On the eve of peace, Henry Knox clearly viewed himself as an American who devoutly believed in the new nation’s founding principles. But just a few years earlier, he—along with Washington and many other Patriots who fought in the Revolution—had considered himself a loyal subject of Great Britain. Between 1775 and 1783 these new Americans had had to discard their loyalty to the only country they had ever known, attaching themselves to a new national identity.

At the same time, the families they had left at home underwent a similar process of Americanization. During the war, Knox and his wife Lucy Flucker exchanged hundreds of letters and their correspondence provides us with a rare glimpse into how men and women decided to abandon Great Britain and take the essential first step toward adopting new loyalties to the United States. Embracing their new national identity involved fundamental sacrifices of family, home, and basic beliefs. The couple, whose reasons for ultimately rejecting Britain were not the same, found the process long and difficult.

Henry Knox was born in 1750 to a struggling maritime family in Boston. His father abandoned the brood when Henry was just nine, but young Knox nevertheless grew up with a craving for knowledge and a knack for reading, especially books in military science, and he secured an apprenticeship in a Boston bookstore. On his 21st birthday in 1771 he opened his own shop, naming it the London Book Store to honor the British Empire’s great capital.

Lucy Waldo Flucker entered the store the following year. Six years Henry’s junior, Lucy possessed a formidable personality, a quick mind, an excellent education, and strong opinions, which she rarely hesitated to share with others. She also belonged to an exalted Boston family. Her grandfather, General Samuel Waldo, was a military hero and a successful land speculator. Her father, Thomas Flucker, was a wealthy merchant and a high-ranking crown official in Massachusetts. Her brother, also named Thomas, held a captain’s commission in the regular army and served in British Antigua. Lucy could not have helped but feel pride in an empire that had given her family so much.

After they met, the couple began a passionate courtship. Deeply attracted to one another, 16-year-old Lucy and 22-year-old Henry found they had much in common, including a great love of books, literature, and conversation. After the pair married in June 1774, they expected to spend the rest of their days together as well as to remain faithful subjects of their monarch. During the time of their courtship and marriage, the imperial crisis rapidly escalated in America, but Henry kept his political cards close to his vest. Consequently, he never joined one of Boston’s prewar Whig associations, possibly because many of his store’s customers were British officials and American Tories.

However, when the Revolution began the couple had to choose sides. Shortly after April 1775, they slipped out of the city and Henry joined the assembling Continental Army. He experienced a meteoric rise during the Revolution’s first year, earning command of the army’s artillery branch. In the winter of 1775-76, Knox led a remarkable trek that carried captured British guns and mortars from New York’s Fort Ticonderoga, through the Berkshire Mountains and to the American forces besieging Boston—forcing the British to evacuate and gaining the colonies their first great victory.

Portrait of Henry Knox (after 1783), by Charles Peale Polk, copy after Charles Willson Peale. Art courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Even then, as their letters show, Henry and Lucy viewed the rebellion mainly as a momentous adventure. Little American blood had yet been shed, and the goal of most colonials was reconciliation. Still a loyal British-American, young Knox desired the same cherished liberties and respect enjoyed by His Majesty’s faithful subjects in the British Isles.

Like many ambitious Continental officers, he wanted to be considered a gentleman of honor. Early in the war, Knox spoke of enemy officers with great esteem—and he prized their respect in return. In a letter to Lucy in the summer of 1775, he wrote that a British officer parleying with colonial sentries near Boston’s Neck lamented “this unatural [sic] breach,” wishing only “to Heal” the wounds felt by both aggrieved parties. When recently captured British naval officers dined with General Washington, Knox noted how the men had respectfully presented themselves at dinner: the “one Lieut., one Doctor, one master & four midshipmen” had arrived dressed as “handsome Genteel looking men”; therefore, they too “were dispos’d of Genteely” in return. Knox scrupulously remarked whenever the British treated Continental officers as equals. He still viewed the British as national-kinsmen with whom he wished to put things right.

Lucy Knox’s traditional loyalties early in the war didn’t go to the empire per se, but to her family, all of whom had sided with the Crown. She wrote frequently to her parents throughout the Boston siege, sending letters across hostile lines. By spring 1776, she wrote Henry that she knew that her family had evacuated with the British, but little more. Worried for their well-being, she listened avidly for rumors regarding their whereabouts. That July, as the main armies gathered around New York City, Lucy heard that her father had gone to London and her mother to Halifax—and that her eldest sister, Hannah, might be with the British army encamped on Staten Island. Lucy worried that Hannah’s husband, British Captain James Urquhart, was stationed elsewhere. If Hannah was alone, Lucy wrote, Henry must bring her into American lines under a flag of truce, so that the two sisters could be reunited. Hannah would most certainly do the same for her, Lucy told her husband.

As the war’s costs escalated, however, the couple began to cast off their prewar loyalties. Knox supported the Declaration of Independence when it was announced, but his letters to Lucy indicate that he finally discarded his British attachments during the arduous New York-New Jersey campaign of 1776-77, when the Continental Army suffered repeated defeats and American civilians endured depredations at the hands of enemy redcoats. The season’s fighting famously ended with Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton.

