Washington's Spies

by Alexander Rose

  Rivington’s rag appeared twice a week—on Wednesdays and Saturdays so as not to compete with Hugh Gaine’s New York Mercury, which came out Mondays—and had 3,600 subscribers paying three dollars for an annual subscription, with advertisers being charged one dollar per fifteen lines of text.72 While it took only 600 subscribers to make a paper self-sufficient, Rivington’s costs were enormous, employing as he did sixteen men. Like many other newspaper barons, he found his influence greater than his profits. So, in keeping with traditional Grub Street practice, Rivington opened a business on the side. In his case, two. There was, first, a general store selling gloves, stationery, “a few very elegant pictures of the King and Queen,” canes, walking sticks, paper hangings, fishing tackle, tea, “gentlemans dress frocks, of scarlet cloth,” and “French raspberry brandy.”73 Second, along with at least one other silent investor—Townsend—he maintained his very fancy private coffeehouse, whose customers were forgiven their bills if they passed on stories Rivington could print (unattributed, of course).74

  The Rivington investment brought Townsend a small income. For his everyday business, he maintained his old connections to Templeton & Stewart, who supplied him with sugar, coffee, molasses, wine, butter, pork, cloth, pepper, tobacco, and tea.75 Townsend also supplied difficult-to-procure provisions (ribbon and fustian) for his father’s firm in Oyster Bay, which, in turn, was patronized by local British and Loyalist units, and he was occasionally fortunate enough to receive fresh produce from Oyster Bay—thanks to his family connections with the area’s farmers.76

  Even with his army contacts providing much-needed revenue, the first years of the war were hard on Townsend (as they were for many a merchant in New York). In late 1779—a few months after joining the Culper Ring—he took on a partner, Henry Oakham, an experienced merchant who had been recommended by Oliver Templeton. The pair opened a store at 18 Smith Street, just off Hanover Square between Queen and Water streets. The partnership was not a happy one, with Townsend accusing Oakham of importing goods on his private account and covertly reselling them to the firm at a vast markup. Oakham and Townsend parted ways in the early spring of 1781.77

  By that time, however, Townsend was firmly enough established to fly solo once more (and to leave the Underhills’ boardinghouse). He rented a store on Pecks Slip from Hannah Cockle for £125 a year, paying her in moderate weekly installments.78 He had rather good digs. In addition to the store, there was a spare room adjoining it, a cellar, a shared kitchen, and a small bedroom upstairs. Townsend went to Barclay & Co. for his home-furnishing needs. He bought andirons, a bellows, a poker and rake for the fireplace, candlesticks, a guest bed, chairs, and much else. Townsend, a lifelong bachelor, must have had an enthusiastic cook, owning as he did a ladle, a tureen, pepper grinder and salt cellar, milk pot, canisters, teapot, wineglasses (for company), mustard pot, decanters, tumblers, a vinegar cruet, a sugar dish, and cupboards full of pots, pans, cutlery, and plates.79

  Townsend did well out of the war. According to his Cash Book, between May 1781 and July 1783, he brought in £16,786, and expended £15,161, leaving him a profit of £1,625, or about £750 per year. This was at a time when his monthly “house expenses for sundrys” ran him (depending on inflation and scarcity) between £6 and £14—let’s assume it averaged £10. Adding his rent of £125 and those “sundry” costs of £120 a year comes to £255, or 34 percent of his annual income—leaving him more than enough for a young man-about-town to get by on.80

  Yet, despite the flashy connections and a hefty disposable income, two and a half years after pledging his allegiance to the Crown, Townsend turned his coat in mid-1779 and joined the Culper Ring. Why?

  During the crisis of the mid-1750s in Pennsylvania, when the “Political” Quakers broke away from their “Religious” brethren, the latter faction accused them of bending their most sacred pacifist principles to appease their critics. In the end, the majority of Politicals resigned their seats in the provincial Assembly, spelling the end of Quaker secular influence and heralding the rise of more doctrinally fundamentalist leaders. As a result, Quakerism’s expansive, universalist experiment in irradiating the masses with the “Inner Light” flickered and died, and was replaced by a reformist, purifying emphasis on spirituality, exclusivity, and withdrawal from the slights of the corrosive outside world.81 To that effect, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting decreed that all Quakers must “cease from those national contests productive of misery and bloodshed,” for glory and power and treasure were “as dust of the balance.”82 Good Quakers, in other words, would tend their own gardens, not toil in the jungle outside.

