Washington's Spies

by Alexander Rose

  13. J. L. Van Buskirk, Generous enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia, 2002), p. 136; B. Quarles, The negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961; rep. 1996), pp. 152–56.

  14. See letter, William Whipple to Dr. Josiah Bartlett, July 12, 1778, 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. 967–68.

  15. T. J. Wertenbaker, Father Knickerbocker rebels: New York City during the Revolution (New York, 1948), p. 210.

  16. 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., 1915–1928), V, p. 1027.

  17. William Smith (ed. W. H. W. Sabine), Historical memoirs from 16 March 1763 to 12 November 1783 of William Smith, historian of the province of New York; member of the governor’s council, and last chief justice of that province under the Crown; chief justice of Quebec (New York, 3 vols., in 2, rep. 1969–71), entry for May 10, 1780, III, p. 261.

  18. For slightly varying figures, see Stokes, Iconography, V, p. 1047; Wertenbaker, Father Knickerbocker rebels, p. 208; Barck, New York City during the War for Independence, pp. 129–31.

  19. Barck, New York City during the War for Independence, pp. 129–31; Stokes, Iconography, V, pp. 1075, 1086.

  20. Letter, Woodhull to Tallmadge, February 26, 1779.

  21. P. D. Nelson, William Tryon and the course of empire: A life in British imperial service (Chapel Hill, N.C./London, 2005), pp. 167–69.

  22. Letter, Jay to Washington, November 19, 1778.

  23. This was the determined opinion of Thomas Jones, in his History of New York during the Revolutionary War, and of the leading events in the other colonies at that period (New York, 2 vols., 1879), II, pp. 223–25. In 1782, Jay was captured by the British, to whom he confided his fear of growing French influence. After expressing a desire for reconciliation between the Mother Country and America, he was released and allowed to leave for Britain, giving rise to suspicions as to the robustness of his Patriotism. (For individuals to switch sides during the Revolution was common, but at that stage of the war, it was often to the Cause of Liberty, which also happened to be the one winning.) John Jay, hearing the news of his brother’s apparent defection, wrote to a friend that “if after making so much bustle in and for America, he has … improperly made his peace with Britain, I shall endeavour to forget that my father has such a son.” The two brothers corresponded rarely after the war. See Appendix XXXIX, in Jones, History, II, p. 540.

  24. Letter, James Jay to Jefferson, April 14, 1806, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. “My method of communication was this: To prevent the suspicion which might arise were I to write to my brother John only, who was a member of Congress, I writ with black ink a short letter to him, and likewise to 1 or 2 other persons of the family, none exceeding 3 or 4 lines in black ink. The residue of the blank paper I filled up, invisibly, with such intelligence and matters as I thought would be useful to the American Cause. All these letters were left open, and sent in that condition to the Director or Secretary of the General Post Office, with a letter insinuating that I thought it could not be the intentions of Government, in their restraining laws, to put a stop to family intercourse; and therefore requesting the party to read over the letters, and if nothing improper appeared in them, that he would permit them to pass in the mail to New York. They passed accordingly, and on their arrival in New York were sent into the American Lines. In this invisible writing I sent to Franklin and Deane, by the mail from London to Paris, a plan of the intended Expedition under Burgoyne from Canada.” James Jay adds that he and his brother often corresponded using the ink, but once came close to discovery because John Jay had kept the letters and sent them to what he thought was a place of safety in New Jersey. When General Howe landed at Staten Island in the summer of 1776 in preparation for the assault on New York, his troops advanced within seven miles of the letters’ hiding place. John Jay burned them shortly afterwards. For more on John Jay and Deane, see V. H. Paltsits, “The use of invisible ink for secret writing during the American Revolution,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, XXXIX (1935), no. 5, pp. 361–4.

  25. Letter, Washington to Elias Boudinot, May 3, 1779.

  26. Letters, Washington to Jay, April 9, 1780; Jay to Washington, April 13, 1780.

  27. Letter, Jay to Washington, April 13, 1780.

  28. Letters, Washington to Jay, May 12, 1780; Washington to Hay, May 13, 1780.

  29. Letter, Washington to Boudinot, May 3, 1779.

  30. Letter, Washington to Tallmadge, September 24, 1779.

  31. Letter, Washington to Tallmadge, July 25, 1779.

  32. S. Rubin’s exhaustive The secret science of covert inks (Port Townsend, Wa., 1987) has a chapter on sympathetic inks; the one here may be found on p. 15. Sympathetic inks were not altogether unheard of at the time, though very few, excepting some specialists and antiquarians, knew about them. For his correspondence with the British, the extraordinary Tory spy Benjamin Thompson—soldier, charlatan, brilliant physicist—distilled gallotannic acid from gallnuts that could be developed with ferrous sulphate, an idea gleaned from Giovanni Battista Porta’s sixteenth-century tome Natural Magick. (Thompson would go on to become Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire—it was quite a career.) Despite Jay’s claims of uniqueness, this solution bears a distinct resemblance to his. Even so, the solution was such a rarity, the chances of discovery by the British are too remote to consider. On Thompson’s concoction, see S. C. Brown and E. W. Stein, “Benjamin Thompson and the first secret ink letter of the American Revolution,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, XL (1950), 5, pp. 627–36.