Knox’s letters to Lucy during the campaign focused on the army’s movements and his safety. Thus, he didn’t dwell on Great Britain and the empire’s place in America. Afterwards, though, as Knox looked back on the months of hard fighting, it became clear that something had changed. Writing Lucy in January 1777 from winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey, he began to express disdain for the British. Characterizing the war as “a Contest of Virtue with vice,” he insisted, “My Country demands my poor pittance … to rescue her from Barbarity, Tyranny, & every misery consequent to uncheck’d power.” The British had, among other crimes, sent vile “Hessians … to desolate & lay Waste [to] this Country, almost the only Country on earth … [to] have even the appearance of Liberty.”

Knox continued in this vein into the spring—“[W]e are contending with a people cruel indeed,” he wrote Lucy in April, whose “one Characteristick of Greatness” was “a total debauch of morals.” But at the same time, an attachment to the new United States started to emerge in his letters. Though frustrated that more Americans had not joined the army, Knox confidently told his wife, “I have the Most enthusiastic assurance of mind that it is the Will of high Heaven that America should be great.”

The hard war of 1776-77 had turned Henry against his British identity. In the same months, hard treatment at the hands of her own family forced Lucy to sever her loyalties to the past. Lucy wrote to Henry in Morristown how she felt “sick at heart [and] low spirited.” She especially lamented that her family had abandoned her. “[W]hen I reflect,” she unburdened herself, “that I have a father and a mother, sisters, and a Brother, and yet I am this poor neglected thing, I cannot bear it.”

Later that spring, as Lucy and her one-year-old daughter prepared for hazardous smallpox inoculations, she attempted once more to contact her kin. Hearing new rumors that her sister Hannah had gone to Halifax, Lucy wrote again. She claimed that she still felt “tender affection” for them all, but she reminded Hannah of “the great neglect with which I think I have been treated both by you and my dear Mama.”

Describing the Revolution as a “horrid” war, pitting “Brother against Brother, and the parent against the child,” Lucy begged for news of them and closed with prayers for peace—but the war’s damage was manifest. In the letter’s draft (which is all that survives), Lucy made several deletions that poignantly illustrate the ways she was severing ties to her former life. She originally wrote, for instance, of her “love” for her parents, but struck out the word—and the sentiment—from the missive’s final version. She deleted a sentence explaining how the Knoxes’ little daughter was “very much like her gran mama.” Finally, Lucy referred to Hannah as merely “my Sister,” instead of “my dear sister,” as in the first draft. Lucy’s missive, like her earlier ones, went unanswered, and she didn’t attempt to write her sister again during the war.

Lucy and her daughter survived their smallpox inoculations, and reunited with Henry. But Lucy never saw her Loyalist family again and she only rarely discussed them in the couple’s later correspondence. Like her husband—who ended the war as a major-general and served as President Washington’s first Secretary of War—Lucy Knox looked to the future and toward a new life, one bound together by her young family and loyalty to an independent American nation.

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Civil War soldiers and their families had abundant causes for worry. The men were exposed to rampant disease as well as the perils of the battlefield. Women, running households without help, often faced overwork and hunger. Letters bore the burdens not just of keeping in touch and expressing affection but also of assuaging fear about loved ones’ well-being. Yet most ordinary American families, never having endured a long separation until now, had little experience writing letters to each other. Sometimes barely literate—Sarepta had to ask her older brother to put down on paper what she wanted to say to Daniel—Americans quickly had to learn the delicate art of recreating the comforts of physical presence using only the written word.

Much of the time, they did so by writing about their bodies. In hundreds of millions of letters sent between battlefield and home front, moving across the nation by horse and by rail in recent innovations called envelopes, ordinary Americans reported the details of how they looked, what they ate, how much they weighed. Their world had been one of doing and touching rather than reading and writing, but now, by their ingenuity and resolve to hold their families together, they reshaped the culture of letter writing.

Letter to Mrs. Nancy McCoy from her son, Private Isaac McCoy of Co. A, 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry Regiment, postmarked Feb. 2, 1863. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Letters were close cousins to newspapers: Only a few centuries before, in early modern England, had private letters and commercial news reporting gone separate ways (though the habit of calling journalists “correspondents” remains)—and early Americans still considered a good letter one that could “tell all the news.” Yet news was something soldiers sorely lacked. Isolated from the world beyond their regiments, awaiting orders they rarely understood, men could not satisfy their families’ yearnings for news of the war. “You can see more in the papers,” a typical soldier wrote home. Modern historians have sometimes been frustrated to find rich archives of Civil War letters that seem curiously silent on political and military affairs, but these were subjects ordinary Americans thought newspapers were covering perfectly well. What was left to them was reporting the news of their own physical selves. It may have felt a little odd at first—had Sarepta Revis gone around the house comparing herself to livestock?—but it was what families wanted, and writers found ways to oblige.

