Huzzah76 Rules of Command, Rule 5: Move the Thing Everyone Says Cannot Be Moved
Knox and the Noble Train of Artillery, Winter 1775-76
August 18, 2026 | AmRev Resurrected
Henry Knox was 25 years old and had never moved a cannon in his life.
He was a bookseller. He had taught himself military engineering by reading Caesar’s Commentaries and Sharpe’s Military Guide in a Boston bookbindery after his father abandoned the family and he left school at nine to support his mother. He opened his own bookshop at 21. He talked to the British officers who came in to browse his shelves and asked them questions about artillery and fortifications. He had no formal military training of any kind.
In November 1775, he walked into George Washington’s headquarters outside Boston and proposed that he go to Fort Ticonderoga in northern New York, collect the 60 tons of captured British artillery sitting there unused, and haul it 300 miles across two semi-frozen rivers and through the Berkshire Mountains in winter. Washington said yes.
Knox left the next day.
THE SITUATION
By November 1775, the Siege of Boston had become a stalemate that Washington could not afford to sustain.
The Continental Army had the British pinned inside the city, which sounds better than it was. Washington had men enough to maintain the siege lines but no artillery to threaten the British fortifications. Without heavy guns he could not fire on the city, could not dominate the harbor, could not force a British withdrawal. The siege was a cordon, not a pressure campaign. The British could sit inside Boston indefinitely. Washington needed guns.
Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain in northern New York, had been captured from the British by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys in May 1775. The fort held approximately 60 tons of artillery: cannon, mortars, and howitzers, some of them among the heaviest pieces in North America. They had been sitting there for six months while the Continental Army figured out what to do with them. The problem was obvious. Ticonderoga was 300 miles from Boston, across two major river crossings and through the Berkshire Mountains, in winter.
Everyone who thought about the problem agreed it could not be done.
Knox proposed it anyway. Washington commissioned him Colonel of Artillery on the spot, which was a title for a regiment that did not yet exist because the regiment had no artillery, and sent him north.
THE DECISION
Knox arrived at Ticonderoga on December 5, 1775. He spent five days inventorying and selecting 59 cannon, mortars, and howitzers. The largest pieces were 24-pounders, each 11 feet long and weighing over 5,000 pounds. The total load was approximately 120,000 pounds. He had it loaded onto bateaux to move down Lake George, which was not yet fully frozen, to its southern end. Then the overland haul would begin.
He built sleds. He contracted local farmers for oxen and horses. He organized the column into a train that moved in sections, the heaviest pieces requiring teams of multiple animals and crews of men to manage on the grades. He crossed Lake George on ice that was not entirely trustworthy. Several cannon broke through and sank. Knox had them recovered. He continued.
The Hudson River crossing nearly stopped the expedition. The river was semi-frozen, the ice inconsistent. Cannon broke through twice on the Hudson as well. Knox had them recovered both times. He crossed the last of the train on January 9, 1776, and rode ahead to manage the next stage.
The Berkshire Mountains in January were the hardest section. Knox wrote in his journal on January 10 that he had climbed mountains from which he might almost have seen all the kingdoms of the earth. He wrote the following day that it appeared to him almost a miracle that people with heavy loads should be able to get up and down such hills. He said it appeared almost a miracle. He kept moving.
The train arrived outside Boston on January 25, 1776. Fifty-six days from Ticonderoga. Three hundred miles. Sixty tons of artillery. No pieces lost.
Washington placed the guns on Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston Harbor on the night of March 4, 1776. The British commander General Howe woke on the morning of March 5 to find cannon positioned above his fleet that had not been there the night before. He is said to have told his officers that the rebels had done more in one night than his army could have done in months. On March 17, the British evacuated Boston. The city they had held since 1768 was abandoned in a single morning.
Washington had his first victory. Knox had made it possible by moving the thing everyone said could not be moved.
THE FORMATION BEHIND THE DECISION
Henry Knox’s father William abandoned the family in 1759. Knox was nine years old. He left school immediately to find work, ending up as an apprentice in a Boston bookbindery. He had no choice about leaving school. He chose what to do with the books around him.
He read everything he could get his hands on that touched military science. Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Sharpe’s Military Guide. Whatever he could source on artillery, fortification, and siege engineering. He was not reading for pleasure. He was building a knowledge base for a profession he intended to enter, in a trade that had no formal apprenticeship he could access, in a city where the professional soldiers were the men occupying it.
By the time he opened the London Book Store at 21 he was interrogating every British officer who came through the door about what he knew. He joined the Boston Grenadier Corps at 18. He watched the construction of fortifications. He studied terrain. He was doing what a man does when he intends to close the gap between where he is and where he is going and has no institution to carry him there.
The formation that matters for Rule 5 is this: Knox had spent fifteen years solving the problem of his own ignorance with nothing but available resources and the decision to use them. He knew what it felt like to look at an impossible gap and start crossing it anyway. He had been doing it since he was nine years old.
When he looked at the Ticonderoga problem in November 1775, he did not see a miracle. He saw a logistics problem. He saw ice and mountains and distance and weight, and he saw that each of those variables had a solution if you broke the problem into its components and addressed them one at a time. The cannon could be loaded on bateaux for the lake crossing. Sleds could be built for the overland haul. Oxen could be contracted from local farmers. River crossings required timing and ice thickness assessment. The mountains required smaller loads and more teams.
None of it was easy. None of it required anything other than the willingness to start and the refusal to stop.
He had been practicing that willingness since 1759.
THE CHARGE
You know the thing that cannot be moved.
The business problem that has been sitting in the same place for two years because the solution requires resources you do not have. The relationship that everyone agrees is too damaged to repair. The ministry that cannot launch because the conditions are not right. The conversation with your son that is too hard to begin.
Knox was 25, had no military experience, had no formal engineering training, and proposed hauling 60 tons of cannon 300 miles through the Berkshires in January. He proposed it because he had studied the problem, broken it into its components, and concluded that each component had a solution.
The thing you have declared unmovable may simply be unexamined.
Break it into its components. What is the first piece? Not the whole 60 tons. The first piece. What does it take to move that one thing to the next point? When Knox’s cannon fell through the ice on the Hudson he did not turn the train around. He recovered the piece and continued.
You have been looking at the whole weight of the thing and calling it impossible. Knox looked at the whole weight and built sleds.
The mountains have not moved. Neither has the thing you are avoiding. Start with the first piece. Move it to the next point. Continue.
The chain is in your hands.
Value for Value
Send this to one man you know who has declared something unmovable. He has not broken it into components. He has been looking at the whole weight.
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The chain is in your hands.
~ Brett Hahn, AmRev Resurrected 🇺🇸
Brett Hahn is the founder of AmRev Resurrected and the creator of Freed. He is a member of the Sons of the American Revolution, Anthony Halberstadt Chapter, descended from Thomas Murphy of the 2nd Regiment, Salem County New Jersey Militia. His books Forge the Son and Made for the Mountains*, Volumes One and Two of The First Republic Series, are available on Amazon. His app* Freed is live at freedbyjesus.com.
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Where this first appeared
First published on AmRev Resurrected on August 18, 2026. Read it there.