Washington's Spies

by Alexander Rose

  54. Quoted in Cuneo, Robert Rogers, p. 261.

  55. Letter, Continental Congress to George Washington, July 6, 1776, with Resolutions.

  56. Cuneo, Robert Rogers, p. 265.

  57. See captured copy of Rogers’s “Authorization for British Recruiting,” December 30, 1776, in the Washington Papers.

  58. Quoted in Cuneo, Robert Rogers, p. 268. I have corrected their names, some of which were misspelled by the original reporter.

  59. Cuneo, Robert Rogers, p. 268.

  60. Loescher, Rogers Rangers, Appendix II, No. 124A, p. 229.

  61. Letter, New York Safety Committee to George Washington, August 30, 1776.

  62. Letter, George Washington to Continental Congress, October 4, 1776. See also, especially, letters, Washington to Continental Congress, September 24, 1776; and Washington to Congress, September 2, 1776.

  63. Loescher, Rogers Rangers, Appendix IV, “Uniforms of Rogers Rangers, 1758–1783,” p. 249.

  64. Cuneo, Robert Rogers, p. 270; Loescher, Rogers Rangers, p. 171.

  65. Letter, Jonathan Trumbull to Washington, October 13, 1776.

  66. Quoted in J. G. Rogers (a distant kinsman of Rogers, incidentally), “Where and by whom was Hale captured: An inquiry,” in Seymour, Documentary life of Nathan Hale, p. 444.

  67. Only in 2000, when C. Bradford Tiffany donated a manuscript that had been in his family for generations to the Library of Congress (which published portions three years later), did the true story of Hale’s capture and Rogers’s part in it belatedly emerge after more than two hundred years of speculation. The manuscript is a history of the Revolutionary War, written at the time by a Connecticut shopkeeper of Tory bent named Consider Tiffany. Why should we trust Tiffany’s word? He knew Connecticut Tories who had fled to Long Island, where stories of what happened between Rogers and Hale had circulated, especially since Connecticut Loyalists had been central to identifying the suspicious Connecticut rebel. It was a good local story, in other words, related (either in person or by letter) to him by friends who were there. Furthermore, as his account was written during the war, at a time when the name Nathan Hale meant nothing and the British looked likely to smash Washington any day, there was no reason for Tiffany to embellish or embroider his tale. The relevant parts are printed in J. Hutson, “Nathan Hale revisited: A Tory’s account of the arrest of the first American spy,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin, LXII (2003), nos. 7–8, pp. 168–72. Tiffany’s account of Rogers’s involvement is lent additional veracity by a diary entry written by the otherwise unremarkable Captain William Bamford, an Irish soldier in the Fortieth Regiment of Foot. At the time of Hale’s hanging, he was camped about a mile away, at what is now between Eighty-second and Ninetieth streets in Manhattan, and so heard of the American’s death almost as soon as it happened. Within an hour of Hale’s death, Bamford saw his corpse swinging at the end of the rope, and may even have watched his burial: “22 Su. bright hot Mg. Nathan Hales, a Cap’ in ye Rebel Army & a spy was taken by Majr Rogers & this mg hang’d he had several Papers wt accts of our Force &ca he confess’d … [H]e was a spy.” See “The diary of Captain William Bamford, September 22, 1776,” printed in Seymour, Documentary life of Nathan Hale, p. 446.

  68. Enoch Hale records in his diary that Wyllys told him the story of the Yale diploma. Quoted in Seymour, Documentary life of Nathan Hale, pp. 56–57. Regarding Cunningham’s appearance and his confession, see Lossing, The two spies, p. 24 n.

