“When passing at Brooklyn Ferry was strictly examined”

In October 1776, as recounted here and here, John Hill’s wife Elizabeth (?) and his daughter were stopped at New London and found to be carrying secret messages to the royal authorities on Long Island.

Ironically, a few years later John became inspector at the Brooklyn Ferry, charged with detecting deserters, smugglers, and spies.

That brings me to a letter that Abraham Woodhull wrote on 19 May 1781, after a visit to New York, as quoted by Morton Pennypacker in George Washington’s Spies on Long Island and in New York:

Your very pressing letter of the 3d inst. came to hand. And it is a matter of grief to me that I cannot completely execute your request. When at New York myself, together with Culper Junior [Robert Townsend] almost racked our invention to point out a proper person and made several attempts but failed—no person will write.

The enemy have got some hint of me for when passing at Brooklyn Ferry was strictly examined and told some vilian supported a correspondence from this place. I do assure you am greatly alarmed—and wished to be relieved from my present anxiety. I shall not think it safe for me to go to New York very soon—and can only supply you with verbal accounts as hath been the case for some time.

If that will answer let me know as shall continue as heretofore until I hear from you. . . .

In haste am Yours Sincerely,
Saml. Culper.

John or Richard Hill, or both, had put the scare into the leader of the Culper Ring. We don’t know if Woodhull was right to suspect those inspectors of suspecting him. But of course he had to be careful.

Other members of that cell, such as Austin Roe, were still getting information out of New York City, but Woodhull stuck to Long Island for a time.

TOMORROW: A second evacuation.

Richard Palmes, Hot-Tempered Apothecary

One of the people of pre-Revolutionary Boston I’m collecting information on is Richard Palmes.

He was born and raised in New London, Connecticut, and moved to Boston as a young man to set himself up as an apothecary. That meant he had genteel status, but not at the top rank of society.

In the wake of Nathaniel Wheelwright’s financial failure [subject of the first essay made available to Boston 1775’s “Buff and Blue” supporters], Palmes declared bankruptcy. He had announced his business just a few months before, so he was not off to the best start.

The man was at the Boston Massacre, at the front of the crowd talking to Capt. Thomas Preston. In fact, some writers have misread the record of that event and blamed Palmes for starting the violence. Palmes was quite clear that he swung his cane around after some of the soldiers fired their guns. But he did swing his cane.

By “Palmes was quite clear,” I mean he testified about the Massacre in more venues than any other witness. He testified at a coroner’s inquest and both major trials. His words appeared in both the Short Narrative and the Fair Account. When he didn’t think the published trial transcript was accurate, he published his version of his own testimony in the newspapers over a year after the event.

During the war, Richard Palmes became an officer of the Continental Marines. Even by the challenging standards of American naval officers, he appears to have been quarrelsome and hard to work with.

After the fighting was over, Palmes settled in Charleston, South Carolina, and started a mercantile business there. He bought a black woman from New York named Elizabeth or Liss as a slave, contrary to the seller’s agreement with her former owner, Robert Townsend.

Palmes is thus a figure in Claire Bellerjeau and Tiffany Yecke Brooks’s book Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth.

Bellerjeau will speak about that book on Sunday, February 12, as part of Fort Ticonderoga’s Author Series. This is an online event, free to members and $10 for other registrants.

Knocking Down the Myths of Agent 355

Her Half of History is Lori Baker’s podcast about notable women in various times. Recently she’s been sharing episodes about women involved in espionage.

I like her take on the Culper Ring and whether those spies included a female agent, source, courier, or cover. You can glean her basic conclusion from the title of that episode: “Agent 355: Washington’s Mostly Mythical Spy.”

The historical record of espionage is always sparse, for obvious reasons. We know that Maj. Benjamin Tallmadge invented a code for his agents that used the number 355 for “lady” and the number 701 for “woman.”

We also know that Abraham Woodhull used the number 355 once, in a letter dated 15 Aug 1779. That dispatch referred to bringing a lady along on a trip into New York because the security was getting stricter.

As Baker says, per her transcript:

This brief mention is 100% of the solid, historical record on Agent 355. It is the only time she is ever mentioned. Everything else is either a speculation or an outright fabrication. And oh wow, does imagination run wild. . . .

Culper…wrote “355,” the code for lady. Much has been made of the fact that he did not write 701, the code for woman. . . . [Using 355] certainly meant she was either the wife or daughter of a gentleman. That is to say, she had some social standing.

Morton Pennypacker and more recently Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger have taken this linguistic nugget of truth and run miles with it. Agent 355 was, according to them a young coquette living in the height of New York society, attending parties with the cream of the British officers. She was also, according to them, a lover of Robert Townsend and later maybe even bore him a child.

Author Alexander Rose calls this an “utterly fantastical and fanciful tale” (Rose, 325), and he is absolutely right. He points out that the letter was written by Woodhull and he says a lady of my acquaintance, not Townsend’s acquaintance (Rose, 325).

Rose then goes on to inform the reader with absolute assurance that the lady in question was Anna Strong. Anna Strong was a Setauket neighbor of Woodhull’s…[who] may have been willing to pretend she was his wife. . . .

This theory seems far more plausible to me than the young New York coquette theory, but at the end of the day Rose does not offer any more proof than the others. Woodhull does not say that this happened. He certainly does not name Anna Strong, and surely she is not the only Long Island resident who could have posed as his wife, if anyone did.

Baker is also skeptical of the family lore about Anna Strong signaling Continental spies in Long Island Sound—and rightfully so, I think. I’ve never been able to figure out the practical logic of that tale, which Pennypacker published a century and half after the war without specifying a source.

Modern American culture thirsts for examples of women active in historical events. In the last century, the extremely sparse documentary tidbits about 355 have been spun out in all sorts of adventures: Agent 355, Turn: Washington’s Spies, The 355, Y: The Last Man. Those stories proudly present themselves as fiction. Most histories of the Culper Ring contain a large amount of fictional speculation as well.

(The picture above appears on Wikipedia’s page for Agent 355, which treats the competing claims too credulously. Its caption says it shows “Agent 355, as depicted in an 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly.” In fact, that magazine article was about Antonia Ford, who gathered information for Confederate commanders in the U.S. Civil War. The original caption, “General [J.E.B.] Stuart’s New Aid,” has been cropped out. Such is our interest in seeing Agent 355, if such a lady ever existed.)

“By the assistance of a 355”

I liked this Smithsonian article throwing cold water on the idea that the Culper spy ring included a woman known as “355.”

As Bill Bleyer writes, the number 355 was in the ring’s codebook as the symbol for “lady,” but that number appears on the record of the spy network only once:

Of the 193 surviving letters written by members of the ring, only one contains a reference to any woman. A coded letter from chief spy [Abraham] Woodhull to [Gen. George] Washington, dated August 15, 1779, includes this sentence: “I intend to visit 727 [Culper code for New York] before long and think by the assistance of a 355 [lady in the code] of my acquaintance, shall be able to outwit them all.”

There’s no evidence of how this lady might help Woodhull, what her real or putative relationship to him was, or what came of that visit—if it ever took place. We do know the codebook had different entries for “lady,” “woman” (701), and “servant” (599), indicating that Woodhull referred to an upper-class woman.

Woodhull and other long-time agents had pseudonyms because they made many appearances in the letters. There was no pseudonym for a woman, and, again, this is the only mention of a 355.

Bleyer discusses the various ways authors have imagined “355” while claiming to write nonfiction. Morton Pennypacker, who first identified the Culper codebook and figured out the ring members, described a lady who was “Townsend’s mistress…arrested, imprisoned on the infamous British prison ship Jersey and given birth to Townsend’s illegitimate son onboard before dying.”

In their book with no citations, Fox talking head Brian Kilmeade and writer Don Yaeger placed “355 in the social circle of British spymaster and legendary party-thrower John André.“ Once again, she ends up on the Jersey. As historian Todd Braisted has noted, we have the names of everyone detained on the Jersey because the Royal Navy kept careful records, and there were no women.

In Washington’s Spies, Alexander Rose portrayed Anna Strong as active in spying out of Setauket, New York. Pennypacker had been the first to bring Strong’s name into the story, printing family lore about her signaling Patriot boats with her laundry in a way I’ve never understood the logic of. Strong was related to Woodhull. But the evidence she took part in spying is beyond thin, much less that she was the 355 of August 1779.

Claire Bellerjeau in Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth proposed that 355 was a woman who escaped slavery on Long Island named Elizabeth or Liss. But the only mention of “a 355 of my acquaintance” came from Woodhull while that woman had been enslaved to the family of another Culper ring spy, Robert Townsend. Also, an upper-class white man like Woodhull wouldn’t identify Elizabeth as a lady.

The many stories about 355 reflect our own society’s wish to imagine an active, daring female spy—and to solve the mystery of that number.

