Washington's Spies

by Alexander Rose

  By and large, however, the Americans were more ruthless at weeding out agents and those sympathizers abetting them. Even the “great appearance of guilt” in a man’s “countenance”—“a faithful index to the heart,” declared Alexander McDougal of Simon Mabee, soon after hanged—could be enough to kill him.67 An unguarded word to the wrong person also risked a death sentence. John Williams was tried on April 13 for “holding a treacherous correspondence with the enemy and enlisting men into their service.” The prosecution produced Nicholas Outhouse, Israel Outhouse, and Christian House to swear that Williams had said to them at various times that he wanted to enlist some men for the British and had talked of going to New York. Despite an energetic defense by Williams, who said the Outhouses were biased against him because of a personal quarrel, and adding that he was entirely innocent, while introducing six character witnesses with Patriot sympathies who testified “he has been frequently on guard with them & they always took him to be a friend to his country,” the court found him “guilty of the charge & do therefore sentence him to be hanged by the neck till he is dead.”68

  Miscreants were tried before military courts-martial, not civil courts, and could accordingly expect little sympathy from a jury.69 In the spring of 1777, partly owing to the absence of reinforcements from overseas, the British made a determined effort to raise men for Loyalist regiments. They directed Loyalists, sometimes sent from New York, to travel to the country and offer pay and benefits to potential recruits. These men often stayed hidden in the houses of known sympathizers; if detected, their protectors often went to the gallows with them. Mass trials became increasingly common as the authorities sought to crack down on the enemies within. At the end of April, to take just one instance, thirteen men went on trial for being “soldiers in the service of the King of Great Britain” while “owing allegiance to the State of New York”; ten of them were hanged.70

  In May, Simon Newall volunteered to act as an agent provocateur to rouse a ring of covert Tories. To this end, he befriended John Likely and masqueraded as “one dissaffected to his country and on my way to join General Howe and engage in his service as many as possible.” Over dinner one night, Likely “manifested a firm attachment” to the British cause; Newall saw the opening and said he wanted “to spy out a way in which we could bring down a number of men for General Howe,” and asked “how and when I should find friends to my purpose.” The unsuspecting Likely then told him the names of several “friends,” one of whom, Anthony Umans, was a member of the local Committee of Safety, and had even served in the Continental army, which he said was only “to still people’s talk and save himself from trouble.” Umans put him in touch with Reuben Drake, the chairman of the same committee Umans sat on. Through Drake, Newall was given an introduction to one “Huson,” a recruiter who was looking for men to take to New York, with whom he became friends. Over (many) drinks, Lent Far—one of Huson’s associates—proudly declared that their “business was to plunder the Whigs and they had as good will to kill them as a dog.” As for himself, he said, “he would go and join Howe … and fight his way through the rebel guards to get there or die.” That night, reported Newall, “we all dined heartily, drank King George’s health and Howe’s, confusion to Congress and Washington.”71

  At the subsequent trial, only Likely and Umans were charged. The rest had run for either New York or the hills. Likely claimed that he had sent Newall to Umans—his fellow committeeman—so that he might be arrested. Umans said he had directed him to Drake for the same purpose. The court, this time, was lenient: Each man was sentenced to receive one hundred lashes on his bare back and to be jailed until the end of hostilities. Likely and Umans were lucky in their timing. A short time before, both would have certainly swung, but the pace of executions had been so incessant, even the stoutest of local Patriots and court officers were debating “the propriety of our determining the fate of our fellow creatures.” Civilians “unacquainted with the Articles of War” or martial law should not be tried by courts-martial, especially when, as president of the court Colonel Henry Livingston chided, “skilled persons have been sent among them to draw the substance of their stupidity and ignorance” and had then manipulated the accused into giving evidence against themselves. Here Livingston had in mind Newall, though Likely and Umans still had to be punished for their undoubted acts of subversion.72

