DEFIANT BRIDES -- The Wives of Benedict Arnold and General Henry Knox

BOSTON - June 19, 2013 - PRLog -- NEWS FROM BEACON PRESS

Contact: Travis Dagenais, Beacon Press
617-948-6583    tdagenais@beacon.org

“Breathes life into a complex period of history.”—ForeWord Reviews

“With the seemingly endless parade of books devoted to both founding fathers and revolutionary rascals, it’s nice to see some attention paid to the fervor with which some remarkable women navigated the romantic, political, and wartime challenges of the era.” —Booklist

“An ingenious means of bringing new life to the oldest story in our nation’s past. … Stuart achieves a you-are-there verisimilitude in Defiant Brides that is rare and not to be missed.” —Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters and Margaret Fuller

Why do the largely silent representations of women’s voices of Revolutionary-era America remain a historical puzzle?  Did women do anything to affect the course of the nation besides tending the hearth, raising children and nursing wounded soldiers?  Undoubtedly they did, as contemporary scholars and researchers are discovering today.

Now, in Defiant Brides, historian Nancy Rubin Stuart investigates the little-known histories of Margaret (Peggy) Shippen Arnold and Lucy Flucker Knox, two Revolutionary Era women who were neither “laughable or trivial helpmates” to their husbands Benedict Arnold and Henry Knox, but remarkabe women who intimately witnessed and participated in the Revolution, Through excerpts from hundreds of letters, many never before published, Stuart reveals the ways these women, mere teenagers when they married, witnessed and helped influence the course of America’s earliest years.

Presenting Peggy and Lucy in their own words, Stuart probes why the women defied tradition by marrying men disliked by their families and by remaining loyal to their radical husbands through the turmoil of the Revolution.  Peggy and Lucy never met, but their parallel stories present a fresh and realistic picture of women’s lives during the late 18th century.

Stuart’s writing challenges earlier historical images of Peggy Shippen—privileged society belle, innocent victim, treacherous bride—and reveal a young woman who struggled publicly and privately beneath the shadow of her husband’s infamy. Stuart details how Peggy defied the doubts of her affluent parents and married the questionable Arnold. The  price was exile from her beloved Philadelphia and a lifetime of sneers, taunts, and angry mobs that dogged her from the United States to England to New Brunswick.

Peggy’s behind-the-scenes actions enhanced Arnold’s reputation as a revered military figure as he plotted treason against the United States. Elegant, charming, and beautiful, She attracted attention in the highest social circles, winning favor with figures like George Washington, Henry Knox, and Lafayette, and often with very real benefits for her husband’s career. It was Peggy's  alculated flirtations with New York State Chancellor Robert R. Livingston in 1780 which helped secure Arnold's fateful position of Commander at West Point.

Later that year when letters implicating Arnold’s betrayal of the American cause were discovered, Peggy staged a series of fits that stunned—and deceived— Washington and Alexander Hamilton. As Hamilton wrote to his fiancée, “We have every reason to believe that she was entirely unacquainted with the plan,” while Washington said he had “every reason to believe she is innocent.”

Presenting new research on Lucy Knox, Stuart portrays Lucy as a needy and forthright young bride whose anguished separations from her husband Henry impelled her to follow him through the army camps of the Revolution. In contrast to earlier dismissals of her as either a frivolous woman or a formidable army wife, Stuart captures Lucy’s private torment as well as the daunting challenges she faced during the war. Abandoned by her wealthy Tory family at the time of her marriage, Lucy birthed 13 children, only 3 of whom survived to adulthood. “I am constantly sick with anxiety. Oh, horrid war! How has thou blasted the fairest prospects of happiness,” Lucy wrote in a 1781 letter to Knox.

Despite these setbacks, Lucy remained loyal to Knox, whose duties as a major general and Washington’s chief of artillery required their family to move from camp to camp. Stuart illustrates how Lucy mastered the role of social hostess— “the Emily Post of her day,” Stuart writes—and employed those skills at military galas and the Knoxes’ extravaganzas.

By the last years of the war, citizens praised Lucy as an “amiable leader of society” and “one of the heroines of the Revolution, nearly as well known in the camps as her husband.” However, Lucy could also be haughty, impolite, and  ater became an obsessive card-player.  

As Defiant Brides illustrates, both Peggy Shippen and Lucy Knox led parallel if sharply contrasted lives, but both evolved into unusually resilient women. Their stories illuminate the personal sacrifices made by the “forgotten half” of the population who witnessed the American Revolution. Stuart also provides fresh and intimate portraits of Peggy and Lucy’s famous husbands, Benedict Arnold and Henry Knox, enabling readers to connect with these historical figures “as human beings, as vulnerable, fallible,and praiseworthy as we are today.”

Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era

Women and the Radical Men They Married

Nancy Rubin Stuart

Cloth - $27.95; ISBN: 978-0-8070-0117-2

E-book - $27.95; ISBN: 978-0-8070-0118-9

http://www.NancyRubinStuart.com