by Alexis Coe
This is to certify that the bearer by the name of James has done essential services to me while I had the honor to command in this state. His intelligences from the enemy’s camp were industriously collected and faithfully delivered. He perfectly acquitted himself with some important commissions I gave him and appears to me entitled to every reward his situation can admit of.
Done under my hand, Richmond,
November 21st, 1784.
Lafayette
While most slaves would have to wait until the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to be out of bondage, Lafayette was granted freedom. He also received a pension for his service during the war.
Washington had learned a lesson from Hale. Sending spies behind enemy lines was short-sighted and risky. Recruitment and case work should come from a trusted officer who had longstanding relationships with people in occupied territory—like Major Benjamin Tallmadge, who would go by the code name “John Bolton.” The Yale graduate was intelligent, loyal, and dependable, and though he had no experience in espionage, he had grown up in Setauket, one of the many towns the Continental Army had been forced out of after the Battle of Long Island. His family and friends still lived there and could provide a way in.10
Setauket was not known for patriot sympathy, but the British soon changed that. They took over everything—pubs, restaurants, boarding houses, and churches—and became an overwhelming, frightening burden. For some residents, the American cause was a fight for a quiet way of life. Their help became essential to the untrained intelligence operatives’ success.
Tallmadge knew exactly whom to tap. He began with Abraham Woodhull, a young man he’d known for his entire life, who reported under the name “Samuel Culper,” or “Samuel Culper, Sr.” Woodhull would make dead drops of vital intelligence on his farm, and his neighbor, Anna Strong, the wife of a patriot judge, would arrange the laundry on her clothesline when it was ready for pickup. Patriots on the Connecticut shore would interpret the handkerchiefs and petticoats through a spyglass, then send someone to pass on the message.
That person was often Caleb Brewster, a rough-mannered whaleboat captain. Spies were required to be brave, but Brewster was exceedingly bold. He was known to sign his real name on intelligence reports, and once captured two British vessels before he was struck on the head with an iron cannon rammer and shot by a musket.11
The Culper ring had a far-flung member they called “Samuel Culper, Jr.” who lived even deeper undercover in British-occupied New York. The operative, Robert Townsend, was a practicing Quaker who wrote passionate essays in the New York Royal Gazette, a Tory newspaper, and operated a coffee shop favored by British soldiers.12 It was the perfect cover, allowing Townsend to eavesdrop on customers, who often discussed military business. A courier shuttled intelligence sixty miles east to Setauket, where it made its way to Tallmadge and, not infrequently, to the commander in chief.
Washington went by the name of Agent 711 and exchanged enough letters with Woodhull to grow tired of his lengthy asides about how brightly the American cause for liberty and freedom burned. Time was of the essence, and Washington was after crucial information about British troop deployments, supplies, and strategy. The intel would be best delivered through a code, one complicated enough to deceive the average reader but not too arduous for Washington and his aides-de-camp to decipher. Tallmadge devised a solution, mapping nearly a thousand different numbers onto various words. To reveal the numbers, Washington would apply a reagent to a piece of white paper, exposing invisible ink.
On October 17, 1780, Tallmadge wrote to inform Washington that English regiments had left New York and “intended to make a diversion in Virginia or Cape Fear in No. Carolina, to favour Lord Cornwallis.” Three days later, Washington responded with follow-up questions, eager to learn more about the enemy’s movements.
SAMPLE OF THE CULPER RING’S CODE
0. 8th
114. Contradict
339. Jealous
499. Pervert
701. Woman
10. Absent
125. Damage
335. Indians
487. Pleasure
711. Washington
14. Adore
130. Dispatch
397. Misery
618. September
727. New York
38. Attack
192. Fort
403. Mercenary
619. Surrender
729. Setauket
55. Boat
194. Famine
415. Night
647. Vain
744. England
58. Baker
245. Haste
459. Overthrow
670. Unarm.
763. Headquarters 13
Of what number of Men and of what Corps the late embarkation consisted? Whether Sir Henry Clinton went with them? Whether a reinforcement arrived lately from Europe—the number, and whether of whole Corps or Recruits? In what manner the British army is at present disposed—designating as nearly as possible the Corps which lay at the different places? I am anxious to receive intelligence of the foregoing particulars, and you will oblige me by obtaining it speedily.14
“Cu. Shall be immediately notified of the Questions which Your Excellency wishes to have resolved,” Tallmadge responded on October 23. Woodhull, the senior Culper, soon sent word that the British forces had split up, with one continuing into Virginia and another moving farther south. Townsend, the junior Culper, also had news. A British fleet was headed straight for Lafayette and the Comte de Rochambeau, who were attempting to land some six thousand desperately needed troops in Newport, Rhode Island. Washington acted immediately, sending a double agent to New York with letters supposedly detailing the Continental Army’s next move.15 The agent was intercepted and the letters mined for information; as a result, British ships were rerouted, clearing the way for the French (who were by now aiding the Americans) to land.
