and sail up the lake to Fort Ticonderoga the following day.[1]

Knox received a one-room log cabin for the night, which, for lack of proper quarters, he shared with a captured British lieutenant named John André. André had surrendered during the American siege of Fort Saint-Jean in November 1775 and was being transported as a prisoner of war to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The chance encounter sparked a brief companionship between the two men. Knox and André were the same age and shared a variety of intellectual pursuits, including a deep passion for art and literature. Both had also given up their respective trades to pursue a military career.[2]

However, Knox was careful not to betray the secrecy of his mission. The colonel, who was dressed in civilian clothes, probably did not reveal his military affiliation as a chief lieutenant of George Washington. Nonetheless, the two bedfellows passed the night by the firelight discussing their common interests. André charmed Knox, as he did most men who made his acquaintance, and the British officer’s intelligence and charisma made left a lasting impression on the artilleryman. Alexander Hamilton later recalled that “there was something singularly interesting in the character and fortunes of André” who “united a peculiar elegance of mind and manners, and the advantage of a pleasing person.”[3] The two men cordially parted ways the following day, as Knox made his way to Fort Ticonderoga and André departed for Lancaster.[4]

John André

Five years later Knox and André met again under much different circumstances. By 1780, André had risen to the rank of major and taken charge of the British spy network. It was in this role that the young officer found himself caught up in one of the great dramas of American history: the treachery of Benedict Arnold. André helped facilitate Arnold’s betrayal and eventual defection to the British army, but he was captured by American sentries in the process. Washington appointed a tribunal of 14 Continental Army officers to try André. Among them was Brig. Gen. Henry Knox.

The tribunal unanimously found André guilty of espionage and therefore ordered his death by hanging—the typical form of execution spy in the eighteenth century. Knox did not record his feelings on the matter, and André did not relate whether he recognized the portly artilleryman with whom he had once shared a cabin. Regardless, any companionship between the two men had evaporated as Knox signed André’s death warrant alongside his Continental comrades.[5]

Despite his tragic circumstances, André maintained marked civility even in the face of his execution. Knox looked on as André approached the gallows and declared, “I have said all I have to say before, and have only to request the gentlemen present to bear testimony that I met death as a brave man.”[6] With that, the cart moved out from under André’s feet, and Knox watched as his one-time companion hung.

Despite his role in André’s untimely death, Knox looked back fondly upon his one-time companion. James Thacher, who was stationed at West Point in 1780 and witnessed André’s trial, recalled that Knox “often afterward expressed the most sincere regret, that he was called by duty, to act on the tribunal that pronounced his condemnation.”[7] Though André’s life ended that October day, Knox served in the Continental army with distinction for the rest of the war. However, he never forgot his chance encounter with the charming British officer on that cold, winter night in 1775.

Fort George

[1] Mark Puls, Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 37.

[2] Puls, Henry Knox, 37; Noah Brooks, Henry Knox: A Soldier of the Revolution, Major-General in the Continental Army, and Washington’s Chief of Artillery (New York: Cosimo, Inc., 2007), 42.

[3] Alexander Hamilton to Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens, 11 October 1780, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 2, 1779–1781, ed. Harold C. Syrett, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 460.

[4] Puls, Henry Knox, 37-38; Winthrop Sargent, Life and Career of Major John André (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), 85.

[5] Puls, Henry Knox, 149.

[6] Puls, Henry Knox, 150.

[7] James Thacher, Military Journal During the American Revolutionary War, 1775-1783 (Boston: Richardson and Lord, 1823), 584.

Was the Battle of Point Pleasant the First Battle of the Revolution?

On By erwguestIn Emerging Revolutionary War, Western Frontier1 Comment

Emerging Revolutionary War welcomes back guest historian Evan Portman

By the time Ralph Waldo Emerson immortalized the “shot heard round the world” in his 1836 “Concord Hymn”, the battles of Lexington and Concord had already achieved fame as the first engagement of the Revolutionary War. However, in the early twentieth century one West Virginia historian began to argue that the true “shot heard round the world” had occurred six months earlier on October 10, 1774, at the battle of Point Pleasant.