  33. Letters, Woodhull to Tallmadge, April 12, 1779; Woodhull to Washington, April 29, 1779.

  34. Letter, Washington to Tallmadge, February 5, 1780, copy in the Benjamin Tallmadge Papers held at the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library. This version contains a P.S. containing the words quoted here that does not appear in the Library of Congress copy.

  35. Letter, Washington to Howe, January 20, 1777.

  36. Letter, Washington to Boudinot, May 3, 1779. In the version of the letter actually sent, Washington cautiously wrote “——” in place of “P——,” but used the latter in his draft. For a follow-up, see letter, Washington to Boudinot, May 17, 1779.

  37. Letter, Pintard to Washington, March 25, 1780.

  38. Letters, Pintard to Washington, May 14, 1783; Washington to Pintard, May 21, 1783.

  39. Letter, Washington to Tallmadge, June 27, 1779.

  40. On this encounter, see B. G. Loescher, Washington’s eyes: The Continental Light Dragoons (Fort Collins, Colo., 1977), p. 41; B. Tallmadge, Memoir of Col. Benjamin Tallmadge (New York, 1858; rep. 1968), p. 32. Tallmadge seems to misremember in saying that Lord Rawdon led the attack. Rawdon was an infantry commander, of the Volunteers of Ireland, and his biographer does not mention the incident. See P. D. Nelson, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, marquess of Hastings: Soldier, peer of the realm, governor-general of India (Madison, Wis./Teaneck, N.J., 2005).

  41. The letter, Washington to Tallmadge, June 13, 1779, is kept in draft in the Washington Papers, but the original may be found in Sir Henry Clinton’s papers at the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

  42. Letter, Washington to Tallmadge, July 5, 1779.

  43. Quoted in C. Van Doren, Secret history of the American Revolution (New York, 1941), p. 238.

  44. Letter, Clinton to his sisters, October 4 and 8, 1780, printed in Van Doren, Secret history, Appendix, no. 67, pp. 477–80.

  45. Though there are fuzzy distinctions between a code and a cipher that D. Kahn, The codebreakers: The story of secret writing (New York, 1967), pp. xiv–xv
, discusses, I have tended to use the terms interchangeably, not only to save the reader confusion but because Kahn says that between 1400 and 1850 the nomenclator system commonly used was half-code, half-cipher, which makes it difficult to draw hard and fast lines.

  46. G. F. Strasser, “Diplomatic cryptology and universal languages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” pp. 73–97, in K. Neilson and B. J. C. McKerchen (eds.), Go spy the land: Military intelligence in history (Westport, Conn., 1992), pp. 75–76.

  47. On frequencies, see F. Pratt, Secret and urgent: The story of codes and ciphers (London, 1939), Tables I, VIII, and IX, pp. 252, 260–61.

  48. On Rossignol, see Kahn, Codebreakers, pp. 157–62.

  49. Kahn, Codebreakers, pp. 173–74.

  50. I have relied, for the section on the Dumas and Lovell ciphers, on two sources primarily: R. E. Weber, United States diplomatic codes and ciphers, 1775–1938 (Chicago, 1979), esp. pp. 22–46; and the same author’s Masked dispatches: Cryptograms and cryptology in American history, 1775–1900 (2nd ed., 2002), published by the National Security Agency’s Center for Cryptologic History. On p. 16, Weber reproduces a three-letter key (B.R.A.) for the Lovell Cipher, but provides a transcription using the two-letter key (C.R.), so I have reconstructed the latter for those readers who are interested in this sort of thing.

  51. Letter, Woodhull to Tallmadge, March 17, 1779.

  52. Letter, Woodhull to Tallmadge, April 10, 1779.

  53. Letter, Townsend to Tallmadge, July 29, 1779.

  54. An original copy of the July 1779 Code Dictionary is kept in the Washington Papers, though Weber, Masked dispatches, pp. 44–51, reprints it. Robert Townsend became “723.”

