Mulligan may have started in the rag trade, but by the time he moved to Queen Street he was the owner of an enterprise that employed several tailors. He himself was on hand to welcome customers, and may have taken their measurements while letting his employees do the basic cutting and sewing. At this time, as well, thanks to his conversion to Anglicanism, Mulligan was able to marry Elizabeth Sanders, the niece of Admiral Sanders of the Royal Navy. Given his success, his well-connected wife, and his brother’s status, Mulligan was able to associate with a certain class of officers and gentlemen on a nearly equal level, which made them comfortable enough to chat with him about military strategy and troop movements.31
Outwardly, Mulligan was a paragon of bourgeois respectability; underneath, he nursed a roiling rebelliousness. In 1765 or so, he helped produce The Constitutional Courant, an anti–Stamp Act paper so incendiary the British banned it. Undaunted, Mulligan smuggled samizdat copies from New Jersey into the city for discreet distribution to interested readers. Five years later, Hercules was a secret member of the militant arm of the Sons of Liberty. He and his comrades dismissed boycotts and petitions as a limp-wristed exercise in futility and demanded a more muscular approach guaranteed to get results—fast.
Understandably, considering his notoriety in Loyalist circles, Mulligan felt that vacating New York after Washington’s Long Island defeat might be the most sensible option, and he and his family joined the exodus of Patriot sympathizers. He didn’t get far. Within a few days, a party of Tory militiamen roaming the countryside captured him and dragged him back to the city with a blanket over his head the whole way.32
Released, and adapting to the new reality, Mulligan made do as best he could by compromising his republican ideals. He stayed in New York and made a decent income from catering to British officers and the businessmen who profited from every defeat Washington’s army suffered. With a young family to support, his duty was to survive the war living in an enemy-occupied city; talk of regretting that one had but a single life to give for the cause of liberty was for bachelors and romanticists. Like many other New Yorkers, Mulligan was obliged by circumstances to collaborate, but he refused to betray.
Later in the war, Mulligan becalmed his conscience by becoming, like Amos Underhill, a subagent of the Culper Ring, probably in the summer of 1779. It was then that Woodhull first mentioned that “an acquaintance of Hamilton’s” had passed on information that “4 or 5 regiments were embarking, generally said for Quebec [and] had taken altogether thick clothing, yet nevertheless he thought most likely for Georgia, and believed they all had but a short time to stay here.”33
This “acquaintance” started work a mere six weeks after Robert Townsend, his recruiter, sent his first Culper letter. Through his father, Townsend had known the older man since he had been a child, and knew he could trust him unhesitatingly. Washington, for his part, would have been reassured by Alexander Hamilton, his aide, that Mulligan was sound.34 Mulligan, however, wrote no letters of his own. According to the recollection of his son John Mulligan, Hercules used to rendezvous on Long Island with an unnamed American agent, who transferred the information he gave to Washington’s headquarters.35 It’s possible this hazy memory confused the actuality that Mulligan passed on information verbally to Townsend (who was from Long Island)—whose store was just around the corner from Mulligan’s—who integrated it into his own reports to Woodhull and Tallmadge.
Arnold did not hold Mulligan for long. As a known former agitator, he had been arrested only on suspicion of having questionable contacts with the enemy, not on hard evidence of espionage. Still, the Irishman’s imprisonment did succeed in scaring Townsend enough to drop the correspondence for fear of exposure. He needn’t have worried: There wasn’t a chance that Mulligan would talk, but Townsend was more alarmed that if Arnold started nosing around people’s pasts, his own might come to light and he, too, would face an uncomfortable few weeks in prison.
