The First Conspiracy
Page 13
With the Life Guards becoming so interwoven with Washington’s daily movements, Captain Gibbs becomes in effect the manager of the Commander-in-Chief’s household operations. At the Mortier manor, Gibbs oversees the housekeeper, Mary Smith, and coordinates his guards with the daily comings and goings of every officer or acquaintance who interacts with General Washington.
Likewise, Gibbs’s second-in-command, Washington’s nephew George Lewis, is given special responsibilities unique to the position. Within a few weeks, Washington will issue a general order that “any orders delivered by Caleb Gibbs and George Lewis, Esquires—officers of the General’s Guard—are to be attended to in the same manner as if sent by an aide-de-camp.” In other words, the leaders of the Life Guards are part of Washington’s innermost circle and have the authority to issue commands on his behalf.
Within the Continental army and the rebel militias, the renown and mystique of the Life Guards begins to grow. When a Continental captain stationed in Fairfield, Connecticut, intercepts and secures a small naval vessel from British sympathizers, he even brags in a letter that he has rechristened the boat the “Life Guard.”
Today, history books are filled with stories that say that the Pinkerton Detective Agency, during Abraham Lincoln’s time, was the inspiration for the Secret Service. But in some ways, it is Washington’s Life Guards who should get the credit—an elite force, specially trained, and prepared at any moment to lay down their lives for their leader.
At a time of increasing danger in the war, when the Continental army is preparing to face a possibly devastating assault, the Life Guards are men in whom George Washington can place his greatest trust.
But that trust is about to be tested, in ways that Washington could never imagine.
30
With Washington and the Continental army now fully entrenched in and around Manhattan, residents and soldiers alike begin to face a new reality. New York City is on the verge of war.
The British, having been humiliated once, are now likely to strike back with the full force of their massive power. John Hancock describes England’s position this way. “We have all the reason … from the rage of disappointment and revenge, to expect the worst. Nor have I any doubt, that as far as their power extends, they will inflict every species of calamity upon us.”
From the point of view of Washington and the Continental army, the outlook is daunting at best and potentially catastrophic. As the army continues work to fortify the city, Washington learns that the Crown has just acquired additional mercenary troops from Germany—somewhere close to seventeen thousand—to augment their already superior forces.
These German mercenaries, generally known as Hessians, are seasoned and well-armed fighters. With these reinforcements added to their already vast army and navy, the British commanders—Gen. William Howe and his brother, Adm. Richard Howe—are preparing one of the largest and most powerful expeditionary forces in history.
All this immense firepower will be directed at one city, on a skinny island, surrounded by waterways, with no navy to defend it.
“I fear for you and my other New York friends,” a London resident writes to an acquaintance in Manhattan, “for I expect your city will be laid in ashes.”
The only defense and the only hope for survival is Washington’s army.
In total, the Continental forces now stand at around eight thousand, combining troops from Boston with the newer militias recently raised within New York. Of this number, somewhere between 15 and 20 percent are inactive due to disease, injury, or other health-related causes.
Upon his arrival in April 1776, and in the weeks ahead, George Washington writes a series of urgent entreaties to Congress, begging for more soldiers to withstand the coming onslaught. In response, Congress orders neighboring colonies to send more troops to New York City, both new volunteers and existing militias, to reinforce Washington’s army.
Soon, from all directions, several thousand new American troops stream toward the city to join the cause. These new men, however, are mostly unskilled, inexperienced, and unequipped recruits, not up to even the low standards of the troops Washington had back in Boston. These newcomers must be trained completely from scratch, a task demanding time and resources, all when the enemy could arrive at any moment.
The new wave of soldiers enter Manhattan by foot and by ferry, needing food, lodging, and clothing. The influx of men begins to overwhelm the residential and commercial buildings of the city, and almost every available structure is converted for military use. “We are a complete garrison town,” one resident reports. Another civilian describes the “terror and confusion” as more soldiers inundate the already tense environment.
The Continental soldiers are quickly put to work doing the hard physical labor required to fortify the city. Starting in the early morning, soldiers tear up the streets to create blockades, cut down trees for lumber and firewood, and build crude walls and other defensive structures. Work commences on a new fort in northern Manhattan and another just across the Hudson in New Jersey. The new forts are called Fort Washington and Fort Lee, respectively, named after the Commander-in-Chief and Maj. Gen. Charles Lee—“Boiling Water” himself—who helped devise the plans during his short but memorable visit in February.
At the same time, some of the finest homes in New York City, abandoned by fleeing citizens, serve as the makeshift barracks for the incoming soldiers. As one onlooker relates, “Troops are daily coming in; they break open and quarter themselves in the houses they find shut up. Necessity knows no law.”
In what were once the grand parlors and boudoirs of the city’s elite, now the poor, unwashed, sometimes illiterate farmers’ sons who comprise the common soldiery eat their daily food scraps and sleep several to a room, rarely if ever bathing, even after long days doing drills and laboring in the dirt and mud.
