George Washington's Secret Six

by Brian Kilmeade

  A TURN OF AFFAIRS

  General Clinton exhibited more humanity than had Arnold, and promptly released the unfortunate bargemen who had rowed Arnold to the Vulture. But that was the last piece of good news to reach the Americans’ ears for some time. Just as the confusion of the Arnold betrayal began to dissipate, a blow was struck that threw all covert agents into a state of fear once again.

  Woodhull wrote to Tallmadge, on November 12, of some disturbing news: “Several of our dear friends were imprisoned, in particular one that hath been ever serviceable to this correspondence. This step so dejected the spirits of C. Junr. that he resolved to leave New York for a time.” The letter goes on to add that Austin Roe had returned from New York and that Brewster had been pursued and narrowly escaped capture while crossing the Sound. There is no indication that Rivington was ever suspected or his newspaper operations suspended, and the ring’s satellite members who had functioned as couriers all seemed to be safe. The person imprisoned was someone who was known to Townsend and who enjoyed very close ties to him, making it likely that the “ever serviceable” friend apprehended was none other than Agent 355. Whether she was traced by Arnold or caught because of general suspicion, the lady’s capture shattered the morale of the other five spies.

  What could Agent 355 expect to face in a wartime prison? Because no separate women’s prison for combatants existed, Agent 355 would have been held in the primary confinement facility at the time—HMS Jersey, anchored in Wallabout Bay, near Brooklyn. Prison ships, often called “death ships” for their deplorable conditions, were routinely used by the British during the war, and the Jersey had a reputation for being the worst of the worst, earning the nickname “Hell.” Disease and vermin ran rampant among the starving prisoners. The bodies of inmates who died might not be recovered for a week or more, left to rot in the cramped, airless hulls in which the unfortunate passengers were forced to spend twenty-four hours a day. By the end of the war, approximately eight thousand people were estimated to have died aboard prison ships in New York alone.

  It is no wonder, then, that Robert Townsend sank into such a deep depression. As Woodhull noted, he temporarily closed his store in Manhattan and returned to Long Island for several weeks to check on the safety of those with whom he had worked, to remove himself (as much as possible) from harm’s way, and to try to nurse his spirits back to health even as he mourned the capture and imprisonment of such a brave and faithful friend.

  And, as it turns out, the members of the Culper Ring were not the only spies upon whom Arnold had set his sights. A letter to Benjamin Tallmadge on October 25 revealed that Arnold had hopes of persuading the American spymaster himself to follow in his traitorous footsteps:

  As I know you to be a man of sense, I am convinced you are by this time fully of opinion that the real interest and happiness of America consists of a reunion with Great Britain. To effect which happy purpose I have taken a commission in the British Army, and invite you to join me with as many men as you can bring over with you. If you think proper to embrace my offer, you shall have the same rank you now hold, in the Cavalry I am about to raise. I shall make use of no arguments to convince you, or to induce you to take a step which I think right. Your own good sense will suggest everything I can say on the subject.

  Inexplicably, however, the letter did not reach Tallmadge for three months. “I am equally a stranger to the channel through which it was conveyed, the reason why it was so long on its way, or the motives which induced the Traitor to address himself thus particularly to me,” Tallmadge wrote to Washington on January 28, 1781. “I have determined to treat the Author with the contempt his conduct merits, by not answering his letter, unless Your Excellency should advise a different Measure.”

  KIDNAPPING ARNOLD

  Even as Townsend was crushed by the news of the capture of fellow agents in the city, on the other side of the matter Arnold found himself somewhat dejected rather quickly as well. Despite his highest hopes and delusions of grandeur, none of his efforts had led to anything particularly fruitful. Even the suspected Patriot spies rounded up in the aftermath of his fleeing to the British failed to yield any more names of coconspirators, which left all of his efforts only half realized and hardly worth the excitement they raised. As a result, he was only paid a total of £6,315 and an annual pension of £360 rather than the full £20,000 on which he had been counting. He was somewhat mollified, however, by receiving a commission in the British army as a brigadier general, which carried with it a fairly respectable salary.

  Washington had not given up hope of capturing Arnold. Using the Culper Ring to kidnap the traitor was out of the question—too many of the spies were vulnerable to being known to Arnold, and they were already in enough danger. Instead, Washington commissioned several new spies to make an attempt, explicitly instructing them to bring Arnold back alive to stand trial.

  Working covertly with Major Henry Lee—the same Henry Lee who had spoken out against the Intolerable Acts of 1774—Washington devised a daring plan that would require the young officer to operate in complete secrecy and to disavow any involvement on the general’s part. A sergeant named John Champe volunteered to carry out a dangerous mission, the particular details of which he learned only after stepping forward. “[Champe] was about twenty three or twenty four years of age,” Lee later recalled in his Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States, and “rather above the common size, full of bone and muscle, with a saturnine countenance, grave thoughtful and taciturne, of tried courage and inflexible perseverance.” In short, he was large, strong, serious, and stubborn—the perfect man for such a difficult job.

