Graves did sail back to the scene, coming close enough on September 13 to make a count of the French ships lined up against him, shake his head, and sail on…back to the British base at New York. There he refitted and repaired, and on October 19 set sail again for the bay and Yorktown with a refurbished relief force. Too late, of course, since that was the very day that Cornwallis formally surrendered Yorktown.
Spies in from the Cold
FOR SEVERAL OF GEORGE WASHINGTON’S MEN—SPIES, ACTUALLY—REJOINING their own people at or near war’s end was not always a simple task. His eighteenth-century “moles” had been so successful at infiltrating the enemy, they needed a ranking superior’s good word to redeem their reputations among neighbors or former comrades-in-arms.
One such “mole” was Sergeant John Champe of Virginia, who pretty much had been minding his own business as a member of Henry (“Light-Horse Harry”) Lee’s cavalry troop in New Jersey…that is, until the American camp discovered in September 1780 that General Benedict Arnold had gone over to the British.
As everyone could have guessed, Washington felt personally outraged at such betrayal by an officer he had gone out of his way to befriend and even to protect. Washington was expectantly furious at such an act of treason in any case.
But that wasn’t all—the commander in chief also was determined to bring the traitor back by any means possible.
He meant abduction, kidnapping…by whatever means, go get Benedict Arnold!
He entrusted Lee with the tricky assignment, and Champe volunteered. And what a task it would be! A real Mission: Impossible.
First of all, pretending to be a fleeing deserter, Champe was to “break away” from Patriot lines on the west banks of the Hudson River, leap into the water, swim out to a British frigate, and convince its crew that he really was a deserter. This much Champe did…while almost being shot and captured by American soldiers unacquainted with the abduction plot.
Next, he was to establish himself in Manhattan, where Arnold was known to be residing—and preparing to become a brigadier general in the British army. Champe was to find out where Arnold was staying and then join the still-forming Arnold’s Legion. All the while he was to make contact with Washington’s spies in the city, all of which the tall, very capable Virginian did.
Finally, with the help of his fellow secret agents, Sergeant Champe was to intercept Arnold in one of his nocturnal strolls at the rear of his garden at No. 3 Broadway, overpower and kidnap the turncoat, then carry him back across the Hudson to American lines by boat. This much Champe never did do…but through no fault of his own. Unfortunately, Arnold and his Legion were shipped out before Champe could act. As a “new recruit” in the Legion, Champe was shipped out with them, all the way south to Virginia, far out of touch with his former commanding officer Light-Horse Harry Lee. Yet, only Lee knew the true status and mission of supposed turncoat Champe.
As Arnold and his men ranged up and down the James River, largely in Tidewater, Virginia, Champe lived in fear of capture by his fellow Patriots and execution at their hands as a deserter. Pretty soon he deserted the British and began hunting for Lee, the only man who could verify his story.
Happily, Champe finally did track down Lee in South Carolina, where he had been deployed after Yorktown to campaign with Nathanael Greene during the war’s final months.
Lee gave his fellow Virginian an honorable discharge, and that was that… except that Champe never received a pension for his wartime service, nor any recognition for his unusual role. Two decades after his death in 1818, his family went to Congress and extracted a posthumous “promotion” for Champe to ensign, the lowest officer’s rank in the army of the day, plus pay for the period when he was listed as a deserter.
***
Another of Washington’s agents who later “came in from the cold” of operations in the field, the enemy field, was Irish-born John Honeyman, a former grenadier in the British army’s Forty-eighth Regiment of Foot. In that capacity, he took part in the campaigns against Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1758 and against Quebec in 1759, both actions led by General James Wolfe.
Favored by Wolfe for catching him in a fall down a ship’s companionway, the brawny Irishman rowed in Wolfe’s own boat in the assault on Quebec, then was one of the three men who carried the fatally wounded Wolfe from the battlefield.
