[MUSIC] At a period right after the war, George Washington and John Adams were corresponding.

He asked George Washington how Henry Knox had done, just how he performed.

"With respect to General Knox, there is no man in the United States with whom I have been in habits of greater intimacy.

Known one whom I have loved more sincerely, nor any for whom I have of a greater friendship."

And to me that says an awful lot about Knox.

[MUSIC] People don't realize how Henry Knox was right there with Washington, his right hand man.

Really for years, throughout all seven years of war.

Henry was never formally educated in terms of military science or anything like that.

What he learned just as his whole education was pretty much self taught from books.

He met George Washington when he first got to Roxbury, which was across the river from Boston.

And Washington observed Knox and what he was doing and was already taken by it.

At that time Washington was in his late 40s and Henry was only 25.

He and Knox just really seemed to click.

[MUSIC] The siege was very, very important because we basically had a stalemate.

You had a situation where no matter how Washington had wanted to go about it, it's very unlikely he could have taken Boston without the cannon.

Some people think that was Knox's idea to go get the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga.

He went there in the winter, with his brother, one of the men.

There was no military group and got to Ticonderoga after a pretty arduous trip.

And selected 60 cannon, 59 to be precise, that were to be brought back when they had sleds built and went over frozen lakes, frozen rivers, up and down the Berkshire mountains over a really incredible course, all of that.

And most people thought this 25 year old guy would not be able to do this without any formal training as an engineer.

But he was able to overcome all these burdens and bring them back and it's probably the thing he's most known for.

It was just very critical to the whole war and really a turning point with what would have taken years to really starve the British out.

So he really had to have the artillery to do it.

And that was the focal point of all military efforts at that time.

It was a way of turning that whole focus from New England to a broader national focus too, instead of just everything being about these rebels and Boston versus the British Army.

He was involved in literally every major battle that Washington was in, all the way to Yorktown at the end.

Yorktown is important because it was the last organized resistance of a major British Army.

It's legitimately considered the end of the war.

After the revolution, a lot of the officers just wanted to go back to civilian life.

As a matter of fact, Washington and Knox both were very strong believers in the principle of the military once successful, should turn it over to civilian authority.

So as that evolved, Washington ended up going back to the Continental Congress because they needed leadership to come up with a Constitution.

And Henry was taken along and was always his advisor on military history, for military items, and he was a natural fit for becoming the first Secretary of War, where he was appointed in 1785.

And he, from Philadelphia, then really was responsible for organizing a whole military approach that the United States had, the first real army.

He also was responsible for the US Navy, and commissioned the various ships that, like the USS Constitution and others.

He authorized those.

He really was responsible for setting up a defensive mechanism so these brand new states could defend themselves as a United States.

So then after they had done that all the way to 1795, Henry finally says, I need to go on and leave this life and go retire because I really want to be a farmer.

And because they had all this land in Maine that his wife had inherited, that was the obvious place to go.

And his grand ambition was to set up a number of businesses.

And it was going along pretty well until he died very young.

We take a lot of visitors through the Knox Museum.

Our hope is, and I think our belief is that they will really have an appreciation of what Henry sacrificed for this country.

And that's really kind of a thing that people need to step back and say, would I have done that or could I have done that?

That's the key thing we'd like people to walk away with to say, we really need to be more unselfish about what we're doing and expect less of government to take care of us and be willing more to reach out and to do things for the benefit of others.

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