  55. E. C. Burnett, “Ciphers of the Revolutionary period,” American Historical Review, XXII (1917), 2, p. 332.

  56. Letter, Townsend to Tallmadge, August 6, 1779.

  Chapter Five: The Man of Parts and Halves

  1. Letter, Washington to Tallmadge, March 21, 1779.

  2. Letter, Woodhull to Tallmadge, March 17, 1779.

  3. Letter, Washington to Reed, March 28, 1779.

  4. Letter, Washington to Putnam, March 27, 1779.

  5. Letter, Washington to Putnam, April 1, 1779.

  6. Letter, Woodhull to Tallmadge, April 10, 1779.

  7. Regarding the end of the Staten Island plan, see letter, Washington to Tallmadge, April 30, 1779.

  8. Letter, Tallmadge to Washington, April 21, 1779.

  9. The regiment, now the Queen’s York Rangers, still exists as a Canadian armored reconnaissance unit.

  10. Letter, Woodhull to Tallmadge, June 5, 1779.

  11. See B. F. Thompson (ed. C. J. Werner), History of Long Island, from its earliest settlement to the present time (New York, 3 vols., 3rd ed., 1918; orig. 1839), III, p. 363.

  12. Royal Gazette, July 3, 1779.

  13. T. Jones (ed. E. F. De Lancey), History of New York during the Revolutionary War, and of the leading events in the other colonies at that period (New York, 2 vols., 1879), I, pp. 268–69, 287–88. Floyd is buried in the graveyard of Setauket’s Presbyterian church. Jones, ignorant of Woodhull’s letter, of course, did not speculate why Floyd was released so quickly.

  14. Letter, Woodhull to Tallmadge, February 26, 1779. J. G. Staudt, “Suffolk County,” in J. S. Tiedemann and E. R. Fingerhut (eds.), The other New York: The American Revolution beyond New York City, 1763–1787 (Albany, 2005), p. 65, says that Benjamin Floyd was a major.

  15. Letter, Woodhull to Tallmadge, June 5, 1779 (second of the same date).

  16. Letter, Washington to Tallmadge, June 13, 1779.

  17. Letter, Woodhull to Tallmadge, June 20, 1779. This letter was not sent for at least a week after its composition—an indication of the sudden slowness of communications caused by Hawkins’s departure.

  18. Letter, Washington to Tallmadge, June 27, 1779.

  19. J. C. and C. A. Townsend, A memorial of John, Henry, and Richard Townsend, and their descendants (New York, 1865; rep. and new ed., 1976), p. 101.

  20. Woodhull said he had been acquainted with Townsend for “several years.” Letter, Woodhull to Tallmadge, July 9, 1779.

  21. Letter, Captain Farley to Townsend, February 27, 1797, in the Townsend Family Papers, Raynham Hall Museum.

  22. The list of his books is as follows (taken from an inventory of Robert Townsend’s “Goods, Chattels and Credits,” May 26, 1838, Townsend Family Papers, Raynham Hall Museum, FX 88.30.22.2): Dictionary, Book of Plays, Elements of the English Language, Rasselas, Denham’s Poems, Shaftesbury’s Works, Burke’s Works, Godwin’s Justice, Mair’s Bookkeeping, Chaucer’s Poems, Ovid’s Epistles, Shenstone’s Poems, Hooker’s Works, Covent Garden Magazine, Walker’s Geography, Human Species, Turkish Spy in Paris (8 vols.), Latin Vocabulary, Meignon’s Charter, History of Pennsylvania, Montesquieu’s Works, Leland’s Demosthenes, Free Thinker, Churchill’s Poems, Spectator, Chesterfield’s Letters, British Theatre, Moore’s Journals, Principles of Government, Johnson’s Arithmetic, Mariners Compass, Hume’s History, Raynal’s History, Butler’s Analogy, Woolstonecraft’s History of the French Revolution, Smith’s Essays, Complete Merchant, Carver’s Travels, Love’s Survey, Beattie’s Essays, Johnson’s Dictionary, Smith’s Moral Sentiments, Anderson on Industry, Pope’s Iliad, Life of Pope, Tatler, Reverie, World, French Revolution, Moore’s Journal, Boswell’s Johnson, The Court of Cupid, Barlow’s Writings, La Vie Prince, Bellamy’s Life, Life of John Elvers, Letters of Junius, Butler’s Sermons, Mackenzie on Health, Prior’s Poems, Condorcet’s Philosophical Dictionary, Necker, Waller’s Poems, Freeholder, Murphey’s Tacitus, Macpherson’s History, Webster’s Political Essays, Blair’s Lectures, Books of Fairs, Seamen’s Vade Mecum, Ferguson’s Philosophy, Ash on Education, Fasquahar’s Works, Pope’s Works, Gregory’s View, Whitehead’s Poems, Hutchinson’s Enquiry, Picture of the Times, Plowden’s British History, Sidney on Government, Sheriden’s Revolution of Sweden, London Magazine, Gillies’ Frederick II, Annals of Queen Anne’s Reign, Present State of Great Britain, Atkinson’s Navigator, Bruce’s Memoirs, Locke on the Understanding, Reid’s Essays, Bertrand’s Mathematics, Jones’s Bookkeeping, Duty of the Justices of the Peace, Leyden’s Papers, and four pamphlets on the Laws of England.