Reporting a healthy weight was one of the readiest ways to assure a distant reader you weren’t sick or malnourished. A wife as fat as a pig certainly wasn’t starving, a husband like Daniel Revis could be relieved to know, which was more important in wartime than anyone’s notions of beauty. Soldiers enjoyed the small luxury of reporting healthy weights to the folks back home in exact numbers, because they had access to scales. When regiments were encamped and relatively idle, medical staff could hold regular “sick calls,” examinations that included being weighed.

The resulting numbers made their way into hundreds, probably thousands, of letters from soldiers. Loyal Wort, a 31-year-old Ohioan in the Union Army, wrote to his wife, Susan, “i was waid the other day and waid one hundred and seventy one pounds So you See i am pretty fat.” Thomas Warrick of Alabama assured his wife, Martha, “My helth is good at this time” and, as evidence, reported, “I waide one hundred and seventy-fore pounds the last time I waide and that was the other day.” A Georgia private named Andrew White enthusiastically declared, “I way more now than I ever did in my lief I way 197 pounds.” He believed that if only he hadn’t spent an entire night out in the rain on picket duty, “I would have reached 200 pound in a Short time.” In a war that would see men’s bodies torn apart by shells and reduced almost to nothing by privation—one Union soldier lucky enough to survive the notorious Andersonville prison weighed 80 pounds at his release—numeric snapshots of the physical self acted like needles on the gauges of anxiety.

Letter to Miss Lydia H. Weymouth of North Braintree, Massachusetts, sent during the Civil War. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Pictorial snapshots had appeal, too, of course, and the relatively new technology of photography became tremendously popular among military families for similar reasons. Virtually all soldiers and soldiers’ wives who had the money and the opportunity got their portraits taken and exchanged them in the mail. An Iowa coupled joked that their photographs of each other were getting “all rubbed out” by too-frequent kissing. But photographs captured only a moment in the past. The back-and-forth of letters could document change.

For younger soldiers, especially, going to war meant proving themselves to be men and not boys, and they strove to picture themselves that way for their families. William Allen Clark wrote to his worried parents in Indiana, “If you was to see me, your doubts in regard to my health would certainly be dispelled. You wouldent see the same Slim, stoop shouldered, awkward, Gosling.” He weighed 12 pounds more than he had the previous summer. William Martin of South Carolina told his sister, “I am Now Larger than My Father My weight is Now 175 pounds.” He also wanted her to know “my whiskers is getin prity thick and they are two inches Long.” A young Georgian named James Mobley was engaged in a kind of competition with his friends: “I wayed 170 pounds and I now weigh 175 and if I keep on I will weigh 180 before long . . . Father wrote to me that John Reece said I weighted 170 and he said he weighed 177 he is only 2 pd larger than I am and I will get them on him if I dont get sick.”

When times were good—when fighting slowed, medical staff had time to make the rounds, and winter’s hardships had not set in—reports of good health prevailed, like the boasts of Wort, Warrick, and White. But the news was not always as good. If some men and women tried to spare their loved ones by withholding worrisome information, many did not. Ebenezer Coggin wrote home from a Richmond hospital that his weight had bottomed out at 105 pounds, although he insisted he was on the mend. Daniel Revis replied to Sarepta that, for his part, he was “as pore as a snake, we dont get anuf to eat.” (In 19th-century vernacular, the opposite of “fat,” “stout,” or “hearty” was “poor.”) It wasn’t what Sarepta wanted to hear, but one didn’t need a formal education to insist on honesty. “Dont tell me you feel better when you dont,” Betsy Blaisdell admonished her husband in December of 1864. She had received no letter from him in the previous day’s mail and worried it meant his recent illness had worsened. Forlorn in the cold of upstate New York—“I never dreaded winter before” Hiram left for war, she wrote—Betsy told him, nothing could “fill your place.” When Hiram’s letter of reassurance finally arrived, it featured his best effort at recreating his physical self: “I have just washed up all clean and nice,” he reported. “I guess if I was there I would have a kiss and it would not mess up your face much.”

Envelope featuring the Confederate flag, addressed to Miss Lou Taylor of Cincinnati, Ohio. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the U.S. Post Office Department had been delivering about five letters per capita annually. During the war, the average soldier sent more than five times that many. People who felt little capable of long, expressive narratives about their mental and physical well-being proved all the more resourceful in approximating bodily presence. For Americans during the Civil War, embracing loved ones on paper was a hardship they could only with difficulty overcome. Most of them, no doubt, would have rather not had to resort to it. For us, their efforts created a record of something we rarely get to see: glimmers of the emotional lives of ordinary people long gone.

Martha Poteet of western North Carolina endured labor and delivery, for at least the ninth time, during her husband’s absence in 1864. When she wrote to Francis a month later, she cheerfully described the easiest postpartum recovery she ever had experienced. “I had the best time I ever had and I hav bin the stoutest ever sens I haint lay in bed in day time in two Weeks today.” Of the baby, a girl she was waiting to name until Francis came home, Martha could report no weight—scales and doctors were rare things in the Blue Ridge.

She had a better idea. She laid the baby’s hand on scrap of paper, traced a line around it, and carefully cut it out to tuck into the envelope. Some days later, in a long-besieged trench outside Petersburg, Virginia, Francis Poteet opened that envelope and held his new daughter’s hand in his.

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