Until Tallmadge could persuade Townsend to come back, he turned his mind to reorienting the Culper Ring away from conducting undercover operations in New York and toward providing timely intelligence on the ground for Tallmadge’s dragoons to launch rapid strikes across the Sound to hit British soldiers and sabotage the Loyalist privateers commerce-raiding and harassing coastal towns. These same privateers were heavily to blame for the delays in conveying the Culper letters—the source of Tallmadge’s problems in the first place. Tallmadge also predicted that occasional raids of fifty or sixty dragoons would provide him with “a good opportunity of opening a correspondence on the other side without being suspected by friends and foes”; in other words, he could shorten the line of communications by “attacking” Setauket as a diversion and meeting Woodhull to pick up letters.36
The “swarm of [Tory] refugee boats which cruise along the shore of Long Island” had annoyed Tallmadge—and the Culpers, and Long Islanders, and Connecticuters, for that matter—for a long time.37 Brewster, for instance, complained of “a constant communication kept up for trade and intelligence by the enemy boats, bringing over goods and taking provisions in return, and in such force that renders it impossible and many times makes it dangerous to transact my business with my present command.”38
Likewise, the Loyalists and the British had been harassed by flotillas of Patriot vessels ever since Washington had abandoned New York in 1776. For the course of the Revolution, a low-intensity guerrilla conflict raged in the Sound that was colloquially known as the “Whaleboat War,” named after the swift, thirty-foot-long boats rowed by freebooters on either side. The whaling companies once based on Long Island and Connecticut had owned these whaleboats, originally carried aboard whalers and lowered into the water when hunting their prey on the high seas. With the outbreak of fighting, these companies wound themselves up, leaving their well-trained, hardy crews unemployed.39 The boats were designed to be easily maneuverable and light enough to be borne on the shoulders of their crew, which numbered anywhere from twelve to twenty-four, one man to each eighteen-foot oar.40 The whaleboatmen could lift the vessels onto their shoulders and hide them in the bushes when on a raid, shelter under them if a storm broke while on land, or even transport them miles across country and relaunch them on the other side of Long Island to spring a surprise attack.41 Some were modified with collapsible masts and a swivel gun or two for close-quarters fighting.42 Amid the roiling waves, in the dark, and with their sails down, the boats’ low silhouette camouflaged them from even short distances, and the first a victim knew about an attack was when he saw boarders armed with pikes, cutlasses, and pistols clambering over the stern.
The Whaleboat War began as a legitimate enterprise. The governors of New York and Connecticut had originally handed out privateering commissions to Patriots—Caleb Brewster possessed one dating from October/November 1776—that legally entitled them to find forage and supplies for the needy American army, destroy provisions before the British could get to them, and capture any enemy vessel they found.43 Thus, in May 1777, General Samuel Parsons ordered Colonel Meigs—a well-born, if rakish, Connecticut man who had been sentenced to death for passing counterfeit money in New York before the war—to destroy the British stockpiles at Sag Harbor. Meigs took 234 men in thirteen whaleboats, along with two sloops for protection, and managed to scuttle no fewer than twelve brigs and sloops, and destroy 120 tons of hay, corn, and oats, as well as a huge quantity of rum, while also killing six and taking ninety militiamen prisoner.44
Tories, too, received authority from Sir Henry Clinton to plunder whatever they wanted from the enemy, provided there were “no excesses, barbarities or irregularities.”45 This form of privateering, which was in accordance with the laws of war as they stood at the time, quickly degenerated into piracy on both sides.46 Whereas once Tories and Patriots had confined themselves to capturing units of soldiers, they soon graduated to kidnapping individuals—usually eminent or rich (or both), but some not so much, such as the luckless carpenter Jonathan Darrow of Southport who was car
ried off in July 1779 and died on a prison ship a year later. It was a practice that resulted in a series of tit-for-tat raids across the Sound. A typical report in, say, the New York Gazette issue of July 17, 1780, ran as follows: “We hear from Setauket, that last Friday a party of rebels surrounded the dwelling house of Doctor Punderson, took him prisoner, and carried him off to Connecticut; and on that night the same party took Mr. William Jayne, Jun. The rebels told Mrs. Punderson that they had taken the doctor to exchange for John Smith, and Mr. Jayne for William Phillips, who were taken at Smithtown, at the widow Blydenburgh’s, on a trading party [i.e., illegal smuggling mission].”47