  His mission was to desert from Lee’s Second Partisan Corps and join the British in New York City as a defector. If he implied that he had been inspired by Arnold’s actions, he stood a chance of meeting Arnold and gaining his confidence. Once ingratiated with Arnold, he was to study his routines and habits and discover the most efficient means of kidnapping him with the help of a handful of operatives in and around Manhattan. The men would then smuggle the traitor out of the city and back into American-held territory in New Jersey, where Washington could take custody of Arnold.

  Champe and his associates needed to be extremely careful, however, for Washington did not want to give the British any reason to believe that the Americans had simply sent in thugs to finish off Arnold as revenge. The general wrote to Lee on October 20: “No circumstance whatever shall obtain my consent to his being put to death. The idea which would accompany such an event would be that Ruffians had been hired to assassinate him. My aim is to make a public example of him, and this should be strongly impressed upon those who are employed to bring him off.”

  The plan worked beautifully. Champe managed to successfully desert, though the extreme secrecy of the plan meant that Lee’s unsuspecting men gave chase and nearly captured Champe to bring him back for punishment. Nevertheless, he made it to the shore not far from two British ships and dove into the water, swimming madly toward them. After he was taken aboard and questioned, the British brought him into the city, where General Clinton, upon interviewing him, deemed his desire to join the British genuine, introduced him to Arnold, and placed him in the force Arnold now commanded.

  Over the next few weeks he formed a plan to capture Arnold during his evening walk. However, Champe never turned up on the evening of December 21, when he was scheduled to bring an unconscious Arnold to a small boat waiting in the river. A few days later, it was learned that Arnold’s unit (in which Champe was now serving as part of his cover) had been unexpectedly shipped off to Virginia the day before. What had begun as a promising attempt to purchase additional safety for the Culpers by removing a dangerous enemy ended in disappointment.

  SMALL VICTORIES

  Despite the clever plotting of Washington and Lee and the valiant efforts of John Champe, Benedict Arnold was still at large, which meant the Culper Ring was still at risk—a
nd one of them was still imprisoned. The pressure was felt by every member, but the spy at the center of the ring suffered the most.

  Evidence of Townsend’s continued anxiety and despondency throughout the fall and winter of 1780–81 shows up in the account book from his store. Whereas he had previously been quite prompt in recording his business transactions, the entries suddenly appear far more sporadic. Between November 1779 and July 1780, he updated his accounts every three to five days at first, then slowed down to every seven to nine days. During those eight months, he was almost predictable in his reckonings, with the exception of February–March 1780, when he twice lapsed thirteen days between entries. During the summer of 1780, his entries began to have much larger spans between them. He made no entries for September, just one in October (on the seventh), and then nothing again until December 2. The next time he seems to have cracked open his ledger after that was nearly four months later, on March 29, 1781.

  Townsend’s spying activities largely ceased during the season of his withdrawal from business, but Washington took advantage of that time to shift his focus temporarily from Manhattan to the surrounding areas. Thanks in part to the reports still coming in from Woodhull on Long Island, Washington began to reconsider Tallmadge’s earlier proposals to storm certain vulnerable locations on the island.

  On November 21, 1780, Tallmadge (now a colonel in the Continental Army) led a contingency of eighty men selected from his Second Dragoons—along with Caleb Brewster, who is listed as a captain in the operation—from Fairfield, Connecticut, across Long Island Sound in whaleboats to the town of Mount Sinai, roughly six miles from Tallmadge’s native Setauket. Battling rain and high winds, they marched roughly twenty miles through the night of the twenty-second, straight across the island to Mastic, on the southern shore, and attacked Fort St. George on the morning of November 23. Constructed and fortified the previous year by staunch Loyalists and named for the patron saint of England, the fort had a large stockpile of supplies and provisions, including an ample supply of hay upon which British soldiers in the area depended to feed their livestock. After a brief fight against the well-armed residents, Tallmadge’s men were able to seize control, destroy the stockpile, burn the hay, and take the fort’s inhabitants prisoner—all with suffering only one injury on their side. The prisoners were marched back across the island to the boats that were waiting under guard, and the whole company crossed the Sound again for Connecticut.

  Washington was pleased by the efforts and applauded Tallmadge in a personal letter. Woodhull, too, sent his congratulations, writing on November 28, “The burning the forage is agreeable to me and must hurt the enemy much.”

  It was not a major battle from a strategic standpoint, but it delivered an important morale boost to the Patriots and provided a psychological victory over the British by proving that New York and Long Island had not been forgotten, nor were they invincible.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Beginning of the End

  With the death of André, the British found themselves without a spymaster at a time when such an officer was particularly important. Things were heating up in the south again, particularly in Virginia, where Arnold (with poor Champe in tow) had sailed with fifteen hundred troops in December 1780. Clinton found his attentions drawn to the Chesapeake even as the raid at Fort St. George had proved that New York could not be left unattended. A man was named to fill André’s vacancy and manage intelligence for the commander of the British troops on American soil.