  69. From the moment he died, Hale was virtually forgotten, and remembered only by his friends, like Benjamin Tallmadge and William Hull. The first mention of the Hale affair seems to have run in the Essex Journal of Newburyport, Massachusetts, of February 13, 1777, which alleged that the spy had cried, at the scaffold, that “if he had ten thousand lives, he would lay them all down, if called to it, in defence of his injured, bleeding country.” The tone and thrust of this line make it sound suspiciously like invented propaganda, and it was no doubt placed by one of Hale’s comrades, probably Hull. Only four years later do we find a second mention: in the Boston Independent Chronicle on May 17, 1781. This article was certainly written or informed by Hull, and it was only then that a concentrated effort was made to sanctify Hale as the martyr-spy. Thus, “just before he expired, [he] said, aloud: “I am so satisfied with the cause in which I have engaged, that my only regret is, that I have not more lives than one to offer in its service.” Over the coming years, Hull streamlined this clumsy sentence into the memorable version we have today. Even so, Hale was hardly a household name, with just two articles to his credit during the entire course of the war. It was only in 1799, when Hannah Adams published her Summary History of New England, which included a section on Nathan Hale, that the story began receiving some attention. It was at Adams’s request that Hull contributed the section in question, and we can see the pieces of the grand mythic melodrama already slipping into place. “He passed in disguise to Long Island, examined every part of the British army, and obtained the best possible information respecting their situation and future operations,” said Hull, adding that William Cunningham, the provost marshal who guarded Hale in the greenhouse, cruelly destroyed his prisoner’s last letters so “that the rebels should not know that they had a man in their army who could die with so much firmness.” Hull clearly invented this: How could he have known what happened? And then he concluded, “His dying observation, ‘that he only lamented, that he had but one life to lose for his country.’ ” Hull admitted, though, that “Hale has remained unnoticed, and it is scarcely known such a character ever existed.” And so he stayed: Mercy Warren’s famous Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805), Paul Allen’s History of the Revolution (1822), and James Thatcher’s History of the Revolution (1823) do not mention Hale. It was only in 1824, when the Revolutionary generation—rather like the Second World War generation—was disappearing, that Nathan Hale was rediscovered as an exemplar of selfless virtue and heroism. Thus, in 1824, Jedediah Morse’s Annals of the American Revolution highlighted the episode, in the process unleashing a Krakatoa of histories, biographies, novels, and magazine articles devoted to the Hale cult. Hale’s old acquaintances, like Stephen Hempstead and Asher Wright, suddenly found themselves roused from obscurity and their memories and letters (a Missouri paper in 1827 published a lengthy one from Hempstead detailing all he recalled of his captain and the mission) in huge demand. In 1829, Samuel L. Knapp produced his well-known Lectures on American Literature, where he declared that “it is time we should be familiar with [Hale ’s] reputation. This staking one’s life and reputation together—and staking them for love of country … is the highest of all mortal resolves.” Seven years later, at almost the same time as Congress announced that it intended to build a monument at Coventry, Hale’s birthplace, the American Historical Magazine placed Nathan Hale “in the Pantheon” as an “early and distinguished victim in the cause of his country.” Congress failed to come through, but the citizens themselves did it in 1846. Later, his schoolhouses at East Haddam and New London were preserved, and two bronze statues erected in Hartford, as well as others in New York and Yale, beside the Justice Department in Washington, and outside the CIA headquarters (where the former director William Casey thought it did seem a little incongruous to be celebrating a failed spy). In 1848, Hull’s own memoirs appeared, though they were actually written by his daughter, as he had died in 1825. In crucial respects, the Hale story differed from Hull’s original account in Hannah Adams’s book half a century before. Now, Hull (or rather, his daughter) said that Captain Montressor had told him directly “that Captain Hale had passed through their army, both on Long Island and York Island [italics added].” Originally, Hull said that Hale had “passed in disguise” only on Long Island. Clearly, as Hale had become more famous, his exploits assumed a grander hue, and so he walked upon “York Island” (i.e., Manhattan) as well. The role of William Cunningham experienced a transformation, as well: From being merely a brute who tor
e up Hale’s two final letters, he became a man “hardened to human suffering and every softening sentiment of the heart” who refused Hale a clergyman and a Bible. (Oddly, in the 1848 version, it seems that Montressor took Hale away from Cunningham, and permitted him to write the two last letters, “one to his mother and one to a brother officer.” Hale’s mother had died years before his execution, which renders this version more dubious still.) And, lastly, there was a subtle alteration of Hale’s last words. In the 1799 version, Hale speaks indirectly (“he only lamented, ‘that he had but one life to lose for his country’ ”), but in 1848, this construction has been rendered, more pithily, as, “He said ‘I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.’ ” In and of themselves, these changes are perhaps not hugely significant, but together they helped set into stone the version we still know. Ultimately, in 1856, came the final act: the publication of I. W. Stuart’s full-scale biography, which mythologized its subject as much as the great Parson Weems did his. The last word on Nathan Hale should be left to Stuart’s breathless reviewer in Putnam’s Magazine: “His death proved what his life had only indicated. It showed in him a true heroic greatness, which could, in calm dignity, endure to die wronged and unasserted. The common pathway to glory is trodden with comparative ease; but to go down to the grave high-spirited but insulted, technically infamous, unfriended in the last great agony, with an all-absorbing patriotism, baffled and anxious, and burning for assurance of his country’s final triumph—thus to have done and borne in unfaltering dignity, was the ultimate criterion and evidence of a genuine nobility of nature. Had this sharp ordeal been spared, the man’s strong, true spirit might have remained ever unrecognized.”