  In the purely military realm, however, spies could not expect such leniency. In mid-July, for instance, General Israel Putnam at Peekskill, New York, told Washington that he captured one Edmond Palmer, who had “been lurking around here plundering & driving off cattle to the enemy, [and] breaking up & robbing houses.” He had entered a Mr. Willis’s house, “presented his pistol to his wife’s breast as she sat in bed, strip’d the rings from her fingers, then fell upon the father an old gentleman, abused, beat, & left him, to appearance dead.” Palmer was also known to have “been about recruiting for the enemy & spying our army.” Putnam believed that “the speedy execution of spies is agreeable to the laws of nature & nations & absolutely necessary to the preservation of the army & without such power in the army, it must be incompetent for its own safety.”73 Despite Palmer’s wife (carrying an infant in her arms) pleading with Putnam for mercy and a request from Sir Henry Clinton, then commanding the British troops in New York, that since Palmer held a lieutenant’s commission in a Loyalist regiment he was a prisoner-of-war, Putnam remained unmoveable and Palmer was hanged. He also brusquely informed Clinton that “Edmond Palmer, an officer in the enemy’s service, was taken as a spy lurking within our lines, has been tried as a spy, condemned as a spy, and shall be executed as a spy.” Soon afterwards, he added a helpful P.S.: “And has been accordingly executed.”74

  Another of Washington’s generals, Lord Stirling, was equally merciless. In late July, one of his detachments brought in five Tories, one of whom—Daniel Curvin—proved upon interrogation to be a spy. He confessed that he had been sent “to view the situation & motions of our army, that he came and remained in the neighbourhood of the army till Sunday” but was caught in northern New Jersey. There were several corroborative pieces of evidence. “Therefore I ordered him to be instantly hanged.”75

  That summer, as well, the Americans were faced with the threat of General John Burgoyne’s army driving south from Canada, the grand strategy being to rendezvous with Clinton near Albany and thereby split New England from the rest of the rebel states. British high command tended to assume that the majority of Americans were not rebels, but were pushed into insurrection by fiery New England radicals; once the Bostonians were dealt with, so the theory went, the colonies would return to their natural allegiance. Burgoyne’s plan, while strategically correct and boldly executed, suffered fatally from its complexity.

  The general had envisaged a triple-pronged offensive in which he would push south along the Lake Champlain–Lake George waterway and occupy Albany, Colonel Barry St. Leger’s eight-hundred-man contingent would circle west to Lake Ontario and then drive east to Albany, and General Howe would advance from New York up the Hudson—all at the same time. The major problem with the plan was that it required seamless coordination between the three prongs, an impossibility given the distances that separated the armies. Howe’s usual lack of energy should also have been taken into account, though in his defense it had been left unclear what exactly he should have been doing, and when it should have been done. After all, Burgoyne was his junior in rank, and Howe received his orders from Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State for America in London (whose considered view of the rebellion’s chances was that “these country clowns cannot whip us”): Should he take his commands from a man who was the illegitimate son of Lord Bingley and rumored to fleece drunks at cards?

  In mid-June, Burgoyne’s expedition left St. Johns in a large fleet of pinnaces and transports to sail south toward Fort Ticonderoga, the key to Lake George and the Hudson. Within a week of Burgoyne’s arrival on July 1, the fortress had fallen, but the victo
r made a grievous mistake in advancing to the Hudson overland (the original plan had called to proceed by water) in order to circumvent Fort George. Out there, there were no roads, just rough, thick wilderness with uneven terrain crammed with pine and hardwoods. By the end of the summer, Burgoyne’s army was down and bloodied, just as the enemy was continually receiving fresh volunteers. Worse, Burgoyne had heard that Barry St. Leger had turned back, and that Howe was not about to save him, as he had sailed instead for the Delaware Bay, intent on capturing Philadelphia, the rebel capital and seat of Congress.

  In September, while Howe was engaged in the Philadelphia campaign, he left New York in the charge of Sir Henry Clinton, who was keener to help the beleaguered Burgoyne. At the time, since Howe had denuded him of troops and left him just four thousand regulars and three thousand Loyalists, Clinton couldn’t achieve more than a diversionary feint, but on September 24 he received reinforcements from Britain and began preparing to march north to relieve the pressure on Burgoyne.