Though both sides indulged in hostage taking, the Tories had begun it in May 1779 when Captain Bonnell and his deputy, Newtownborn carpenter Captain Glover, gained Clinton’s imprimatur to kidnap the commander of Connecticut’s coastal defenses, General Gold Selleck Silliman, who lived two miles outside of Fairfield. Taking seven men with them, Glover and his second-in-command, Lieutenant Hubbell, began beating at the general’s door at 1 a.m. on Sunday only to hear the sound of smashing glass as the doughty old warrior thrust a musket through a pane and tried to fire. The powder flashed in the pan, allowing the Tories time to break in. Taking Silliman and his son prisoner, “these ruffians said it was fortunate for him that his gun missed fire [sic], for had he killed a man they would have burned the house & murdered all who were in it.” As it was, the prisoners were roughly bundled onto the awaiting boats and spirited to Long Island. “On arriving at [Lloyd’s Neck] they were hailed by Col. Simcoe,” who asked, “ ‘Have you got him?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Have you lost any men?’ ‘No.’ ‘That’s well,’ says Simcoe, ‘Your Sillimans and your Washingtons are not worth a man.’ ”48 Soon afterwards, the detested Simcoe himself was the target of, as he recalled in his memoirs, “a party of twenty men” from Connecticut who lay “concealed” on Long Island for three weeks, but they failed to nab him.49
A month after the Silliman raid, a party of rebels under Major Jesse Brush landed at Treadwell’s Farm and kidnapped Justice Hewlett and a Captain Youngs. Brush, a small man with red hair and a sandy complexion, had been a Long Islander before the war, but was forced to flee to Connecticut and his property was expropriated by a Tory. In August 1780, addressing the interloper, he took out an ad in, of all places, Rivington’s Gazette, warning that “I have repeatedly ordered you … to leave my farm. This is the last invitation. If you do not, your next landfall will be in a warmer climate than any you ever lived in yet. 20 days you have to make your escape.” Warning his foe of his intentions may not have been the smartest move, as Brush and his gang were ambushed by the waiting British when they landed in late September to make good the threat; two were killed by musket fire, and the rest, including Brush, were dragged to the clink.50 Soon after the Brush raid of June 1779, Tories raided Greenwich and took thirteen prisoners, including “a Presbyterian parson, named Burrit, an egregious Rebel, who has frequently taken arms, and is of great repute in that Colony” (according to Rivington’s Gazette of June 23), plus forty-eight head of cattle and four horses.51
In early November 1779, aiming to shanghai a senior Tory to avenge General Silliman, Captain David Hawley and twenty-five men landed near Smithtown, fifty-two miles away from the house of the ultra-Tory Thomas Jones, a justice of the Supreme Court of New York. Hiding their boats in the undergrowth, they trekked for two nights (sleeping during the day in the woods) until they reached Oyster Bay at 9 p.m. on Saturday. They rapped at the door, but Jones was holding a party and no one answered it. Hawley burst through the door and “laid hold of the judge, whom he found in the entry,” as well as his nephew. Later, as they marched back to the boats, Jones saw British sentries and “hemmed”; Hawley told him to shut up, whereupon Jones “hemmed” again, only to hear Hawley snarl that “he would run him through” if he did it again. He didn’t, and the guards continued on their way none the wiser. Billeted, fittingly, on Mrs. Silliman, who grew quite fond of him, Jones and his nephew were exchanged six months later for Silliman and his son.52 (The judge and the general maintained an active correspondence after the war.)
It was money that severed the political bonds of the privateers on either side. Loyalists not only soon discovered the profits inherent in smuggling—the so-called London Trade—goods out of New York to the Connecticut shore, but also the delight gained by mugging suspected Whigs (or anyone, for that matter) living on Long Island. In June 1781, for instance, Woodhull mentioned to Tallmadge that “a number of men commanded by one Stephen Smith a deserter from Col. Ludlow’s [Loyalist] regiment, much abused and plundered several houses at a place called Drowned Meadow [now Port Jefferson]; broke their windows, fired into their houses, whipped and threatened both old and young.”53