  70. MacKenzie was the well-educated son of a Dublin merchant. He came to America in 1774 as a lieutenant, and was promoted to captain in the fall of 1775. He served during the siege of Boston, as well as in New York and Rhode Island. He died in England in 1824. For his diary entry, see J. Rhodehamel (ed.), The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence (New York, 2001), p. 229.

  71. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, V, p. 1025.

  72. Letter, Washington to Howe, September 23, 1776.

  73. Force (ed.), American archives, 5th ser., III, p. 725.

  74. Force (ed.), American archives, 5th ser., II, p. 854.

  75. Johnston, Hale: Biography and memorials, pp. 131–32. Note the confusion, already seeping in, about factual details; i.e., “Stamford,” caused by the slowly spreading rumor.

  Chapter Two: The Year of the Hangman

  1. Letter, General Howe to Lord Germain, September 23, 1776, in P. Force (ed.), American archives: Consisting of a collection of authentick records, state papers, debates, and letters and other notices of publick affairs, the whole forming a documentary history of the origin and progress of the North American colonies; of the causes and accomplishment of the American Revolution; and of the Constitution of government for the United States, to the final ratification thereof (Washington, D.C., 4th and 5th ser., 1848–53), 5th ser., II, col. 380.

  2. See his letter to Lund Washington, quoted in B. Schecter, The battle for New York: The city at the heart of the American Revolution (New York, 2002), pp. 207–8. On Congress’s refusal, see letter, Hancock to Washington, September 3, 1776, in Force (ed.), American archives, 5th ser., II, col. 135.

  3. Quoted in E. G. Burrows and M. Wallace, Gotham: A history of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), p. 242.

  4. Undated article, “Reminiscences of the American Revolution,” no page number, in H. Onderdonk, New York City in olden times, consisting of newspaper cuttings arranged by Henry Onderdonk, Jr. (Jamaica, Long Island, unpub. personal scrapbook, 1863).

  5. St. James’s Chronicle, November 7–9, 1776; New York Mercury, September 30, 1776; letter, General Howe to Germain, September 23, 1776, in Force (ed.), American archives, 5th ser., II, cols. 462–63; “Extract from a letter from New-York to a gentleman in London,” September 23, 1776, in ibid., col. 463. Diplomatically, Robertson avoided mentioning that the sailors “did the best part of it, taking care to pay themselves well by plundering other houses near by that were not on fire,” as General Major Baurmeister ironically noticed. See C. Baurmeister, “Narrative of the capture of New York, September 1776,” in Magazine of American History, I (1877), p. 38; letter, from an American officer in Harlem, September 25, 1776, printed in Force (ed.), American archives, 5th ser., II, col. 524.

  6. New York Mercury, September 30, 1776; letter, Tryon to Germain, September 24, 1776, in Force (ed.), American archives, 5th ser., II, cols. 493–94.

  7. Letter, Governor Tryon to Lord George Germain, September 24, 1776; in E. B. O’Callaghan (ed.), Documents relative to the colonial history of the state of New York; procured in Holland, England and France (Albany, 15 vols., 1856–87), VIII, p. 686.

  8. See letter, Tryon to Germain, September 24, 1776; in Force (ed.), American archives, 5th ser., II, cols. 493–94; also, O’Callaghan (ed.), Documents relative to the colonial history of the state of New York, VIII, p. 686.

  9. New York Mercury, September 30, 1776, which also notes that “nearly a fourth of the whole City” was destroyed, though its edition of two days earlier judged that it was a “6th part.” On the number of houses destroyed, see D. Grim, “Account of the Fire of 1776 [by] David Grim,” Collections of the New-York Historical Society, III (New York, 1870), p. 276.

