The Revolutionary War broke out in April, 1775 when colonists opened fire on British redcoats at Concord, Massachusetts. The British soldiers were chased back to Boston. Although the British won the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, Boston remained under siege by colonial forces under Gen. George Washington. At one point, Washington planned an amphibious assault on the city, which would almost certainly have resulted in a disaster for his Continental Army. Thankfully, Mother Nature cancelled it. On May 10, Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold captured Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain without a fight. The fort’s cannons were now possessed by the Continental Army. Washington had on his staff a 25-year-old Boston bookseller named Henry Knox. Knox and Washington became friends and it was Knox that proposed that the Ticonderoga guns could be better used for taking Boston. He promised he could bring the cannons in twenty days.
Knox arrived at the fort and decided to move 58 cannons. Most were 12-pounders or 18-pounders. The weight refers to the weight of the cannonballs. The biggest cannon was a 24-pounder called “Old Sow”. It alone weighed 5,000 pounds. The total weight was 120,000 pounds or 60 tons. On Dec. 9, 1775, the train reached Lake George. They were carried on the lake by three boats. Eight days later, the guns were loaded on sledges using a half-mile of rope to lash them down. The sledges used the snow to their advantage. Some of the sledges needed eight horses to pull them. (Tom Lovell famous painting below that is entitled “The Noble Train of Artillery” erroneously gives credit to oxen.) The route took the sledges through forests and across the frozen Hudson River four times. The journey took 40 days instead of 20, but Knox did not lose a single cannon. The “noble train of artillery”, as Knox called it, arrived in Boston on Jan. 27, 1776. It was a stupendous achievement by Knox and he became the chief artillerist in the army and Washington’s most trusted subordinate. President Washington would later appoint him to be the first Secretary of War.
On March 5, 1776, British Gen. William Howe woke up to see many of the cannons emplaced on Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston. The rebels had fortified the heights in just one night. It came as a stunning surprise. The British are going to continue underestimating the colonists. The emplacement was a fait accompli that forced the British to evacuate Boston.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/guns-ticonderoga
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_train_of_artillery
https://allthingsliberty.com/2019/02/henry-knoxs-noble-train-of-artillery-no-ox-for-knox/
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