The battle was the culmination of Lord Dunmore’s War, a five-month campaign against the Shawnee and Mingo tribes in an effort to quell the violence along the Ohio frontier.[1] Virginia settlers had begun moving into the Ohio Country following the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, in which the Iroquois Confederacy ceded the territories of present-day Kentucky and West Virginia to the Colony of Virginia. However, the Shawnee had not been consulted regarding the treaty and claimed ancestral hunting rights to the region, responding with violent raids along the frontier to reclaim their land.[2] Virginia Colonial Governor John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore sanctioned the colonial militia to wage a campaign against the Native Americans after white settlers began reacting violently, themselves.[3]

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Early Preservation at Fort Ticonderoga

On By erwguestIn Battlefields & Historic Places, Battles, Emerging Revolutionary War, French and Indian War, Preservation, Revolutionary War1 Comment

Emerging Revolutionary War welcomes back guest historian Evan Portman

Most historians credit Ann Pamela Cunningham with kickstarting the historic preservation movement with her purchase of Mount Vernon in 1858. However, preservation of historic sites began long before the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. In fact, the storied walls of Fort Ticonderoga became the object of a preservation movement 38 years before the Ladies’ Association purchased George Washington’s ancestral home.

Fort Ticonderoga—known as the Gibraltar of North America—played an integral role in both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. The fort was originally constructed by the French in 1755 on a portage known to the Iroquois as ticonderoga, meaning a “land between two waters.” Fort Carillon, as it was known to the French, stood strategically between Lake Champlain and Lake George, thereby controlling both the Hudson River Valley and St. Lawrence River Valley. On July 8, 1758, an outnumbered French army successfully defended the fort against British forces in the bloodiest battle of the French and Indian War.[1] However, the following year British General Jeffery Amherst captured the fort and renamed it Fort Ticonderoga.[2]

By the American Revolution, the fort had fallen into disrepair but was still guarded by a small British garrison. In 1775, it was the scene of one of the most famous dramas in American history. On May 10, Col. Benedict Arnold and Col. Ethan Allen led a combined force of the Green Mountain Boys and Massachusetts and Connecticut militiamen across Lake Champlain to capture the fort. “Come out you old Rat!” Allen famously cried to the fort’s commander, Capt. William Delaplace, and demanded he surrender the garrison “in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.”[3] Delaplace agreed, and Ticonderoga quickly fell into American hands.

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John Adams Goes to Catholic Mass

On By erwguestIn 1774, Civilian, Continental Leadership, Emerging Revolutionary War, Personalities9 Comments

Emerging Revolutionary War welcomes back guest historian Evan Portman

Two future presidents walk into a Catholic church.

No, that’s not the beginning of a bad historical joke. It’s what happened on October 9, 1774, when George Washington and John Adams wandered into Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church while serving as delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

In September 1774, delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies convened in Philadelphia for the purpose of discussing a response to Parliament’s recent Intolerable Acts. But after a month of debating (and bickering), Adams wrote that “the Business of the Congress is tedious, beyond Expression.”[1] Seeking a break from the monotony, Adams and Washington ventured to one of the oldest Catholic churches in the colonies. Established in 1763 by parishioners of Old St. Joseph’s, St. Mary’s Church grew from the need for a Catholic cemetery.

“[L]ed by Curiosity and good Company I strolled away to Mother Church or rather Grandmother Church, I mean the Romish Chappell,” Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that day.[2] The church stood just a few blocks south of the Congress’s meeting place at Carpenters’ Hall and starkly contrast anything the Protestant Adams had seen before. A descendant of some of America’s early Puritans, Adams was raised in the Congregational church of Braintree, Massachusetts, where “unfettered daylight through clear window glass allowed for no dark or shadowed corners, no suggestion of mystery.”[3] Old St. Mary’s could not have been more different. Light poured through several stained-glass windows before a large, ornate altar, behind which hung a dramatic depiction of Christ’s passion while burning candles and incense lit the nave.