  In the two decades before the Revolution, meeting attendances rose markedly, the most zealous adherents being the young. Though Robert Townsend, born in 1753 amid the reformist wave, never went as far as some contemporaries—judging by his enthusiasm for commerce, and perhaps because he was half Episcopalian—he did not escape the second, more powerful, undertow created by Quakerism’s renewal.83

  As part of their campaign to withdraw from the world, reformers focused on strict pacifism and obedience. So that outsiders would leave them alone, they espoused a creed of nonviolence and pledged never to rise up, or conspire against, a legal and constituted government. By the 1770s, accordingly, the Quakers had emerged as the stoutest defenders of British rule in the colonies. A torrent of missives to this effect emanated from Philadelphia to meetings north and south. As early as 1770, the Yearly Meeting warned Friends against participating in any activities “asserting or maintaining their civil rights and liberties [against British rule], which are frequently productive of consequences inconsistent with … our peaceable testimony.”

  In January 1775, the Yearly Meeting issued its official position on the looming war. First and foremost, Friends must “discountenance and avoid every measure tending to excite disaffection to the king.” The Declaration of Independence not only marked the final rupture between Britain and America, but also that between Quakers and Patriots. In September 1776, the Yearly Meeting barred Quakers from holding any type of public office that could even remotely be tied to the war effort.84

  However, as evidenced by Samuel Townsend and later Robert Townsend, Quakers never formed a wholly unified body of resistance to the war. All in all, some two hundred Friends were purged from their meetings in the first few years of the war either for joining the Continental army or for holding offices under the Revolutionary regime.85 In particular, what persuaded Robert Townsend to volunteer as a Patriot commissary—a decision that put him at odds with the Quaker leadership—that summer as Washington desperately sought to fend off General Howe on Long Island?

  The answer is the Revolution’s most electrifying pamphlet, Common Sense, by Tom Paine. Almost immediately following its publication on January 10, 1776, Common Sense became the century’s biggest bestseller; within a year, between 100,000 and 150,000 copies had been purchased, with every edition selling out immediately. Roughly 10 percent of the entire American population owned Common Sense, and even that remarkable figure underestimates how many humble colonials it really converted into rebels. Many scores of thousands more may not have owned or read it, but they were familiar with Paine’s basic arguments thanks to the extracts run in the local newspapers (which also printed exchanges of letters on the subject) and the counterblasts streaming from the Loyalist presses.

  The more ferocious parts of Common Sense and its magnificent prose impress themselves on the memory. Less well remembered is the extent to which Common Sense is suffused with Quaker tenets, images, and messages. We should not be surprised: Like Robert Townsend’s, Paine’s father was a Quaker (his mother was an Anglican), and though Paine himself eventually threw off Quakerism for Whiggery (and Deism), he was suckled, raised, and taught in the Quaker tradition.

  In tone, Common Sense echoes the authors of early religious Quaker tracts, who stressed the responsibility of individuals to participate in the struggle against worldly hubris, corruption, and narcissism so that t
hey, too, might live in a paradisiacal, divine future. For his rousing plea to overthrow the effete despotism of Britain and “begin the world over again” by creating “an asylum for mankind,” Paine merely secularized his forefathers’ message for republican readers.86

  Where Paine differs from his Quaker contemporaries is in advocating resistance as the means to create this new world. “Every quiet method for peace [has] been ineffectual,” he said, which left only the option of defensive war to safeguard Americans’ rights, since “the violence which is done and threatened to our persons; the destruction of our property by an armed force; the invasion of our country by fire and sword” justified the use of arms.87