Sometimes, the quartered troops hack up the expensive furniture to serve as firewood. “Oh the houses in New York, if you could see the insides of them!” one resident writes. “Occupied by the dirtiest men on the continent … if the owners ever get possession again, I am sure they may be years in cleaning them.”
As usual, Washington and his officers attempt to instill some discipline with new rules to prevent this destruction. In the general orders of April 17, Washington complains that “many houses taken up for barracks, are much abused by the Soldiers,” and prohibits “any wood being cut upon the floors or any water or filth thrown out of the windows.” By most indications, these rules are not particularly well enforced, if at all. Homes continue to be destroyed.
In fact, damaged houses are the least of the army’s worries. The visiting troops quickly overwhelm the city’s sanitation, sewage, and water systems. The same bad hygiene and lack of sanitation that plagued the soldiers’ camps outside Boston now plague the New York City quarters, even more amplified by the tighter proximity of the soldiers in city buildings, as well as the prevalence of dust, soot, and garbage in the air and on the streets.
With no prior regional infrastructure in place to supply a national army, the Continental Congress and local colonial authorities have to scramble to accommodate the army’s never-ending needs, rarely reaching them on time. As a result, the troops in New York City are in a constant condition of being insufficiently clothed, fed, armed, and supplied.
Even more troubling for George Washington is the growing ratio within the army of new soldiers who lack any experience or training. “To expect … the same service from raw and undisciplined recruits, as from veteran soldiers,” Washington writes, “is to expect what never did and perhaps never will happen.” Somehow, these “raw and undisciplined recruits” are supposed to stand up to the best-trained armies in the world.
George Washington soon summarizes his army’s prospects in a candid letter to his brother John Augustine. “We expect a very bloody summer at New York,” Washington writes, “and I am sorry to say that we are not, either in men or arms, prepared for it.”
&n
bsp; All the while the hulking British warship Asia sits anchored in the harbor, visible from shore, its massive array of cannons aimed at the city’s homes. In the Asia’s shadow floats the smaller Duchess of Gordon. Inside, William Tryon and his allies meet and plan, with intentions impossible for Washington or his officers to know or fathom. Every evening after the sun sets, the dark silhouettes of these ships serve as a constant reminder to soldiers and citizens alike of the massive show of power that awaits when the British fleet arrives.
It’s coming. It’s just a question of when.
31
New York Harbor
April 1776
Washington’s army is so close.
On many mornings when Governor Tryon wakes up aboard the Duchess of Gordon, he can see the waterfront buildings and docks of southern Manhattan, across the harbor from where his ship is anchored. From this visible shoreline, Tryon knows that George Washington’s headquarters—the very heart of the Continental army—is only a few blocks away.
Here on his floating base of operations, Tryon is doing everything within his power to undermine that very army.
Not by force, of course. He’s using other, more surreptitious means.
Throughout the months of winter and into the spring, Tryon’s intelligence-gathering efforts have continued to improve, and his efforts are noticed by both sides in the conflict. When Tryon’s ship had to spend a few weeks farther from shore due to ice patches in the harbor back in February, the British general Henry Clinton—one of the most astute officers in the Crown’s forces—wrote to Tryon: “I lament much that this movement will put you at such a distance from intelligence, as Your Excellency is almost the only one on the Continent that can get any.”
In his unusual role as floating spymaster, perhaps Tryon’s most audacious feat of the season is to plant a mole at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia—a mole who can therefore deliver to him regular updates of the highest-level proceedings in all the colonies.
Tryon accomplished this by somehow arranging for his own former servant to be hired by an oblivious congressman, James Duane from New York, to serve as the congressman’s valet and personal aide. While Duane employed the valet, Tryon simultaneously paid the young man to send him regular updates from the inside.
This bold scheme of Tryon’s is eventually discovered. As one Philadelphian recounts the story, “At length a doubt arose in the breast of Mr. Duane … that his valet, who had formerly lived with Governor Tryon, had, at night, when he went to bed, taken his minutes out of his pocket, which he had copied, and sent to his late master.”
Once the valet’s cover was blown, he eluded capture and escaped from Philadelphia, after which Tryon had to arrange for the young spy’s secret transport to England to avoid imprisonment or worse.
Somehow Tryon orchestrates this entire scheme, and others like it, from his small shipboard headquarters.
Naturally Tryon hasn’t been doing all this work alone. In the past few months he’s had a team of allies coming and going to support his efforts, including an inner circle of confidants. For a while he’d been able to conduct regular meetings with his Governor’s Council, comprising seven men who served as his appointed governing body when he was still running the government.
Tryon has had to curtail these council meetings ever since Generals Lee and Washington cut off communications between shore and the king’s ships; with these new regulations it’s too difficult for Tryon to sneak the council on board.