Adams’s puritanical upbringing taught him to abhor such pageantry in the house of the Lord. He looked with pity upon “the poor Wretches, fingering their Beads, chanting Latin, not a Word of which they understood, their Pater Nosters and Ave Maria’s.” Even “their holy Water—their Crossing themselves perpetually—their Bowing to the Name of Jesus, wherever they hear it” appalled the young lawyer from Boston.[4]

Despite his disdain, some elements of the mass impressed and even moved, Adams. He described the priest’s homily as a “good, short, moral Essay upon the Duty of Parents to their Children, founded in Justice and Charity, to take care of their Interests temporal and spiritual.” Its brevity stood in stark contrast to the long-winded sermons of the Great Awakening, with which Adams would likely have been familiar. Even the priest’s flashy garments were noteworthy to the future president. “The Dress of the Priest was rich with Lace—his Pulpit was Velvet and Gold,” Adams noted.[5]

But most noteworthy of all was the “Picture of our Saviour in a Frame of Marble over the Altar at full Length upon the Cross, in the Agonies, and the Blood dropping and streaming from his Wounds.” That combined with the organ music, which Adams described as “most sweetly and exquisitely” was enough to move him. “This Afternoons Entertainment was to me, most awfull and affecting,” he confessed. But in the eighteenth century, the word “awful” did not mean what it does today. Adams quite literally meant that he was “full of awe” in observing the mass. He was so moved, in fact, that he wondered how “Luther ever broke the spell” of Catholicism.[6]

Perhaps Adams’s experience that day, 250 years ago, is indicative of the Revolution at large, as it brought together men from disparate backgrounds and regions. As a young man in Braintree, Adams likely never imagined he could be moved by a “papist ceremony,” nor could he probably have imagined signing his name on a document securing independence from his former country. In this way, the American Revolution made fantasy a reality, and the impossible, possible.

[1]“John Adams to Abigail Adams, 9 October 1774,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0111. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 1, December 1761 – May 1776, ed. Lyman H. Butterfield. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 166–167.]

[2] Ibid.

[3] David McCullough, John Adams, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 84.

[4] “John Adams to Abigail Adams, 9 October 1774,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0111. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 1, December 1761 – May 1776, ed. Lyman H. Butterfield. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 166–167.]

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

The Baron…

On By erwguestIn 1777, Battlefields & Historic Places, Continental Leadership, Emerging Revolutionary War, Memory, Personalities, Revolutionary War, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Emerging Revolutionary War welcomes guest historian Evan Portman

Overlooking the Grand Parade at Valley Forge National Historical Park is a statue almost as solid as the man it portrays. Baron von Steuben helped transform the American army into an effective and efficient fighting force in the winter of 1777-1778, but he also aided the country nearly a century and a half later. Yes, Baron von Steuben helped the United States through World War I—or at least the social turmoil on the home front.

Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand Steuben was born in Prussia (modern day Germany) in 1730 and served in the Prussian army through the Seven Years’ War. By 1775, Steuben had accrued a considerable amount of debt (despite his stature within the aristocracy), so he sought a foreign military appointment. Failing to catch the eye of the British, French, or Austrians, the Baron set his sights on the fledgling American government. Congress arranged for Steuben to be paid, depending on the outcome of the war, and sent him to the winter encampment at Valley Forge. There, he began drilling the Continental army and instituted better hygiene and sanitation practices. He also wrote a drill manual, which he published in 1779 as Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States. After the encampment at Valley Forge, Steuben participated in the Southern Campaign of the Revolutionary War. After the Siege of Yorktown, Congress awarded the Baron a tract of land in New York where he died in 1794.

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