* * *
On December 22, 1776, Continental soldiers captured John Honeyman, a former British soldier. Washington had told him exactly where to be found, should he need an immediate audience. They both played along when the soldiers delivered Honeyman to camp in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Washington declared him a “notorious” turncoat and insisted on interrogating the prisoner himself. Thirty minutes later, he ordered that Honeyman be thrown in the guardhouse. In the morning, he would hang.
But the next day, Honeyman was nowhere to be found. The watchmen swore they had no idea how he had slipped out, but Washington did: He’d handed Honeyman a key to the door during their “interrogation” and told him the fastest route out. The escape had to look real, just like the capture and interrogation, lest there be informants among them. And even if there weren’t, Honeyman needed a plausible story to report back to Johann Rall, the colonel in charge of about twelve hundred Hessians in Trenton, New Jersey.
Washington’s camp was in a sorry state, Honeyman told Rall. The Continental soldiers were hungry, shirtless, and shoeless. There were deficits of every kind, of weapons and of ammunition. Rall was overjoyed at the news, which meant he and his men might be returning home soon. In the immediate future, they could at least celebrate Christmas, and celebrate it hard, with all the drink and women they could round up.
Honeyman had been working Ra
ll for weeks. By the time he was “captured,” he knew the garrison’s schedule and the location of stationed guards, all of which he reported back to Washington, who now had the intelligence he needed for a successful attack. By December 26, Rall was dead, his troops were captured, and New Jersey had been loosened from the crown’s grip.
* * *
Although Washington was often a successful spymaster, he suffered bitter intelligence failures, too, and numerous close calls—many of which involved Major John André, who ran British intelligence operations out of Philadelphia, where he occupied Benjamin Franklin’s house. Washington failed to ferret out André’s finest agent, Ann Bates, the wife of a British soldier who passed as a peddler in his own camp.16 But she wasn’t the one who caused Washington the greatest misery. That honor went, of course, to Benedict Arnold.
History has reduced Washington and Arnold to two-dimensional characters—God above, Lucifer below—but in the beginning, when they shared a place in the nation’s first class of American heroes, they didn’t look all that dissimilar.17 Both men were obsessed with honor and thus extremely sensitive to slights; neither was much of an orator, lacking the education afforded to so many of the founders; and both found success on the battlefield.
As time went on, though, their differences began to show. All successful American military men were micromanaged, painstakingly audited, and occasionally court-martialed by the distrustful Continental Congress. The politicians feared that a celebrity general would emulate Oliver Cromwell and seize power. Washington, who’d learned to hold his tongue as an adult, bore these bureaucratic impositions well; Arnold never did.18 In a May 1779 letter to Washington, just days before he began corresponding with André, Arnold wrote:
If Your Excellency thinks me Criminal For Heavens sake let me be immediately Tried and If found guilty Executed, I want no favor I ask only for justice. . . . I little expected to meet the ungrateful Returns I have received from my Countrymen, but as Congress has Stamp’d ingratitude as a Current Coin I must take it.
Washington sympathized with his complaints but not with his too-public recitation of them. He called Arnold’s conduct “Impudent and Improper.” Earlier a military tribunal had called them “illegal, illiberal and ungentlemanlike”—and that was one of Arnold’s better hearings.19
Insult, alienation, and want of money made him easy prey for André, who passed messages between Arnold and British general Sir Henry Clinton. For what would now be around half a million dollars, Arnold agreed to hand over West Point—the patriots’ strategically key fortress on the Hudson River—to the British, along with Washington himself.20 Had Washington been captured, he would likely have been taken to London, tried, and hanged. Coupled with the loss of West Point, which Washington called “the most important Post in America,” Arnold’s betrayal might have ended the Revolution.21
André came exceptionally close to claiming that victory. In 1780, he was sneaking away from West Point with Arnold’s treasonous instructions hidden in his boots when three patriot militiamen stopped him. Their supervising officer, following protocol, was about to turn him over to the commanding district officer—Benedict Arnold—when the transfer was halted by none other than Major Tallmadge of the Culper ring. He knew how to spot one of his own kind. André was ultimately court-martialed and sentenced to death. Yet because he was widely admired, Washington’s inner circle suggested that André be exchanged for Arnold. The British refused the deal, and André was hanged.