  Major Oliver DeLancey was in his early thirties—a New York City native whose family was among the earliest Jewish settlers in the American colonies. He had been educated in England but returned home soon after the war began in order to organize a Loyalist regiment in New York. He may not have had the same level of star appeal that André enjoyed, but he was brilliant, able, and now operating in his native territory, which gave him a distinct advantage in understanding the people, customs, and terrain. He immediately set about to reorganize the British intelligence system, unifying codes and bringing a number of disparate and independent elements together so that information could more easily be shared, analyzed, and acted upon.

  The Culper Ring, in the meantime, stayed busy (if not active in spying) as the calendar turned from 1780 to 1781. Late in the winter, Caleb Brewster captured a British boat and eight prisoners, including two officers. Townsend resumed his business and reopened his shop in the city in March. Woodhull tried to persuade him to start gathering intelligence again, but Townsend believed that the British had dispatched a spy of their own in New York who was actively trying to root out the sources and paths of the Culpers’ information and insisted on lying low. The matter was dropped until the end of April, when Tallmadge could finally report the pending resurrection of the ring’s activities, with a few adjustments made to their former routine. “The plan which he [Woodhull] has consented to adopt, on certain conditions, is for him to remain for the most part on Long Island and C. Junr. whom he thinks might be engaged again, to reside constantly at New York,” he wrote to Washington on the twenty-fifth. “That some confidential person must of course be employed to carry dispatches as it would cause suspicions which might lead to detection if either of the Culpers should be frequently passing from New York to Setauket, &c. they being men of some considerable note.”

  Washington preferred a more timely delivery of intelligence, but he agreed to this arrangement. The Culpers’ reports were essential to the continued success of the Americans, even if they did take a few days longer to arrive. The general had learned from his earlier mistake; vital information received a few days late was infinitely preferable to no information at all. He quickly replied to Tallmadge:

  The great object of information you are very well acquainted with—such as, Arrivals, Embarkations, Preparations for Movements, alterations of Positions, situation of Posts, Fortifications, Garrisons, strength or weakness of each, distributions and strength of Corps, and in general every thing which can be interesting and important for us to know. Besides these, upon a smaller scale, which are necessary to be reported: and that whatever intelligence is communicated ought to be not in general terms, but in detail, and with the greatest precision.

  At present I am anxious to know (for the reports have been very numerous vague and uncertain) whether another embarkation is preparing, and if so to what amount, and where destined. What the present force of the Enemy is; particularly on Long Island, in New York and at King’s Bridge. What Corps are at the latter place, how strong, and where posted exactly—and indeed what the situation, prospect, and designs of the enemy are, so far as they can be penetrated into.

  Washington’s instructions are vast in their scope and display the extreme confidence he had in his most valuable ring to obtain precisely the breadth and depth of intelligence he required. He took pains in the same letter to note that he was “engaging in behalf of the United States a liberal reward for the services of the C——s, (of whose fidelity and ability I entertain a high opinion) it is certainly but reasonable, from patriotism and every other principle, that their exertions should be proportionately great, to subserve essentially the interest of the Public.”

  Despite Washington’s praise, Townsend adamantly refused to put pen to paper. He had seen how André had been done in by the discovery of papers and plans—hard and damning evidence he could not deny or talk his way out of. He would be happy to convey orally whatever information he had observed, Townsend explained to Woodhull when they met in the city in early May, but the risk of trying to smuggle written documents out of Manhattan was far too great. Woodhull could not deny the truth of those concerns, especially now that Oliver DeLancey was asserting his authority with new ideas for uncovering plots in their midst.

  In his May 19 letter to Tallmadge, Woodhull noted that, on the way back to Long Island from visiting Townsend, “the enemy must have got some hint of me for when passing at Brooklyn Ferry was strictly examin
ed and told some vilian supported a correspondence from this place.” The letter also included intelligence Austin Roe had obtained verbally from Townsend on his last visit to the city, but they all knew their visits could not be so frequent as to raise suspicions. Woodhull and Townsend worked exhaustively to recruit a new member for the ring, one who was not already under the watchful eyes of British operatives and could operate freely in Manhattan and smuggle out detailed written reports. “When at New York myself, together with Culper Junior [we] almost racked our invention to point out a proper person and made several attempts but failed—no person will write,” Woodhull lamented.

  SECRET SIX DELIVER YORKTOWN TO WASHINGTON

  General Washington remained hopeful that the next major military engagement would be focused on retaking New York, but he was depending heavily on the French navy—specifically, the large fleet under the command of Admiral François-Joseph-Paul de Grasse, which was currently in the Caribbean—because the success of the mission would rely in large part upon the men, supplies, and ships that the French could provide to shore up the inadequately manned and provisioned American forces. This meant that Washington’s plans were at the mercy of the French leaders who ordered the admiral to sail. So when word reached the general that the fleet would be sailing in August 1781 to Yorktown, Virginia, and not to New York, he was disappointed but knew he could not afford to squander such an opportunity—especially because he had a secret weapon.