by Brad Meltzer
In the vast annals of the Continental army’s war papers and correspondence, few topics come up more frequently than the urgent need for more weapons and more gunpowder, requested by every regiment and in every colony, almost on a daily basis. During the army’s stay in New York, the need for guns is so great that soldiers are sent door-to-door in the surrounding counties, asking farmers and ordinary citizens in small towns to donate or sell their guns to the cause.
While some do sell, most ordinary citizens, whether in rural areas, small towns, or cities, are more than ever inclined to keep their personal guns, to protect themselves and their families in violent and unpredictable times.
While the British regular army has no shortage of guns, their Loyalist allies in the colonies are just as desperate as the rebels to acquire weapons—all the more so because the rebel authorities often “disarm” suspected Loyalists by confiscating their firearms.
In other words, in the winter and spring of 1776, guns are bought, sold, stolen, traded, seized, collected, stored, hidden, and generally coveted far more than before.
For all these reasons, the formerly unexceptional work of a colonial gunsmith takes on greater prominence. For Gilbert Forbes, it is his work as a gunsmith that will thrust him unexpectedly into the center of the many plots and schemes swirling around the city.
In fact, he will soon be a key player in the greatest plot of them all.
It all starts quietly on a day in late April or early May. According to Forbes’s own later account, on this day, he is talking to an acquaintance, a “burr-millstone maker” named Webb. In this conversation Webb tells Forbes that if Forbes has any extra firearms in his shop, Webb knows where they’ll fetch a good price.
Okay. Where?
Aboard the British ship in the harbor, the Duchess of Gordon, where the exiled governor, William Tryon, is headquartered.
Tryon needs guns and is ready to pay. Forbes’s ears perk up. He has a stash of nine rifles in his shop and some muskets too. He’s looking for a buyer.
Shortly after this conversation with Webb, Forbes hears a similar story from another person, a “young man who lived with James Rivington.” James Rivington is widely known for having operated a prominent pro-British printing press in New York City, before an angry rebel mob looted his shop and destroyed his press. Anyone who lives with James Rivington is likely to have good information from the British ships.
From two sources now, Forbes has heard that he can obtain a high price for his firearms from Governor Tryon, aboard the Duchess of Gordon.
The gunsmith is ready to make a sale.
Of course, however high a price Governor Tryon may be offering for rifles, many gunsmiths wouldn’t even consider the transaction. With the Continental army stationed in New York, and with General Washington himself forbidding any communication or trade with Tryon or anyone else on the British ships, selling rifles to the Duchess of Gordon is to risk imprisonment or worse if caught.
So in the spring of 1776, is it just money that motivates Gilbert Forbes to take this chance?
Evidence suggests there’s more to it than just greed. There are no concrete records of Forbes’s political leanings before this time, but from this point forward, various accounts will place him inside a web of surreptitious Loyalist activity in the city.
Although most Loyalists fled the island of Manhattan at or before the arrival of Washington’s forces, an underground network remains, whether to do business, spy on the rebels, or act as resistance.
Like much of what happens in New York City, Loyalist activity is often centered around taverns and other drinking establishments: alehouses like Houlding’s and Lowry’s are known as meeting places where the faithful can converge, conspire, share intelligence, curse the revolution, or raise a glass to the King.
Gilbert Forbes will soon be a known presence at these venues. He will be heard “talking Tory” with other colonists who maintain loyalty to the British. Still, it is difficult to know whether Forbes’s Loyalist politics predate his decision to sell guns to the ships, or whether his convictions arose after he made his decision to do business with the Governor’s ship.
Regardless of his innate political leanings, something else about Gilbert Forbes will emerge in the wake of his decision to sell rifles to Tryon. He seems to have ambitions beyond being just a gunsmith.
Indeed, events suggest that Forbes is looking for an opportunity to change his station, to take risks, and to accomplish bigger things. Like many others living through this moment in history, perhaps Gilbert Forbes sees in the chaos of the early war an opportunity to expand his life’s ambitions—and the underground Loyalist movement happens to be the avenue that opens before him.
Whatever Forbes’s true motivations, he is soon making arrangements to deliver his firearms to the Duchess of Gordon. Forbes’s shipment will include nine rifles and eleven “smooth narrow-bored guns,” otherwise known as muskets. These two types of firearms—the accurate but slow-loading American-made rifles, and the less accurate but faster and more powerful British-made muskets—are the most common weapons in the colonies, and the most commonly used by soldiers. It is no surprise that these are the weapons Forbes has in his shop.
Webb, the man who first suggested the idea of the sale, becomes the intermediary and confirms to Forbes that “Governor Tryon will give him three guineas apiece” for the rifles and guns. Payment will be made after receipt. Exact comparisons across eras are difficult to make, but three guineas in 1776 comes out to the equivalent of around $550 in modern currency. So with twenty firearms in the shipment, Forbes will hypothetically make the equivalent of $11,000 if the deal goes according to plan.
