4. Lucy Flucker Knox lost her entire family due to her support of the Patriots during the Revolution
Lucy Flucker, born into a Loyalist family, first met Henry Knox at his Boston bookstore, a popular site among British officers in Boston prior to the Revolution. Her father was a colonial official, her brother an officer in the British Army. Henry Knox allowed and even lured British officers in his store, engaging them in conversation during which he learned all he could about the use of artillery in battle. When Washington arrived at Cambridge to command the Continental Army, Knox joined him there. Impressed with the Bostonian’s knowledge, Washington appointed him his Chief of Artillery. By then, Henry and Lucy were married, though Lucy’s parents were disappointed in her choice, and tried to entice Henry into accepting a British commission. When the British evacuated Boston in early 1776, Lucy’s family left with them, and Lucy left for Cambridge and her husband.
With no family, and her husband away with the army, Lucy became an ardent supporter of the Patriot’s cause. She and Henry exchanged well over one hundred letters in which she expressed the desire to join him in the encampments. He refused her due to the shabby condition of the army in the first years of the war. He did not want to make the loss of her family worse by seeing the desperate straits the cause she supported had fallen to. She did visit him in camp later in the war. Lucy spent much of the war purchasing and sending supplies to her husband, calling herself in one letter, “quite the woman of business”. In another, she warned him he would not be commander in chief in his house when he returned from the war.