Honeyman subsequently settled in the American colonies, became a weaver and married. He chose Griggstown, New Jersey, as home for himself and his wife, Mary, also an immigrant from Ireland. When the Revolutionary War broke out, he not only joined the American cause but volunteered his services to George Washington in person. Honeyman was able to show Washington a letter of recommendation from the late General Wolfe.
After a series of meetings in 1775 and a final one in November of 1776, it was decided the onetime British soldier would travel about in British-occupied territory posing as a butcher and Loyalist. His war record presumably would win the confidence of the British, at that moment in hot pursuit of Washington’s tattered army as it retreated across New Jersey to the Delaware River and the Pennsylvania line.
As a result, Honeyman supplied the Hessians at Trenton with their beef as the Christmas holidays of 1776 approached. Seeing the relaxed, festive mood of the Germans and scouting the dirt “highways” and byways of the vicinity, “butcher” Honeyman was quite ready to report when Washington’s outlying troops “captured” him (at the commander in chief’s orders) and hauled him into headquarters at Newtown, Pennsylvania. The notorious “Loyalist” was closeted for a time with Washington himself—and perhaps with staff aide Tench Tilghman, as well. He imparted all the information he had on the Hessian defenses and troop dispositions at Trenton. Emerging from that vital conference, Honeyman was remanded to the custody of a stout stockade, its guards told he would be court-martialed and then hanged as a spy the next day.
That night, not-so-oddly enough, a nearby fire distracted the stockade guards, a door was left open, and Honeyman was able to dash for the river in a shower of musket-fire that fortunately missed him altogether. At the river, he found a conveniently abandoned boat, which provided him a vehicle for crossing the river and reaching “safe haven” among the Hessians.
He related his tale of narrow escape and regaled the holiday-minded Hessians with stories of the pitiful condition of the rebels in their encampments on the Pennsylvania side of the river. Bidding the Hessians farewell that Christmas Eve, Honeyman disappeared into the New Jersey countryside. Two days later, at dawn on December 26, the “pitiful rebels” surprised the Hessians at Trenton in one of the greatest American victories of the entire Revolutionary War. They again struck hard at the enemy—this time at the British themselves—a few days later at Princeton. It is thought that additional intelligence-gathering by Honeyman contributed to that victory as well.
The former British soldier continued his spying for much of the war, albeit somewhat less spectacularly. He was so deeply entrenched as a “mole,” he was again arrested by American troops. An emissary sent by George Washington arranged bail that won his temporary release from jail, then he disappeared again.
Just as potentially serious, an angry Patriot crowd gathered at his New Jersey home one night, frightening his wife and seven children and threatening to burn their home to the ground. Her fellow townspeople desisted only when she produced a piece of paper ostensibly signed by George Washington, saying that the wife of “notorious spy” John Honeyman of Griggstown should be “protected from all harm and annoyance from every quarter until further orders.”
When Honeyman returned home from his wartime travails in 1780, his friends and neighbors treated him with open hostility, still thinking he was a committed Loyalist. Only a personal appearance by George Washington himself dissuaded them—and overnight transformed their hated neighbor into the town’s best-known hero.
***
Additional notes: George Washington’s extensive spy networks for most of the wartime period w
ere “run” both by himself and his intelligence chief, Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge. With focus upon British headquarters in New York, their spies, or “moles,” included Samuel Rivington, editor of the strictly Loyalist Royal Gazette in New York, and one of his writers, local merchant Robert Townsend. The latter wrote his Loyalist-appearing pieces as a cover while actually supplying information to one Samuel Woodhull, a farmer on the north shore of Long Island. Woodhull in turn signalled his frequent receipt of Townsend’s latest tidbits by hanging garments a certain way on his clothesline. Americans in Connecticut across the Long Island Sound spotted the signals with their spyglasses, then sent a boat across the water to pick up the latest Townsend message, usually written in invisible ink…and then usually rushed to Washington himself.
These two, Townsend and Woodhull, went by the code names of Culper Junior and Senior.