  Reading these incendiary, heretical words by one of their own—if a fallen, disgraced one of their own—the Quaker leadership was horrified. Ten days after the publication of Common Sense, they retorted by issuing The Ancient Testimony and the Principles of the People Call’d Quakers. The broadside alleged that a conspiracy was afoot among Whigs to drag America into war with Britain, and sternly warned Quakers to dissociate themselves immediately from all such intrigues. It ended in a declaration of unbending loyalty to the Crown, and called for Friends to “unite in the abhorrence of all such writings” designed “to break off the happy connection we have heretofore enjoy’d” with Britain.88

  It was blazingly clear to all to just which “Writings” the Quakers were referring. Whereas the original version of Common Sense had dealt but fleetingly with Quakerism, in mid-February 1776 a nettled Paine added a short, devastating indictment of the Society and their Ancient Testimony to the pamphlet’s new edition. In it, Paine accused the leadership of hypocrisy and of turning their religion into a political hobbyhorse by declaring their loyalty to George III instead of maintaining a truly neutralist silence. Paine particularly loathed those reformists who deployed pacifist religious principles to justify their political Loyalism while claiming to stand aside from worldly affairs.89 For Paine, the “Quaker junto” was “cringing” and “venomous,” and little better, he would charge, than “three-quarter” Tories.90

  Most damagingly, in the addendum to Common Sense, Paine declared that his antagonists were not too Quakerish, but not Quaker enough; the pacifists-at-any-price were not authentic Quakers. Real Quakers, the hardy men and women of a century before who suffered such awful persecutions, would never have bowed so humbly to their oppressors. The reformist Quakers had, in short, “mistaken party for conscience” and politicized pacifism, which they exalted as falsely as the Mosaic Jews had worshipped the Golden Calf. Paine countered that following one’s conscience, one’s soul, one’s Inner Light—the founding tenet of the Quaker creed—truly marked the genuine Friend from his ersatz reformist fellows.91

  Paine’s assaults on the reformists inspired a small following among Friends. Patriotically minded dissenters in their ranks had found at last a Quaker (well, partly, anyway) who encouraged them to challenge the conformism imposed by their meetings. For the first time, it was suddenly possible, if not strictly permissible, to be both a Quaker and a Patriot without feeling that one had betrayed the Lord.92 Still, while they avidly read their Paine, and nodded in agreement as he turned his guns on the reformists, they shuddered at the implications. True, the Quaker leaders erred in aligning themselves so openly with the Loyalists, but was violence the answer? Surely there was some way, a via media of some kind, to keep aglow the In-Dwelling Light and avoid jettisoning the Quakers’ commitment to pacific resistance?

  Robert Townsend was one of those ensnared and enraptured by Paine’s arguments. Common Sense subverted everything he had taken for granted. In his reformist meetings, he had followed the strictures to obey his British masters with an increasingly reluctant heart, and was torn between his desire to fulfill his peace testimony and submit to his Inner Light. No longer was he forced to accept the proposition that the irresistible might of meekness would awe oppressors into submission.

  Paine proved that pious Quakers could rebel against injustice without damning themselves. In his eyes, to be an authentic, heroic Quaker, one must struggle for liberty and security, and not idly accept the world as it is, fallen as it was. And so, just a few months after the publication of Common Sense, we find Robert Townsend volunteering to act as commissary—a logistics post that did not require shedding blood—to General Nathaniel Woodhull of the Queens County militia.

  Still, why did Townsend ultimately accept Abraham Woodhull’s blandishments? Life was good for well-connected Loyalists in New York, and Townsend was, despite his covert patriotism, a willing British collaborator. Yet he still agreed to spy for Washington, and risk his neck in the process, so by 1779—three years after his brief service with General Woodhull—he must have been seriously disaffected from British rule.

  The answer lies in Queens County. Back in 1776, despite his attempts to woo erring Patriots back into the fold, General Howe’s primary focus remained the annihilation of Washington as a military threat. But when he failed to trap his rival in Manhattan, Howe’s priorities suddenly shifted.