It took Washington a year to give up on catching Arnold, who was now serving as a brigadier general in the British Army. At one point, he ordered Sergeant Major John Champe to cross enemy lines, posing as a deserter. Champe managed to land a job in Arnold’s house; he planned to knock him unconscious one night while he was relieving himself in the garden, spirit him away to a boat, and deliver him to Washington. When the perfect moonless night arrived and Arnold indeed went to pee, Champe came close—but in a dramatic turn of events, just before the perfect moonless night arrived, Arnold’s American legion was suddenly called to raid Richmond, Virginia.
Arnold escaped punishment for his treason. He’d inconvenienced the patriots and damaged their morale, but he accomplished very little for the British. He knew, for instance, that there were spies in New York, but Washington had never told him their names.22
“Washington did not really outfight the British,” the British spymaster Major George Beckwith said. “He simply outspied us.”23
CHAPTER 12
Eight Years Away
I can hardly think that Lord Dunmore can act so low, & unmanly a part, as to think of siezing Mrs Washington by way of revenge upon me,” Washington wrote to Lund Washington, his third cousin, in 1775. Lund, who was five years his junior, served as Mount Vernon’s estate manager throughout the war, although Washington often micromanaged from afar.1 The general was in Cambridge, his headquarters during the Siege of Boston, when he felt, for the first time, how vulnerable the war made him and everything he cared about. He was still years away from fully realizing the price he would pay in family, estate, and fortune, but rumors that Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, had plans to sail up the Potomac and kidnap Martha reached him immediately. It seemed everyone was concerned for Martha’s safety at home—except for Martha herself.
“’Tis true many people have made a Stir about Mrs Washingtons Continuing at Mt Vernon,” Lund responded, but “she does not believe herself in danger.”2 Martha, then forty-four, wasn’t even at home when they corresponded. She had taken a carriage to Mount Airy, her daughter-in-law’s family plantation in Maryland, to attend to the birth of her first grandchild.
In the end, Martha remained safe, but the British did come to Mount Vernon during the war. The HMS Savage had been burning great homes along the Potomac when their patriotic owners refused to supply it with provisions—with offers of sheep, hogs, and poultry, the British warship left with more than just the livestock Lund gave them. In 1781, seventeen people enslaved by Washington—fourteen men and three women—bolted for the ship when it docked, and there was nothing Lund could do about it. At the beginning of the war, Dunmore issued a proclamation that many Virginians had tried and failed to keep quiet, declaring “all indented Servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to Rebels) free, That are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining his Majesty’s Troops.”3 If they fought against American liberty, they were fighting for their own freedom.
It didn’t take long for the news to reach Washington. “When the Ennemy Came to your House Many Negroes deserted to them,” wrote Marquis de Lafayette, who would later urge Washington to free or allow the people he enslaved to work as free tenants. “This piece of News did not affect me much as I little Value property. But You Cannot Conceive How Unhappy I Have Been to Hear that Mr. Lund Washington Went on Board the Ennemy’s vessels and Consented to give them provisions.” In peacetime, Washington would have pursued the escaped slaves, but now he targeted Lund. Echoing Lafayette, Washington wrote him a dramatic letter of censure: “It would have been a less painful circumstance to me, to have heard, that in consequence of your non-compliance with their request, they had burnt my House, and laid the Plantation in ruins.”4
MOUNT VERNON SLAVES WHO ESCAPED ONTO THE SAVAGE5
In 1781, there were nearly seventy enslaved men, fifty enslaved women, and fifteen hired and indentured men at Mount Vernon. (Nonworking enslaved adults and children weren’t counted.) Washington estimated that there were between two hundred and three hundred enslaved workers at the plantation over the course of the war, and records show there were at least fifty births during that time.6
NAME
AGE
JOB/DESCRIPTIONS
FORCIBLY RETURNED TO MOUNT VERNON AFTER THE REVOLUTION
Peter
“old”
Lewis
“old
Frank
“old”
x
Frederick
“about 45”
“overseer and valuable”
x
Gunner
mid-40s
brick maker
x
Harry
around 40
stableman
James
“about 25”
Tom
“about 20”
“stout and Healthy”
Sambo
“about 20”
x
Stephen
“about 20”
cooper
Lucy
“about 20”
x
Watty (or Wally)
“about 20”