According to Thomas Fleming in Liberty! The American Revolution, the “Culper” pair could take credit for aborting British plans for a potentially crippling attack on the French when they landed at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1780. An early exponent of disinformation, Washington reacted to the “Culper” information by spreading word that he planned to attack New York about the same time. The British, as a result, kept their forces “at home” rather than weaken the New York garrison.
Another key spy for Washington, Fleming notes, was Irish-American tailor Hercules Mulligan, who provided “invaluable” information, also from inside the British bastion of New York City. Staff aide Alexander Hamilton was Mulligan’s “handler,” said Fleming.
At war’s end, Washington took the necessary steps to rehabilitate his dug-in “moles” in the eyes of their Patriot neighbors and friends. In Mulligan’s case, he did this by publicly having breakfast with the tailor one day. He also openly visited with editor Rivington. The roles of Townsend and Woodhull became known as well.
Frontier Standoff
OUT IN THE UNTAMED WILDS OF KENTUCKY, WITH THEIR AMERICAN FORT UNDER attack by a combined force of Indians and British, a combination of women and young boys would be the heroes of the day. For it was they who actually ventured beyond the stout log walls of Bryan’s Station to fetch water from a spring sixty yards away, close to bushes and trees potentially hiding the enemy.
“While we were dipping up the water I chanced to see under the bushes the feet of one Indian and the hand of another grasping a tomahawk,” said fifteen-year-old Hetty Tomlinson later. “They were not twenty steps from me, and I trembled so I could barely stand.”
The settlers crowded inside the log fort and its twenty cabins knew the Indians were out there—they just didn’t want the Indians to know that they knew.
August 16, 1782, had started with an odd “display” by several Wyandot Indians to the rear of Bryan’s Station. They were shooting off their muskets and jumping around with no effort to conceal their presence. Old Indian hands among the fort’s settlers, forty-four of them armed militiamen, suspected a trap—correctly so.
Rather than a mere handful of oddly behaving Indians, the wilderness beyond the fort’s confines held a hidden force of more than three hundred Indians from various tribes, plus fifty British and Tory members of Butler’s Rangers led by Captains William Caldwell and Alexander McKee. Also on hand was the notorious Simon Girty.
The mixed force, in fact, had crept forward during the previous night to surround the fort. Caldwell’s plan and hope was that the American defenders would rush forth in pursuit of the small Wyandot group and thus leave the fort itself vulnerable to attack by the entire 350-man raiding party.
But this was the “Year of Blood” out on the frontier; a year of repeated attacks on frontier forts and settlements by the British and their Indian allies; a year of atrocities and horror stories, too. The Americans inside the log walls of Bryan’s Station were understandably jittery. And suspicious.
They were also prepared for a fight. Learning that Hoy’s Station in nearby Madison County had been attacked, the men at Bryan’s had spent the night before cleaning their weapons and molding bullets in preparation for a march to the aid of Hoy’s Station. They expected to run into Indians…albeit not quite so soon as outside their own fort the very next morning.
At that point, their captain, Elijah Craig, warned of a possible ambush by a larger, well-hidden force and refused to send anyone to confront the Wyandots. He did dispatch two messengers—bursting out of the fort gates on horses at full gallop—to nearby Lexington with an urgent plea for help. Now, those left behind the stockade walls must prepare to hold out until help came. The longer they could pretend to be unaware of the hidden Indians, meanwhile, the longer they might delay the inevitable attack by the entire force. Let the enemy wait and to see if the fort’s fighting men could be drawn out by the demonstrating Wyandots. That was the reasoning inside the log walls.
Unfortunately, the trapped settlers had not yet gone for their daily water supply. The spring was outside the fort, just sixty yards away…a long, unprotected sixty yards. They would need drinking water if the fort came under siege for any length of time. Just as vital, they also would need water to put out fires if the Indians attacked with flaming torches, a known and proven tactic on the frontier. Then, too, it would be “normal” to send the women out for water as was customary. Anything to lull the watching enemy into holding back his full-scale attack.