The most frequently used American-made weapons in the Revolutionary War are long-range rifles, like the Pennsylvania model pictured above (top). More common for both armies are British-made smoothbore guns, known as muskets (middle). Muskets are inaccurate but faster to load, and a bayonet (bottom) can be affixed for hand-to-hand fighting. In May 1776, Manhattan gunsmith Gilbert Forbes agrees to the secret sale of nine rifles and eleven muskets to Governor William Tryon, aboard the British ship Duchess of Gordon.
But first, the delivery somehow has to get to the Governor’s ship.
Following instructions, Forbes sends most of the guns to a mysterious woman named “Mrs. Beck,” who runs a tavern near the waterfront and will supposedly coordinate the secret shipment to the Duchess. The remainder will be ferried aboard by Webb.
The details of how and when Forbes will receive his payment are left open. After he releases the guns, Forbes must simply wait and hope he will be paid as promised—and also hope, of course, that the rebel authorities currently running the city don’t somehow discover the illicit transfer of weapons and trace it to him.
Most likely, Gilbert Forbes doesn’t sleep so well the night or two after he delivers his rifles—and probably wonders if he’ll ever hear back from his accomplices or be paid for the rifles and guns he sent to the ships.
Then, Forbes receives an unusual invitation.
A man wants to meet with him for a confidential conversation.
And this is not just any man—it’s a man named David Mathews. That is, the Mayor of New York City, appointed by Governor Tryon himself.
Because Mathews is so closely linked to Tryon, Forbes must suspect that the meeting is connected to the guns he sent aboard the governor’s ship.
A few days later, he goes to meet the Mayor. There is no full record of what was discussed at the meeting, but according to Forbes’s later account, the Mayor has one key message for Forbes: He will ensure that Forbes is paid for the guns he sold to Governor Tryon.
Mayor Mathews adds that he himself will soon be visiting the Duchess of Gordon, at which time he’ll retrieve the payment from Governor Tryon personally, and see to it that Forbes receives it.
Suddenly, Forbes is doing business with both the Mayor of the city and the Governor of New York—two of the most important men in the colony.
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For Gilbert Forbes—the short, thick gunsmith who wears a white coat and runs a shop on Broadway across from Hull’s Tavern—his new friends are about to make life a lot more interesting.
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Throughout April and May of 1776, Washington and his officers embark on the massive logistical undertaking of fortifying New York City and preparing their army for the coming British attack.
While trying to accomplish these already momentous tasks, the officers find themselves with another challenge, unrelated and just as difficult: keeping control of their own soldiers in the heart of a major city.
Many of the young men in the Continental army come from poor rural areas and know almost nothing of the world outside the farms, small towns, and country villages of their upbringing.
Even for those from bigger towns or cities, a good number know only the narrow slice of life represented in their home neighborhoods. Most of the common soldiers are uneducated, and more than a few are illiterate. For a large percentage of the soldiers and militiamen who have marched down from Cambridge with the army, and for many recruits now marching in from the farms of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, and southern New Jersey, this long journey will be the first time they set foot outside the tiny radius of their homes.
Now, here they are in New York City.
Even back in the 1770s, New York has established a well-earned reputation for one exceptional quality: vice.
As the Continental officer William Tudor puts it in his diary, “Every brutal gratification can be so easily indulged in this place that the army will be debauched here in a month more than in twelve at Cambridge.”
To put it another way, this place knows how to party.
It starts with the booze.
By any measure the amount of alcohol consumption in the city is extraordinary. Throughout the early 1770s, New York City issued enough liquor licenses that there was one drink seller for every thirteen adult white men in the city; this was about twice as many drinking establishments per capita as any other large city in the colonies.
This comparison is significant because liquor was popular everywhere in the colonies throughout the mid- and late eighteenth century. In 1770, the average annual rum consumption for the colonies as a whole was 4.2 gallons per year per capita, which based on demographics at that time means the typical adult male probably consumed more than five shots of rum per day.
As impressive as this statistic may be, in New York City, the figure is even greater: 6.7 gallons per year per person, or the equivalent of roughly eight shots of rum per day for a typical adult male. And this is only for rum. Other spirits like beer, gin, and the Portuguese wine called Madeira are also popular.
New Yorkers also liked their booze extra boozy. According to a prominent liquor merchant, suppliers in the port of New York demanded higher-proof alcohol than in other ports, because their New York customers wanted stronger stuff.
All this alcohol, and the prevalence of taverns and public houses, made for a hard-hitting drinking culture in the city. Throughout the 1760s, concern had been growing among some civic-minded citizens that excessive drinking was corrupting the moral character of the public.
One newspaper writer complained about the “obscene toasts” heard in taverns that served to “disgust the sensible, to disconcert the modest, and to expose the depravity of taste as well as manners.”
Another writer complained that the “drinking houses” were making the lower classes and servants of the city particularly unruly, and that “the suppression of these houses, which subsist only by furnishing the means of drunkenness and debauchery to servants and mean disorderly people, would be highly agreeable to the inhabitants in general.”