  10. New York Mercury, September 28, 1776; New York Mercury, September 30, 1776.

  11. O’Callaghan (ed.), Documents relative to the colonial history of the state of New York, VIII, pp. 798–99.

  12. New York Mercury, September 30, 1776.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Letter, Howe to Germain, September 23, 1776, in Force (ed.), American archives, 5th ser., II, cols. 462–63. See also, letter, Tryon to Germain, September 24, 1776, in O’Callaghan (ed.), Documents relative to the colonial history of the state of New York, VIII, p. 686.

  15. Undated article, “Reminiscences of the American Revolution,” no page number, in Onderdonk, New York City in olden times. In the New York Public Library, by chance I found this ragged scrapbook of newspaper clippings cut out and glued in by Henry Onderdonk, a mid-nineteenth-century local historian of Long Island. This particular article, “Reminiscences of the American Revolution,” was written sometime in the first decades of that century by an anonymous “soldier of seventy-six,” and tells the fullest story of how the fire started, though his version has, as far as can be told, escaped historians’ notice. (It’s possible the memoirist was a Hessian, or maybe even a Briton, who settled in America after the war.)

  16. Letter, Colonel Silliman to his wife, September 25, 1776, quoted in I. N. P. Stokes, The iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909: Compiled from original sources and illustrated by photo-intaglio reproductions of important maps, plans, views, and documents in public and private collections (New York, 6 vols., 1915–28), V, p. 1023; S. A. Harrison, Memoir of Lieut. Col. Tench Tilghman, secretary and aid to Washington, together with an appendix containing Revolutionary journals and letters, hitherto unpublished (Albany, 1876), letter, Tilghman to his father, September 25, 1776, pp. 139–40.

  17. Cutting, June 9, 1777, reproduced in F. Moore (ed.), Diary of the American Revolution from newspapers and original documents (New York, privately printed, 2 vols., 1865), I, p. 446. Washington himself took notice of the case, and recommended that Congress consider a “private donation”—given Patten’s sensitive undercover work, he thought a “public act of generosity” would attract too much attention—to his family, as the agent had “conducted himself with great fidelity to our cause rendering services and has fallen a sacrifice in promoting her interest.” Letter, Washington to John Hancock, June 13, 1777.

  18. St. James’s Chronicle, November 7–9, 1776.

  19. W. H. Shelton, “What was the mission of Nathan Hale?” Journal of American History, IX (1915), 2, pp. 269–89, far-fetchedly claims this captain was Nathan Hale. F
or the real identity of the New Englander, see the report in the St. James’s Chronicle, November 9–12, 1776. For his background, see letter, Samuel Curwen (who knew Smith’s family) to George Russell, December 20, 1776, in G. A. Ward (ed.), The journal and letters of Samuel Curwen, an American in England, from 1775 to 1783 (Boston, 4th ed., 1864).

  20. London Packet, December 2–4, 1776, quoted in Stokes, Iconography, V, p. 1024.

  21. Letter, Washington to Governor Jonathan Trumbull, September 23, 1776. “The gentleman who brought the letter from General Howe [i.e., regarding Nathan Hale] last night … informed Col. Reed, that several of our countrymen had been punished with various deaths on account of it [the fire], some by hanging, others by burning, &c.; alleging that they were apprehended when committing the fact.” On the incidents of being hung up by the heels, see letter from John Sloss Hobart, in Force (ed.), American archives, 5th ser., II, col. 503; regarding bayoneting, see St. James’s Chronicle, November 16–19, 1776.

  22. St. James’s Chronicle, November 9–12, 1776. Edmund Burke, the political philosopher, later extolled this woman’s patriotism in the House of Commons. See Parliamentary Register, VI, p. 60, November 6, 1776, quoted in Stokes, Iconography, V, p. 1023.

  23. On Greene, see T. Golway, Washington’s general: Nathanael Greene and the triumph of the American Revolution (New York, 2005).

  24. Demont appears to have sought refuge in London after the war. See letter, Demont to the Reverend Dr. Peters, January 16, 1792, which contains his version, and Captain Frederick Mackenzie’s diary entry for November 3, 1776 (where he is called “Diamond”), both printed in H. S. Commager and R. B. Morris (eds.), The spirit of ’seventy-six: The story of the American Revolution as told by participants (New York, 3rd ed., 1978; rep. 1995), pp. 491–92.