Henry Knox

Henry Knox (July 25, 1750 – October 25, 1806) was an American military officer, politician, bookseller, and a Founding Father of the United States. Knox, born in Boston, became a senior general of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, serving as chief of artillery in all of George Washington's campaigns. Following the war, he oversaw the War Department under the Articles of Confederation from 1785 to 1789. Washington appointed him the nation's first secretary of war, a position which he held from 1789 to 1794. He is well known today as the eponym of Fort Knox in Kentucky, which is often conflated with the adjacent United States Bullion Depository. Knox was born and raised in Boston where he owned and operated a bookstore, cultivating an interest in military history and joining a local artillery company. He was also on the scene of the 1770 Boston Massacre. He was barely 25 when the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, but he engineered the transport of what became the "noble train of artillery", British ordnance captured from Fort Ticonderoga in New York, which proved decisive in the British evacuation of Boston in early 1776. Knox quickly rose to become the chief artillery officer of the Continental Army. In this role, he accompanied Washington on all of his campaigns and was engaged in the major actions of the war. He established training centers for artillerymen and manufacturing facilities for weaponry that were valuable assets in winning the war for independence. Knox saw himself as the embodiment of revolutionary republican ideals. In early 1783, as the war drew to a close, he initiated the concept of the Society of the Cincinnati, authoring its founding document and establishing the organization as a fraternal, hereditary society of veteran officers that survives to this day. In...