Still, he has had other regular confidants, including David Mathews, the Mayor of New York City, who often comes aboard; Cortlandt Skinner, the attorney general of New Jersey, who, like Tryon, fled to the Duchess when the rebels threatened to seize him; John Tabor Kempe, the attorney general of New York, who also came aboard to avoid prosecution; and Edmund Fanning, Tryon’s trusted secretary and top aide, who has been with Tryon since his North Carolina days. Edmund Fanning has a servant who is also another regular on the ship—a dark-skinned man often tasked with the risky business of ferrying sensitive information and goods back and forth from ship to shore in the dead of night.
For Tryon the spying and ferrying of information are now only part of the operation from his ship. Now that spring is here, and now that the British army is expected, his focus shifts from gathering intelligence to gathering something else: soldiers.
It starts with mobilizing ordinary citizens in areas where the Continental army does not exert control—finding small towns and rural areas where farmers and townsfolk will agree to secretly take up arms against the Continental forces.
In some cases Tryon also organizes the secret flow of guns from their ships to these areas surrounding the city. Once formed, the underground groups communicate with one another and create a secret network of Loyalist influence in the counties throughout the region.
For Tryon, creating new soldiers from citizens is good, but there’s something else even better: luring Continental soldiers to switch sides.
What more devastating way to subvert the Continental army than to turn its own soldiers against it? Tryon has already demonstrated that soldiers currently fighting for scraps in Washington’s army, often under terrible conditions, are susceptible to being “turned.”
Tryon’s underlying conviction, and one on which he has never wavered, is that most ordinary residents in the colonies—or at least in New York—remain devoted to England. The radicals and rebels may have temporarily scared them or bullied them into proclaiming their support for the revolution, but they can just as easily be persuaded back to their original allegiance. He believes this of citizens, and he believes this of soldiers.
Tryon’s attempts to turn soldiers began with relatively small efforts, sending recruiters around—men like Thomas Vernon, for whom Tryon had purchased the armed sloop—with money in their pockets, hoping to lure or bribe suggestible soldiers or militiamen in the counties surrounding the city.
Once on the payroll, some recruits are sent aboard the British ships in the harbor, either the warship Asia or the Governor’s own ship, the Duchess of Gordon. Others are sent to Long Island, where a growing number of Loyalists are banding together to organize against the rebels. Others remain where they are, but act as undercover agents, still outwardly allied with the rebels, but secretly communicating with Tryon’s spies and recruiters, offering intelligence, and awaiting instructions.
Tryon’s recruiting efforts in the spring of 1776—and evidence will later show that these efforts stretch from Long Island to New Jersey to upstate New York—become the foundation of a vast new operation.
If he can assemble a wide but secret web of followers, prepared to raise arms or otherwise act on his behalf, there is no end to the havoc he can wreak upon the Continental army.
Tryon’s plan has many components, but one common thread is that he will wait for the perfect moment—the very moment when the British army arrives this summer—and then his secret web of recruits will rise up and take action.
For those Continental soldiers whom he has already secretly recruited on Long Island, in New Jersey, and in upstate New York, this could mean suddenly turning their guns on their fellow soldiers. For others, it could be acts of military sabotage: blowing up bridges, stealing weapons, or destroying supplies.
Through the months of April and May, Tryon’s plans steadily take shape.
Still, he wants to do more.
Tryon can practically see George Washington’s headquarters from his ship in the harbor. How can Tryon penetrate the real inner circle? How can he get closer and do even more damage?
Maybe, instead of recruiting Continental soldiers on the outskirts, Tryon can find a way to infiltrate the very heart of Washington’s army. Not on Long Island, not in New Jersey, but right here in Manhattan.
Somehow, Tryon needs to get to someone on the inside.
32
New York, New York
May 1776
Gilbert Forbes is a gunsmith. This much is known.
These are the basic facts about Gilbert Forbes. After that, things get murky.
What’s clear is that in the early months of 1776, there seems to be nothing unusual about Forbes, as a gunsmith or as a person. His first appearance in the public records that year is unremarkable. On March 22, he had gone before a local law-enforcement body, the New York Committee of Safety, for help settling a petty dispute with another gunsmith, who Forbes claimed was trying to steal his employee. The entire matter is contained in one paragraph in the Committee’s records:
Gilbert Forbes, of the City of New York, gunsmith, informs that he has lately had a certain William Clarke, a lockfiler by trade, and a useful mechanic, employed in his service; that a person named Winter, from Chester, in Maryland, has lately come here, and insists on taking the said William Clarke.… Winter now claims him as a servant, and has threatened to apprehend the said Clarke, and to commence a suit against the said Gilbert Forbes.
That’s it. The authorities side with Forbes, he presumably keeps his employee, and the other gunsmith goes back to Maryland. On just that single day at the Committee of Safety when Forbes pleads his case, there are probably a dozen matters of greater importance.
In ordinary times, that minor dispute might be all that history would ever record about a man like Gilbert Forbes.
These are not ordinary times.
In the spring of 1776, on the eve of the first large-scale battle of the Revolutionary War, one commodity is in an almost infinitely high demand: guns. The flintlock muskets and American hunting rifles of the era are not mass-produced, and the colonial army in particular is in constant, almost desperate need of more firearms.