Patriots, for their part, conveniently interpreted their official marques to imply that they could plunder at will behind enemy lines, stealing everything from furniture to coins to horses. What happened, inevitably, is that since Long Island was controlled by the enemy, anyone who lived there was a potential target, be he Tory or Whig. The Culpers had long complained of the predations of their own side: “It is the nature of the people here, they will do any thing to get money,” lamented Woodhull in June 1779.54 Brewster once wrote to Governor Clinton about the atrocities that had occurred in the first two weeks alone of August 1781. Two boatloads of men banged on the doors of the houses of Captain Ebenezer Miller and Andrew Miller. The captain’s young son was shot dead, and then Mr. Miller was hit “with the breech of a gun” which “broke the bone over his eye, tore his eye all to pieces [and] broke his cheek bone.” The gang left him for dead. Another time, Gilbert Flint was hanged from his own rafters “till he was so near dead, that they had to apply the doctor to fetch him to.” And then there was Major Richard Thorn, whose Patriotic credentials were impeccable, who received a visit at his house in Great Neck. They “hung him up to make him tell where his money was till they thought him dead, then cut him down and after awhile finding life yet in him, one of the party took his knife and cut him under his jaw from one ear to the other” before heading for Mr. Coulne’s place, where they “hung him up in the same manner to get his hard cash and plundered his house.” “There’s not a night but they are over; if boats can cross people can’t ride the roads but what they are robbed,” concluded Brewster.55
A month later, relates another petition to Clinton, there was a crime spree between Friday, September 14, and Sunday the sixteenth. On the first night, two Connecticut crews stole sheep from Joseph Havens of Southampton; the second, they ransacked the houses of Nicoll Havens, Captain James Havens, and Mrs. Payne, a widow, all on Shelter Island; the third, this time at Southold, they burgled David Gardiner, assaulted Joseph Peck, beat up Mr. L’Hommedieu and his wife (described as “aged persons”), and tried to raze the house of Mrs. Moore (another widow).56
Like Brewster, Tallmadge also nursed a particular dislike of these men who declaimed their Revolutionary principles while acting like banditi. The “crime of plundering the destroyed inhabitants of Long Island” is having a terrible effect on morale, he reported to Washington in 1779, because “the marauders from our shore make no distinction between Whig and Tory.” Moreover, “the boat [used] for dispatches from C——has been chased quite across the Sound by these plunderers … while our crew has supposed them the enemy.” Worse, owing to their menaces, “C——will not risk, nor 725 [Brewster] go over for dispatches.”57
Indeed, about six weeks before, one of Townsend’s last letters had been lost when Woodhull, awaiting Austin Roe at Stony Brook for a drop-off, was disturbed by the sound of the militia being mustered “to pursue and lay wait for Ebenezar [sic] Dayton and his companions, that last night plundered two houses.” “Dayton’s excursion,” he complained, “was the sole cause of the loss” of Townsend’s letter as “the refugees and some troops were filling the road that the express was to pass.” Brewster had had to return to Connecticut empty-handed. “These things you will readily conceiv
e lay me open, and I desire you to take such measures to prevent the like again,” pleaded Woodhull.58
This Ebenezer Dayton was a notorious freebooter who caused havoc up and down the Long Island shore throughout the war. Before it, Dayton had been a peddler who sold goods on credit and was for a time a minuteman, but the British invasion obliged him to move his wife, Phebe, and their three children to New Haven, Connecticut, while he sailed back and forth across the Sound to recover money owed to him by former customers. Within a year, Dayton, having noticed that plundering was easier than debt collection, had drifted into “privateering.” By 1778, he was cruising the Sound in his own schooner, the Suffolk, escorted by no fewer than four heavily armed whaleboats, each with fourteen men. On June 5, Dayton and Company jumped four British merchant vessels (Dispatch, Polly, Jane, and Lively) and captured them all. The next year, as Woodhull’s letter attested, Dayton found it compatible with his patriotic conscience to launch inland raids on Long Island and to make no distinction between friend and foe. (In 1786, it was reported that Dayton, charged for his privateering activities, had drowned in the Housatonic River. In 1853, his son, the Reverend Smith Dayton, revealed that Ebenezer had faked his death and had actually died in New Orleans in 1802 of yellow fever, aged fifty-eight.)59
Washington agreed with Tallmadge and his agents that “the piracies upon the inhabitants of Long-Island … are in their very nature injurious to our cause, and altogether unjustifiable,” and promised to take up the matter with Governors Clinton (of New York) and Trumbull (of Connecticut).60 Little came of Washington’s intervention. While Clinton proved willing to revoke their privateering commissions, saying they meant well but in fact were hurting more than they helped the cause, Trumbull reiterated that the whaleboatmen had paid two-thousand-pound bonds for the right to attack enemy assets and that any Whigs who were allegedly robbed by them enjoyed recourse to the law.61 (It was only in August 1781 that a congressional committee finally ordered Trumbull to cancel their privileges.)62
Washington's Spies Page 26