  Clinton’s feelings on the matter of Howe’s adventure were revealed in a letter he sent to Burgoyne in August:

  You will have heard, Dr Sir I doubt not long before this can have reached you that Sir W. Howe is gone from hence. The Rebels imagine that he is gone to the Eastward. By this time however he has filled Chesapeak bay with surprize and terror. Washington marched the greater part of the Rebels to Philadelphia in order to oppose Sir Wm’s. army. I hear he is now returned upon finding none of our troops landed but am not sure of this, great part of his troops are returned for certain. I am sure this countermarching must be ruin to them. I am left to command here, half of my force may I am sure defend everything here with much safety. I shall therefore send Sir W. 4 or 5 Bat[talio]ns. I have too small a force to invade the New England provinces; they are too weak to make any effectual efforts against me and you do not want any diversion in your favour. I can, therefore very well spare him 1500 men. I shall try some thing certainly towards the close of the year, not till then at any rate. It may be of use to inform you that report says all yields to you. I own to you that I think the business will quickly be over now. Sr. W’s move just at this time has been capital. Washingtons have been the worst he could take in every respect. sincerely give you much joy on your success.…

  By a different courier, Clinton sent a single piece of paper with an hourglass-shaped hole cut out, a device known as a “grille” or “mask.” He was using a “Cardano System,” named after Giralamo Cardano, a sixteenth-century Italian cryptologist. What Clinton had done was write his genuine message within the borders of the grille and then filled in the rest of the above letter with suitably innocuous observations and deliberate misinformation. In case of interception, Clinton sent two express messengers; the enemy needed the letter and the grille to decipher the message. Thus, while Clinton openly says “Sr. W’s move just at this time has been capital. Washingtons have been the worst he could take in every respect,” when read with the grille, the true meaning is revealed as “I own to you that I think Sr. W’s move just at this time the worst he could take.”76

  Be that as it may, Clinton was still expected to do something, and he prepared his troops for an expedition. He aimed for Forts Clinton and Montgomery, then commanded by General George Clinton (the governor of New York). Sir Henry Clinton captured the forts in early October, and sent a small force up the Hudson to Fort Constitution, which quickly surrendered. In short order, Clinton had done what he had intended to do: create a diversion to the south, demolish the American barrier of forts on the river, and open the Hudson for navigation for forty miles north of the forts. Even so, Fort Constitution lay one hundred miles south of Burgoyne’s position.

  On October 8, Henry Clinton dispatched Captain Daniel Taylor to find Burgoyne and acquaint him with the situation.77 Cognizant that Taylor’s route would be a hazardous one through wilderness occupied by roving detachments of American soldiers under General Horatio Gates’s command and unsympathetic locals, Clinton—no slouch when it came to finding innovative ways to get his messages through—had cast a small, swallowable silver ball, oval in shape and about the size of a bullet, which could be unscrewed into halves to reveal a tiny piece of silk containing the message: “Nothing now between us but Gates. I sincerely hope this little success of ours may facilitate your operations.”78

  Clinton was being deliberately ambiguous in hoping that the beleaguered Burgoyne’s operations would be “facilitated”: No one wanted to be blamed for Burgoyne’s loss of an army, and Clinton consciously avoided advising Burgoyne to advance or retreat from his isolated position. By passing the buck right back to Burgoyne, Clinton had ensured that what his comrade did next would be his own decision, and his sole responsibility.

  Clinton’s craftiness, nevertheless, did Taylor no good. He was caught a day later by a patrol and, when searched, was revealed to be carrying seven personal letters written by British and Loyalist officers to their friends in Burgoyne’s army that Taylor had foolishly agreed to deliver.79 That correspondence, in itself, was enough to condemn him, but Taylor panicked and forgot to swallow the silver ball, which he had secreted in his pocket. Dragged before General George Clinton, Taylor recovered his composure and slipped the casing into his mouth. As his captors pried open his jaws to retrieve it, Taylor managed to swallow the message. Clinton, a patient man, wasn’t angry, and asked Dr. James Thacher to administer “a very strong emetic, calculated to operate it either way.” Unfortunately, while this “had the desired effect,” Taylor, “though close watched,” enterprisingly swallowed the casing again. This time, Clinton “demanded the ball on pain of being hung up instantly and cut open to search [for] it. This brought it forth.”80

