The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

In an era of improbable ascents, Henry Knox’s rise was among the least likely. At age nine, he had been forced to drop out of Boston Latin Grammar School when his father abandoned the family for the West Indies after his shipbuilding business collapsed. The boy went to work, both in the bindery and as an autodidact, teaching himself passable French and studying Plutarch’s Lives and Caesar’s Commentaries. At eighteen he joined a militia artillery company, training on brass 3-pounders under British tutelage and firing salutes for the king’s birthday. As a witness to the Boston Massacre, he testified at the subsequent trials and soon after opened his London Book-Store, peddling Bibles, law books, and almanacs in an effort, as he advertised, “to exterminate ignorance and darkness.” Knox himself was an attraction. “He was affable without familiarity, dignified without parade, imposing without arrogance,” one admirer wrote. Within three years the shop had become “a fashionable morning lounge” for browsing British officers and well-heeled Bostonians alike, an emporium offering stationery, wallpaper, quills, flutes, Keyser’s pills, telescopes, “cordial cephalic snuff,” reading glasses, and Hill’s “never-failing cure for the bite of a mad dog.” And books: twenty volumes of Voltaire, ecclesiastical histories, the eleven-volume Complete History of England, treatises on shoeing horses and how to treat venereal disease with mercury, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and various pirated Irish...