Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Knox owned and operated a bookstore in the city, cultivating an interest in military history and joining a local artillery company.

Though barely 25 when the American Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, he engineered the transport of captured artillery from New York's Fort Ticonderoga, which proved decisive in driving the British out of Boston in early 1776.

In this role he oversaw the development of coastal fortifications, worked to improve the preparedness of local militia, and directed the nation's military operations in the Northwest Indian War.

The shop's owner, Nicholas Bowes, became a surrogate father figure for the boy, allowing him to browse the store's shelves and take home any volume that he wanted to read.

[9] The inquisitive future war hero, when he was not running errands, taught himself French, learned some philosophy and advanced mathematics, and devoured tales of ancient warriors and famous battles.

As a bookseller, Knox built strong business ties with British suppliers (like Thomas Longman) and developed relationships with his customers, but he retained his childhood aspirations.

The genial giant initially enjoyed reasonable pecuniary success, but his profits slumped after the Boston Port Bill and subsequent citywide boycott of British goods.

[21] At 24 years old, Henry married the well-educated Lucy Flucker (1756–1824), the 18 year-old daughter of wealthy Boston Loyalists, on June 16, 1774, despite opposition from her father, who had differing political views.

Lucy never saw her estranged parents again after they left, never to return, with the British during their withdrawal from Boston after the Continental Army fortified Dorchester Heights, a success that hinged upon Knox's Ticonderoga expedition.

Knox bolstered his own case by writing to Adams that Richard Gridley, the older leader of the artillery under Ward, was disliked by his men and in poor health.

[33] As the siege wore on, the idea arose that cannon recently captured at the fall of forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point in upstate New York could have a decisive impact on its outcome.

[35] Reaching Ticonderoga on December 5, Knox commenced what came to be known as the noble train of artillery, hauling by horse-drawn and ox-drawn sled 60 tons of cannon and other armaments across some 300 miles (480 km) of ice-covered rivers and snow-draped Berkshire Mountains to the Boston siege camps.

He narrowly escaped capture following the British invasion of Manhattan, only making it back to the main Continental Army lines through the offices of Aaron Burr.

Though hampered by ice and cold, with John Glover's Marbleheaders (14th Continental Regiment) manning the boats, he got the attack force of men, horses and artillery across the river without loss.

[56] At Germantown he made the critical suggestion, approved by Washington, to capture rather than bypass the Chew House, a stone mansion that the British had occupied as a strong defensive position.

[62] In late September 1780, Knox was a member of the court martial that convicted Major John André, the British officer whose arrest exposed the treachery of Benedict Arnold.

[72] The unwillingness of Congress to deal with the issue prompted Knox to write a warning letter, in which he wrote "I consider the reputation of the American army as one of the most immaculate things on earth, and that we should even suffer wrongs and injuries to the utmost verge of toleration rather than sully it in the least degree.

[74] Because of the unresolved issues, however, Knox and others became vigorous proponents of a stronger national government, something which leading political leaders (including Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams) opposed at the time.

These plans included two military academies (one naval and one army, the latter occupying the critical base at West Point), and bodies of troops to maintain the nation's borders.

Knox worked to reassemble a large parcel of land in Maine (parts of what are sometimes called the Waldo Patent and the Bingham Purchase) that had been confiscated from his Loyalist in-laws.

Always a large, imposing man at 6 feet 3 inches (1.91 m) tall, Knox is reported to have gained significant weight later in life and been of "immense girth," weighing nearly 300 pounds (140 kg) by the 1780s.

Although Benjamin Lincoln raised a militia force and put down the rebellion, it highlighted the weakness of both the military and defects in the Articles of Confederation that hampered Congressional ability to act on the matter.

Most of the Continental Navy's few ships were sold off at the end of the Revolutionary War, leaving the nation's merchant fleet without any defenses against piracy or seizure on the high seas.

These policies were implemented in part by the passage of the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790, which forbade the sale of Native American lands except in connection with a treaty with the federal government.

[109] In June 1790, Knox wrote to General Josiah Harmar that diplomacy with the Northwestern Confederacy was no longer an option, and that it instead needed to be subjugated by military force in order to "produce in the Indians a proper disposition for peace".

Seeking to close the issue before he left office, he organized an expedition led by Anthony Wayne that brought the conflict to a meaningful end with the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers.

[114][115] The Native American nations were reluctant to leave their hunting grounds but Knox thought he could make a deal with the southern tribes headed by Alexander McGillivray.

On January 2, 1795, Knox was forced to leave the government after rumors that he had profited from contracts for the construction of U.S. frigates which had been commissioned under the Naval Act of 1794 in order to combat Barbary pirates.

In spite of personal financial hardships, he managed to make the last payment of £1,000 to Longman Printers in London to cover the price of a shipment of books that he never received.

[130] Before his death in 1832, Henry Jackson Knox became "impressed with a deep sense of his own unworthiness", requesting in penance that his remains not be interred with his honored relatives but deposited in a common burial ground "with no stone to tell where.