  On October 14, Taylor was taken before a court-martial and charged with espionage. He pleaded not guilty on the distinctly weak grounds that when a Lieutenant Howe and his men had captured him, they had been wearing British uniforms. “He was thereby deceived” when he approached them for directions. In fact, Taylor was quite correct about the patrol wearing enemy garb, but that was because they had recently taken some of Burgoyne’s men prisoner and had stolen their red coats—which were rather better tailored and more durable than the American ones. Taylor’s end was an inevitable one: A few days later he was brought to a nearby apple tree and hanged from one of its limbs.81 As he mounted the ladder, Taylor—who had risked, and was about to lose, his life to save Burgoyne—heard the clatter of a messenger arriving from General Gates. Burgoyne had surrendered, but it was too late for Taylor.

  Burgoyne’s lack of support from New York had doomed him, but from General Howe’s point of view, the conquest of Philadelphia was of vaster importance than the sideshow up north. He was content to allow Henry Clinton to launch a diversionary thrust that would attract Washington’s attention to the Hudson while he himself transported the main army to the Delaware River by sea. At the end of August, Washington received word that Howe, believing the river defenses too strong to proceed to Philadelphia with his fifteen thousand men, had actually landed at the Head of Elk on the Chesapeake. From there, he intended to march northeast to the city. Washington planted himself midway between Howe’s landing place and Philadelphia, on Brandywine Creek. On September 11, in what was a repeat performance of the Battle of New York a year earlier, Howe feinted toward Washington’s center while executing a flanking maneuver with his main force. Washington seems not to have learned his lesson from his defeat the previous time, and at Brandywine he was again defeated by Howe and forced to retreat, leaving a thousand of his men dead and wounded. Howe, for his part, had yet again been unwilling or unable to launch a knockout blow to the staggered American forces. Though Washington escaped, the road to Philadelphia now lay open. On September 26, Lord Cornwallis and his legions entered the city, recently abandoned by Congress, which had decamped to Lancaster.

  Some time before, Major John Clark had returned from Long Island and was attached to General Greene’s staff, but shortly before Brandywine was “se
verely wounded” in his right shoulder during a skirmish.82 He had had little time to recuperate when he was called back into service as a spy. Washington ascribed the Brandywine defeat to what he called “uncertain and contradictory” intelligence, which had prevented him from deploying his forces more effectively.83 Since Clark’s observational and undercover skills were unsurpassed, he wanted Clark to act as his eyes and ears as close as possible to Philadelphia and the key forts, Mifflin and Mercer, that guarded the Delaware. Clark immediately set out on his lonely mission and was soon running a remarkable stable of spies. Just two days after yet another defeat for Washington at Germantown on October 4, Clark dispatched his first letter to the general at five in the morning.84 (He used a former barber turned soldier, Martin Nicholls, aged eighteen and five feet two inches tall with a yellowish complexion and a face badly pitted with smallpox, as his messenger.)85 His second was sent the same day at 10 p.m.86 Over the next three months—despite suffering grievously from shoulder pain—he would send another thirty of them, each carefully describing British troop movements and numbers, naval maneuvers, infantry positions, checkpoints, artillery emplacements, and Philadelphia gossip, all gleaned from local inhabitants (some of whom were so suspicious of the stranger, they “watch me like a hawk would a chicken”) or his roster of agents.87 Driven solely by duty—“Please give me every instruction you may think necessary, and I will endeavor to observe them, and obey your orders with all the exactitude of a better officer,” he once wrote—Clark changed his hiding places so frequently and roved so distant (up to forty miles a day) he wore out three nags.88 At other times, camped out there all alone in the winter darkness and sleeping fitfully for fear of discovery by an enemy patrol, he confessed that “my hands are so cold I can scarcely write to you.”89