Note: The newest installment of The Road to the American Revolution is now live on Substack. Follow the series on Facebook, Instagram, and X to keep up with new essays and join the conversation. An excerpt from the article appears below.

On January 25, 1776, the first of Henry Knox’s artillery pieces began arriving in Framingham, Massachusetts.

They were the forward edge of what Knox called his “Noble Train of Artillery”—nearly sixty tons of cannon, mortars, and howitzers hauled more than three hundred miles from Fort Ticonderoga through the dead of winter. Oxen strained against reinforced sleds. Iron scraped across frozen rivers and rutted mountain roads. The guns did not arrive all at once, but their appearance marked the beginning of the end for the British occupation of Boston.

The mission had begun weeks earlier. On December 5, 1775, Knox reached Fort Ticonderoga to take charge of the artillery captured there the previous spring. Since the fighting at Lexington and Concord, New England militia had contained British forces inside Boston. But containment was not a victory. Without heavy artillery, George Washington could not force the British fleet and army to abandon the city.

Readers of this series will recall that Knox’s assignment was a logistical nightmare. Cannon broke through the river ice and had to be hauled back to the surface. Roads vanished beneath snow or collapsed into gullies. Storms erased days of hard-won gains. Writing to Washington from Fort George on December 17, Knox admitted how close the expedition had come to failure.

Contrary winds and the advancing season, he warned, had made it “very uncertain whether we could have gotten them over until next Spring.” Still, Knox pressed on. “If that should be the case,” he wrote, “I hope in 16 or 17 days to be able to present to your Excellency a Noble train of Artillery.”

Whether resolve or competence carried the day, by late January, Knox’s artillery was in Massachusetts. On January 27, he reported to Washington in Cambridge that the guns had arrived…

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