"I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients." Gustave Courbet

07 July 2026

Best.

Brian Lamb dicsusses the book 1776 with its author, David McCullough ...
[Henry Knox] is such an extraordinary story of an American who seemed to be miscast, seemed to be a fellow not prepared for the role that history had for him to play and who not only lived up to the role but went over the top, as it were.  An example of a man who came from very humble origins with very little advantage in the way of education or connections.  He rose to be one of the most important Americans of his day, the man that George Washington discovered and the man that George Washington counted on through nearly eight and a half years of the Revolutionary War and who then counted on him as his secretary of war during the time that Washington was president.

He started out as a Boston bookseller. Big, stout, gregarious, robust, friendly, popular fellow who had about the equivalent of a fifth grade education and who loved books and never stopped reading. And he became one of the best officers in the whole war. 

Washington singled out two young men almost within a week or two weeks after he took command at Cambridge, Massachusetts as people he could count on. One was Nathaniel Green, who was a 33-year-old Quaker who'd been made a major general at the age of 33, having had no military experience at all. And the second was Henry Knox, who was all of 25, and he had had no military experience at all.  But both of them had been reading books. What they knew about the military was entirely from books. That was an age, an era that believed that one of the best ways to learn things was to read books, the age of The Enlightenment. They are in their way, I think, wonderful examples, personifications of the Enlightenment faith that if you want to learn something, pick up a book and get reading.

Henry Knox, a long-standing member of The Hammock Papers' Great Hall.

The "Knox Moving Co." scene from John Adams ...


An excellent book ...

No comments: