“The Spies of 1775” in Acton, 31 Mar.

On Monday, 31 March, I’m returning to Acton to speak in the town’s series of Sestercentennial lectures.

My topic this time is “Spies and Military Intelligence,” though I’m titling it “The Spies of 1775” for the assonance.

In my previous visit last spring I talked about the story of The Road to Concord: the Patriots’ effort to build an artillery force and Gen. Thomas Gage’s desire to thwart them.

That talk covered the Boston militia men who smuggled cannon away from the redcoats, the British officers scouting the countryside, and the still unidentified spy sending Gage messages from Concord in bad French.

I don’t want to go over the same ground again, so for this talk I’m collecting the stories of other intelligence sources active from late 1774 to early 1776. One I’ve mentioned only once on this blog is John Skey Eustace, represented above by his coat of arms.

Eustace arrived at Gen. George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters in December 1775, one of several Virginians whom Capt. John Manley had captured on a British ship. He’d been sent north to Boston by his mentor: Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia.

Within weeks Eustace was giving Gen. Washington useful tips about Dunmore’s agent Dr. John Connolly. Washington had already collected information on Connolly’s plan to recruit a Loyalist regiment, and at his warning Patriot authorities in Maryland had locked the man up. On 25 December, Washington warned John Hancock there was more to find:

I have received undoubted Information—that the genuine instructions given to Conolly, have not reached your hands—that they Are very artfully Concealed in the tree of his Saddle & coverd with Canvas So nicely, that they are Scarcely discernable—that those which were found upon him are intended to deceive—if he was caught—you will Certainly have his Saddle taken to pieces in order to discover this deep Laid plot.

Washington repeated that intelligence at the end of January 1776:

You may rely that Conolly had Instructions concealed in his Saddle—Mr Eustice who was one of Ld Dunmores family, & Another Gentleman who wishes his Name not to be mentioned, saw them cased in Tin, put in the Tree & covered over—he probably has exchanged his Saddle, or withdrew the papers when It was mended as you Conjecture—those that have been discovered are sufficiently bad, but I doubt not of the Others being worse & containing more diabolical & extensive plans

That information must have been deemed reliable because on 13 June Richard Henry Lee wrote to Washington:

I am informed that a certain Mr Eustace, now in New York, but some time ago with Lord Dunmore, is acquainted with a practise that prevailed of taking letters out of the Post Office in Virginia and carrying them to Dunmore for his perusal and than returning them to the Office again. As it is of the greatest consequence that this nefarious practise be stopt immediately, I shall be exceedingly obliged to you Sir for getting Mr Eustace to give in writing all that he knows about this business, and inclose the same to me at Williamsburg. I wish to know particularly, what Post Offices the letters were taken from, by whom, and who carried them to Lord Dunmore.

What’s striking about John Skey Eustace eagerly sharing what he knew about Lord Dunmore’s plots is that he was only fifteen years old.

And he’s just one of the people I’ll cover in this talk.

Monday, 31 March, 7 to 8:30 P.M.
The Spies of 1775
Acton Town Hall, Room 204

This event is free to all. It will be livestreamed on ActonTV.org and recorded for posting on the Acton 250 YouTube channel.

Revolutionary Children in Cambridge, 16 Sept.

Tomorrow is Cambridge Discovery Day, when the city’s historical commission promotes a day of free walking tours in various neighborhoods (full schedule in this P.D.F. download).

At 3:00 I’ll kick off a tour called “Children of the Revolution: Boys & Girls in Cambridge During the Siege of Boston.” The description explains:

Children comprised more than half the population of colonial New England. Not only did they get caught up in the start of the Revolution, but some were drawn into the action. Hear the stories of boys and girls from 1774-1776—political refugees, members of the army, servants in the houses of generals, and more.

I’ll focus on the territory around Harvard Square, which was the center of Cambridge in the 1770s. We’ll start at the Tory Row marker on the corner of Brattle and Mason Streets, shown here.

One child I’ll talk about is John Skey Eustace. He was fifteen when he arrived in Cambridge in December 1775. He had been sent north by Gov. Dunmore of Virginia.

Why, you might ask, had the royal governor of Virginia, then on the run from rebels and forming an army of men escaping from enslavement, sent a teenager up to Massachusetts? Well, John Skey Eustace’s story starts with the story of his older sister Catherine, called Kitty.

Kitty Eustace had become Lord Dunmore’s mistress when she was still a teenager and he was governor of New York in 1770. On gaining his post in Virginia the next year, Dunmore arrived with Kitty’s little brother in tow. He arranged for young John’s education, first with a tutor and then at the College of William & Mary.

Meanwhile, Kitty Eustace married Dr. John Blair, a Virginian, which brought her conveniently close to the governor. After only a couple of years the Blairs’ marriage dissolved into lawsuits, which you can read more about in John L. Smith’s Journal of the American Revolution article “The Scandalous Divorce Case that Influenced the Declaration of Independence” and George Morrow’s little book A Cock and Bull for Kitty.

In late 1775, Gov. Dunmore sent John Skey Eustace on a ship to Boston with a letter to Gen. William Howe recommending him for a post in the British army. But the American commodore John Manley captured that ship. That’s how the fifteen-year-old ended up being marched to the headquarters of Gen. George Washington, the opposing commander-in-chief. What happened next? I’ll talk about that tomorrow.