“By what Means this Riot was introduced”

While the king’s army held a public court of enquiry into the violence on the night of 20 Jan 1775, the Massachusetts civil authorities did the same.

Town watchmen swore out a legal complaint against certain army officers. According to John Eliot, witnesses “were examined in the Court House before Justice [Edmund] Quincey,” shown here. Or, as the 30 January Boston Gazette reported:

On Tuesday and Wednesday last there was a full and impartial Examination of Witnesses before the Worshipful Edmund Quincy and John Hill, Esquires, two of his Majesty’s Justices of the Quorum for this County.—

Back in 1768-70, the first time the army patrolled the streets of Boston, Justice Quincy became known for his hostility to any soldiers brought before him. Justice Hill had been one of magistrates most involved in collecting testimony for the town report on the Boston Massacre. So, despite the Boston Gazette’s assurances, friends of the royal government must have been dubious those men were conducting a “full and impartial Examination.”

The army board sat that whole week in “the New Court House,” according to John Andrews, so what “Court House” did these two justices of the peace use? The Town House had served as a courthouse for many years, so perhaps that’s what Eliot meant. It’s hard to imagine the two inquiries taking place side by side.

Edes and Gill published the outcome of the magistrates’ inquiry this way:

By the Evidence it appeared, that previous to the Riot the following Circumstances took place: A little after Ten o’Clock two young Men passing down Milk-Street, near the Entrance into Long Lane, they were accosted by an Officer, not in the English, but as they supposed in another Language, which they did not understand; they asked him what he meant; he said he meant to tell them to go about their Business.

That detail about the officer not speaking in English might have been a dig at Scotsmen in the army. Or he might just have been speaking in another language, or incoherently.

They said they were going, and passed along into Long-Lane. They had not gone far before the Officer called them to stop—they stopped till he came up to them, and angry Words ensued. The young Men, however, parted from him the second Time and went on their Way towards their Homes.

The Officer followed and overtook them near the Head of the Lane, and stopped them again, telling them he supposed they were stiff Americans; to which one of them said, he gloried in the Character.—Here again Words ensued, and the Officer drew his Sword, flourished it and struck one of the young Men on the Arm, who immediately seized him.—

At this Juncture, three or four of the Town Watch, who were upon the Patrole, came up and separated them, advising them to go Home. The two young Men did so, but the Officer refused, saying, he was the Prisoner of the Watch and would go with them; they told him he was not their Prisoner, but might go where he plea’d, and if he desired it, they would see him safe Home; but he insisted upon it, that he was their Prisoner ——

The Watchmen went down the Lane towards their Head Quarters in King-Street, where they had been going before, and the Officer accompanied them. In the Way they met with several Persons, whom they took to be Servants of Officers, who supposing this Officer to be in the Custody of the Watch, attempted to rescue him, but he insisted upon being a Prisoner, and said the Watchmen were his Friends, and he would go with them.

They then went forward, and in Quaker-Lane, which leads into King-Street, they were met and assaulted by more than twenty Officers of the Army, who took several of their Watch-Poles from them and wounded some of them.

We thought it necessary thus far to give a Detail of the Affair, that our Readers might know by what Means this Riot was introduced.——

The Particulars that happened afterwards are too many to be enumerated in a News-Papers. It is sufficient to say, that upon the Evidence the Justices thought proper to bind eight of the Officers, and a Sadler, named Sharwin, who had lived a few Years in Town, to answer for their Conduct at the Superior Court, and in the mean Time to be on good Behavior…

The newspaper clearly painted Sharwin the saddler as a troublemaking outsider. I just hunted for information about him and ended up tracking Richard Sharwin’s career over two decades, followed by his widow’s involvement in the sale of an enslaved woman that linked the Long Island spy Robert Townsend to the Massacre witness Richard Palmes. Someday I may tell that story.

As for the story of what happened on the night of 20 Jan 1775, Eliot supplied this understanding:

Betwixt ten & eleven in the evening an officer in liquor desired the watch to go home with him. A young gentleman of the town, seeing him with two men & thinking him abus'd, went to the British Coffee House, & acquainted the officers collected there that one of their companions was involuntarily led away & made prisoner by the watch. They rushed out, attacked the watchmen with drawn swords, & held the battle till orders were received from the Governor [Thomas Gage] to disperse.

Plus, at some point the main guard turned out under Capt. John Gore, though he was allegedly as drunk as any of the officers from the coffee-house or the first officer who kept cheerfully insisting he was a prisoner of his friends, the watchmen.

TOMORROW: The results of the two investigations.