The Glorious Cause - The Noble Train of Artillery

American Political History · May 5, 2025 · 28m

In the winter of 1776, the American army had Boston under siege and could not break it. The heavy guns that might have broken it sat 300 miles away, behind the walls of a captured fort at Ticonderoga, on the far side of a frozen wilderness. The man who volunteered to go and get them was a 25-year-old Boston bookseller named Henry Knox, who had learned everything he knew about cannon from the books in his own shop.

This is the story of Knox’s “noble train of artillery” — 59 guns and 60 tons of iron dragged across lakes, rivers, and the Berkshire Mountains in the dead of winter — and of what…