  Long Island, once seen as a mere pit stop on the road to victory, turned into the British army’s trailer park. One of Howe’s officers reported that “in this fertile island the army could subsist without succour from England or Ireland. Forming their camp on the plain, 24 miles long, they could in five or six days invade and seduce any of the colonies at leisure.”93 If the war was going to continue for years, as now seemed probable, Howe needed a place to quarter and feed his troops.94

  Long Island was that place. Instead of being treated as liberated territory, much of the island became a military camp, and the sovereign’s loyal subjects placed under martial law. Corruption became rampant among military administrators, and abuses against persons and property, commonly perpetrated. Where placation and politeness would have worked wonders in guaranteeing a satisfactory food and fuel supply, British officers and their troops needlessly antagonized and inflamed a once hospitable civilian population. By 1779, Patrick Ferguson, a Loyalist militia officer, could worry “that the people in general are becoming indifferent, if not averse, to a government which in place of the liberty, prosperity, safety, and plenty, under promise of which it involved them in this war, has established a thorough despotism.”95 As the years ticked by with no relief in sight, far stouter Loyalists than Ferguson began to wonder, would the Patriot oppressors really have been worse governors than their British liberators?

  Queens County was especially hard done by. Even during the Battle of New York, there were reports of plundering and looting by sailors and enlisted men who did not bother distinguishing between Patriot and Loyalist. “These poor unhappy wretches who remained in their habitation through necessity or loyalty were immediately judged … to be rebels,” wrote Charles Stuart to his father, Lord Bute, a former prime minister. “Neither their clothing or property [were] spared, but in the most inhuman and barbarous manner torn from them.”96

  It was after the battle that the real troubles began. General James Robertson, soon to become military commandant of New York, noticed that “when I first landed I found in all the farms poultry and cows, and the farms stocked; when I passed sometime afterwards I found nothing alive.”97 Some British officers, obsessed by the conviction that “the old hatred for kings and the seeds of sedition are so thickly sown [among] them, that it must be thrash’d out of them [because] New England has poyson’d the whole,” experienced some genuinely psychotic moments.98 “We should (whenever we get further into the country) give free liberty to the soldiers to ravage it at will, that these infatuated wretches may feel what a calamity war is,” declared Lord Rawdon, who sometimes seemed a little too excited at the delicious prospect of teaching the locals what a calamity war was.99

  All might have been forgiven after the violent spurt of looting had the British established a fair or effective system of compensation for the fuel, horses, fodder, transport, and supplies the army needed to requisition. As it was, residents felt that
the looting never really ended: Their property continued to be expropriated, only now it was by official edict.100

  Army transport was one field of particularly lucrative pickings. Quartermasters profited immensely by invoicing London for the official cost of compensating Loyalists for the requisition of their horses and wagons for military use, but paid out an unofficial lower rate to Long Island Tories desperate for cash. One senior quartermaster, after having cleared £150,000 from his scams, departed for England in 1778, where he “lived in the style of a prince.” In 1779, his successor also left a rich man, as did his successor in 1780 and, finally, another in 1781. How much did they steal? Between 1777 and 1782, the British government blew the stupendous sum of £642,192 on wagon and horse hire alone; much of it was skimmed. To put that figure in perspective, in 1765 the government anticipated that its windfall from the introduction of the hated Stamp Act would amount to £60,000.101 It would have been cheaper to have let the colonists go untaxed. As it was, the disgraceful and mercenary behavior of many officers, soldiers, and placemen during the occupation toward Loyalist property and sensitivities alienated the very people who had once cheered them as liberators.102

  Fuel was also subject to graft. Coal was too expensive to ship from Britain, so the forests and orchards blanketing Long Island were chopped down instead.103 At first, only trees on rebel-owned land were chopped down, but as the war drew on, the British were forced to requisition Loyalist stocks, promising to reimburse owners at a set price for regulation cords of four feet, nine inches. Enterprising barrack-masters, however, would only compensate residents for four feet’s worth of wood, the nine-inch difference miraculously disappearing into their pockets amid the paperwork. Like compound interest, those nine inches accumulated over time—to the tune of £55,000 each year (at a time when a cord of walnut was set at £5).104