The taverns’ obscene toasts and intoxicated servants were, in fact, the more innocent aspects of the liquor habits in the city. In unlicensed drinking establishments, appropriately known as “disorderly houses,” city authorities were constantly arresting people for “quarreling, fighting, gaming” as well as for “drinking, tippling, whoring, and misbehaving themselves to the great damage and common nuisance.”
According to city records, almost every category of serious crime occurred within the legal and illegal drinking establishments of the city: attempted rape, assault, rioting, pickpocketing, manslaughter, and murder.
Despite the occasional criticism from the elites, this high level of drinking and debauchery is more or less the regular state of affairs for New York City in the early- to mid-1770s.
Now, in the spring of 1776, suddenly add more than ten thousand young male soldiers to the mix. Most of them are under twenty-five and away from homes and families for the first time.
The results are predictable: young soldiers tearing around the city in groups, running from tavern to tavern, buying bottles of rum from the many sellers eager for business, and generally getting intoxicated at any time of day or night.
Of course, the city offers many other unfamiliar sights and cultural experiences for the young men, but the lure of drink has a way of winning out over the other attractions. One soldier earnestly decides to experience the varied religious services offered in the city, most of them totally foreign to the small town from which he comes. But as the young soldier recounts in his journal, after he sits for two hours in a somber Quaker service, he gets bored and instead goes to a tavern next door for “a bowl or two of grog” before returning to camp.
With so many soldiers in the city, a few bowls of grog during a Sunday sermon are far from the worst of the army’s discipline problems. At night is when the city’s taverns come alive, and this is when the wide-eyed soldiers really let loose on the town. On many mornings, the army’s officers receive reports of soldiers out all night, intoxicated, disturbing the peace, fighting with residents, fighting with one another, and occasionally ending up in the city’s jails.
The army establishes curfews, but they prove almost impossible to enforce.
No one is more dismayed by this behavior than the soldiers’ Commander-in-Chief, George Washington. With the impeccable manners of a Virginia gentleman, and his deep convictions of the virtues of modesty and discipline, the Commander is appalled by the drunkenness and debauchery of his troops.
Washington tries to curb the soldiers’ drinking with new rules and regulations, both for the soldiers and the liquor sellers in the city. He orders that “the gin shops and other houses where liquors have been heretofore retailed within or near the lines … are strictly forbidden to sell any for the future to any soldier in the army.”
When Washington’s Quartermaster General, Thomas Mifflin, visits the New York Provincial Congress on April 17, he brings the issue before that body as a matter of grave concern:
General Washington is very solicitous to have the great number of taverns and tippling houses in this city suppressed, because they tend greatly to debauch the soldiers; and requests that this Committee will be pleased to regulate and make out a list of such tavern-keepers and retailers of spirituous liquors as this Committee shall deem necessary.
Washington also creates new rules for the soldiers, in an attempt to restore discipline and curtail the rampant drinking:
If any soldier shall be found disguised with liquor, as has been too much the practice heretofore, the general is determined to have him punished with the utmost severity, as no other soldier in such situation can be either fit for defense or attack.
The army’s general orders are soon peppered with reports of soldiers being disciplined with lashes or fines for excessive drunkenness to set examples for the rest. However, just like the curfews, these rules about drinking are difficult to enforce. If the army were to implement harsher penalties, the result would be self-defeating. The last thing the Continental officers want to do is suspend or expel soldiers when the army so desperately needs to train as many men as possible, as fast as possible.
The need to monitor and discipline unruly soldiers in an unruly city becomes yet another difficult task that befalls G
eorge Washington in the spring and summer of 1776, on the eve of the first great battle of the war.
In the weeks ahead, this task will only get harder.
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Plots, schemes, and conspiracies.
The enemies of the Continental army—the Loyalists whom the authorities have come to call “the disaffected”—seem to be everywhere around New York City, and contriving secret schemes against Washington’s army.
On a weekly and sometimes daily basis, the local Committees of Safety in New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut, Westchester County, Dutchess County, and all over upstate New York file new reports of clandestine plots and activities engineered by the “enemies of America.”
The imminent arrival of British forces for the coming showdown in New York—expected now within the next month or so—has emboldened the enemies of the revolution who reside within the colonies. They’ll do everything they can to undermine the war effort, not with an open show of force, but with subterfuge, espionage, and secret schemes.
On May 15, George Washington receives a letter from Fairfield County, in southern Connecticut. The local Committee of Inspection—a colonial body tasked with maintaining public safety—has uncovered a scheme by which Loyalists from the region are being armed and ferried to Long Island, to join forces with fellow Loyalists and plan an uprising.
The Connecticut militia has already apprehended one boatload of men en route to Long Island and returned them to Fairfield County for questioning. Local authorities also arrested several men in the nearby town of Redding. According to the Committee of Inspection’s chairman, who pens the letter to Washington: “The circumstances attending this affair are not yet fully known … but we think we know enough to convince us that a horrid plot is laid by the Tories to destroy the people of the country, to co-operate with our enemies in every measure to reduce us, and that Long-Island is appointed for headquarters.”