So it was that a cluster of incredibly brave women and girls left the relative safety of the fort and walked to the spring with their containers, ambling as casually as they could, chattering among one another as usual…their hearts in their mouths all the while. When it came to killing and scalping, they well knew, Indians did not balk at making women their victims along with the menfolk.
As Hetty Tomlinson later reported, the Indians were certainly close by as the women filled their containers. They then strolled back to the fort, restraining every natural impulse to run as fast as they could. In minutes, the gate was shut behind them. For the moment, they were safe. And the fort’s occupants had a supply of precious water.
Later in the morning, the Wyandots again appeared to the rear of the fort and again demonstrated. This time, the settlers pretended to be fooled and sent out a party of men, who drew close to the small Indian band, but, by plan, fled when the Indians fired on them. Inside, the rest of the men had been on guard against the anticipated full attack against the front of the fort.
And now at last it came. Girty reacted to the noisy but bogus clash at the rear by signalling the expected, all-out assault. Brandishing flaming torches, his Indians erupted from the woods and raced forward, fully intent on reducing the entire fort to smoldering ashes. Holding their fire until the last second, the defenders finally let loose a crashing volley that halted the charge, cutting down at least thirty of Girty’s warriors. The Indians retreated, but not before starting fires in a few empty cabins outside the stockade. Fortunately, a favorable wind kept the fires from reaching the fort itself.
But the enemy was not through with Bryan’s Station. With sniper fire forcing the defenders to keep their heads down (and killing two of them), the Indians fired off flaming arrows that repeatedly found their mark in the log walls and among the shingles on the inward-sloping cabin rooftops.
Now came the contribution of the fort’s second set of unusual heroes—agile young boys who ignored the occasional flying bullets or descending arrows to scramble about the rooftops putting out the small fires before they could take hold.
No one on the scene knew it yet, but help was on the way. Militia Colonel Levi Todd and Captain William Ellis were on the march with forty-seven men, about a third of them mounted. They came upon the scene in early afternoon, the shooting long since stopped, the woods surrounding the fort silent…still.
Determined to avoid an ambush, Colonel Todd decided to lead his men on foot in a flanking movement that would bring them to the fort’s gate from the side, rather than the front. In the meantime, Captain Ellis would lead more of their men on horsebac
k in a sudden gallop up the buffalo road leading directly to the fort’s front gate. Todd’s caution proved well founded, for the enemy had not left the scene. As Ellis and his troop raced up the buffalo path before the fort, they stirred up a cloud of dust—and a burst of musket fire from the woods alongside. The men of Todd’s flanking force, just then picking their way through a corn field on one side of the fort, heard the gunfire, turned toward it, but soon realized they had encountered an overwhelming enemy force. Fortunate for them, they rushed up before most of the Indians could reload their weapons after firing on the fast-moving horsemen. Even so, Colonel Todd’s flankers had to back off after seeing two of their number killed and two more wounded.
By then, Ellis and his companions had reached the sanctuary of the fort. Now, they joined the defenders in well-aimed fire upon any attackers carelessly exposing themselves in the foliage surrounding the wilderness bastion. If they could just hold out, more help soon would be on the way. Colonel Todd, retreating the few miles to Lexington, would see to that.
Girty and his British allies were well aware of these facts. Their time on the scene would be limited.
The Indian leader now shouted to the Americans in the fort that they had better surrender, or face the threat of British reinforcements armed with artillery due to arrive that very evening. He allegedly warned the defenders they would be tomahawked and scalped if they kept on fighting. All that Girty could accomplish, however, was to exchange shouted insults with loud-voiced American leader Aaron Reynolds inside the fort.
In the end, the Indians and the Rangers retreated on August 17—but not before destroying the settlers’ corn crop, slaughtering their livestock (hogs, cattle, and sheep), and eating what they could of it. The next day, a posse-like force of 180-odd frontiersmen and militia set off in pursuit…with disaster awaiting them at Blue Licks by the Licking River.
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 41