  23. Personal notes by Robert Townsend, in the Townsend Family Papers, Raynham Hall Museum.

  24. Peter Townsend sketchbook, F89.11.9, in the Townsend Family Papers, Raynham Hall Museum.

  25. Which made them exceedingly distant relatives of Viscount Townshend, he of the hated Townshend Duties.

  26. On the house, see F. Irwin, Oyster Bay in history, a sketch (New York, n.d. but 1950–1975), p. 71.

  27. Samuel’s appearance and his wife’s affection for the Quakers were described by his grandson, Dr. Peter Townsend, in his personal notebook. Quoted in Irwin, Oyster Bay in history, p. 98.

  28. M. Pennypacker, George Washington’s spies on Long Island and in New York (New York, 2 vols., 1939, 1948), p. 104; I have also used Weekes’s diary, reproduced in Irwin, Oyster Bay in history, pp. 79–80.

  29. R. L. Ketcham, “Conscience, war, and politics in Pennsylvania, 1755–1757,” William and Mary Quarterly, XX (1963), 3, pp. 416–39; I. Sharpless, A Quaker experiment in government, vol. 1 of History of Quaker government in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 2 vols., 1898).

  30. A. J. Mekeel, The relation of the Quakers to the American Revolution (Washington, D.C., 1979), p. 20; the complete list of signatories is given in J. T. Scharf and T. Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884 (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1884), I, pp. 412–13.

  31. W. H. Conser, Jr., R. M. McCarthy, and D. J. Toscano, “The American independence movement, 1765–1775: A decade of nonviolent struggles,” in Conser et al. (eds.), Resistance, politics and the American struggle for independence, 1765–1775 (Boulder, Colo., 1986), p. 17.

  32. I have drawn on numbers unearthed by J. S. Tiedemann from church records, court minutes, family papers, Bible records, conveyances, mortgages, military records, newsp
apers, tax lists, town records, voting returns, and wills, and printed in “Queens County, New York Quakers in the American Revolution: Loyalists or neutrals?” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, LII (1983), 3, pp. 215–27.

  33. Note to the “Meeting at Jamaica and election of a committee,” in H. Onderdonk (ed), Documents and letters intended to illustrate the Revolutionary incidents of Queens County with connecting narratives, explanatory notes, and additions (New York, 1846), no. 2, held December 6, 1774.

  34. “Meeting at Oyster Bay,” in Onderdonk (ed.), Revolutionary incidents of Queens County, no. 8, December 30, 1774.

  35. “A Provincial Convention to be held,” in Onderdonk (ed.), Revolutionary incidents of Queens County, no. 11, March 16, 1775; Jones (ed. De Lancey), History of New York, I, note XVI, pp. 477–89.

  36. “Certificate of minority at Oyster Bay,” in Onderdonk (ed.), Revolutionary incidents of Queens County, no. 17, April 12, 1775. This document contains the complete list of all Whigs in Oyster Bay.

  37. J. S. Tiedemann, “A Revolution foiled: Queens County, New York, 1775–1776,” Journal of American History, LXXV (1988), 2, p. 427.

  38. Jones (ed. De Lancey), History of New York, I, note XVI, p. 487.

  39. “List of committee men in Queens County,” in Onderdonk (ed.), Revolutionary incidents of Queens County, no. 24, May 29, 1775.

  40. M. H. Luke and R. W. Venables, Long Island in the American Revolution (Albany, 1976), p. 9.

  41. “Arms impressed from non-Associators,” in Onderdonk (ed.), Revolutionary incidents of Queens County, no. 31, September 1775.

  42. “Vote of Queens County of deputies,” in Onderdonk (ed.), Revolutionary incidents of Queens County, no. 34, November 7, 1775.

  43. Tiedemann, “A Revolution foiled,” Journal of American History, pp. 429–31. On the preceding subjects, see also Jones (ed. De Lancey), History of New York, I, note XXVIII, pp. 568–73.