Washington's Spies

by Alexander Rose

  On November 25, 1753, Robert—the third of Samuel’s eight children (five sons, then three daughters)—was born. His mother was Sarah, the daughter of William and Mary Stoddard, local Episcopalians. The Townsends were Quakers, but Samuel—though a member by “birthright”—may have disappointed them by marrying out. Thankfully, she preferred the Friends, and they piously attended Quaker meetings together, but Samuel himself preferred worldly things. He carried a gold-topped cane and his shoes sported heavy silver buckles. Quakers disapproved as vanity the flaunting of precious metals, so Samuel cautiously avoided trouble with his fellows by otherwise dressing plainly. His conventional, if expensively cut, suits were invariably gray or snuff-colored and his shirts white—all good, sound Quaker colors.27 Still, the snappy cocked hat he wore bespeaks in Samuel a certain rakishness, a degree of independent-mindedness that sometimes put him at odds with the leadership in Pennsylvania, homeland and cockpit of Quakerism.

  This Townsend, though not religiously observant, was culturally Quaker—in education, upbringing, language, and outlook. He resembled, in a way, a modern Jew who eats pork but strongly identifies with humanistic Judaism, or a secular Catholic who, much to his dismay, can’t help but perceive the world in terms of sin, confession, and good works. Samuel—whose marriage conveniently made him socially acceptable among New York’s Anglican elites—was sometimes torn between his desire to fit into conventional society and the heavy load of a Quaker inheritance he could never quite bear to shake off.

  Thus, in 1758—when Samuel is a man of status and wealth, a member of the county gentry, and one accustomed to his inferiors doffing their hats as he passes in the street—we see him writing an intemperate letter to New York’s General Assembly calling for better treatment of prisoners; never a popular move during any war, and especially not in the midst of a very nasty French and Indian one. According to a diary entry of March 27 by Oyster Bay’s schoolmaster, Zachariah Weekes, “Last Monday was a report about town that Justice Townsend was sent for to meet the Assembly and they said to be brought forthwith dead or alive.… However he went without compulsion and stayed there until last Saturday night.”

  What had happened was that when a rather shaky Townsend arrived in New York he was arrested by the sergeant at arms and held in custody for a few days. The Assembly found him “guilty of a high misdemeanor and most daring insult on the honour, justice and authority of this House,” and fined him heavily. He was released after pledging to behave better in the future. Weekes added: “He returned and since it has been as still as a mouse in a cheese.”28

  What could have brought about this strange display of orneriness? Townsend was simply following the example set by the Philadelphia Quakers. In 1755, they had faced a crisis when the French and their Indian allies invaded western Pennsylvania. For the first time, settlers were being scalped and their towns razed, some a mere seventy-five miles from Philadelphia. In the provincial Assembly of thirty-six members, of whom three-quarters were Friends, there was a taxation bill to raise money for border defenses and militias—measures that offended the Quakers’ dedication to pacifism. Politically, the Quaker leadership was uncomfortably divided between those who assented to the taxes in order to preserve Quaker power in the Assembly, and those who stood firm on Quaker pacifist principles, come what may. For a time, the politically minded compromisers held sway and the Quaker bloc voted to supply £15,000 “for the King’s use.”

  Their more spiritually zealous brethren angrily dismissed them as sellouts. If the Quakers bent on their most sacred testimony to appease their critics, they argued, then what next would be sacrificed to gain a temporal advantage? In order to keep the church whole and unified, most of the compromisers—“the Politicals”—resigned their positions in the Assembly in June 1756.29 By defending the rights of prisoners—while not condemning the war itself—Samuel Townsend had found a median between fortitude and moderation, and sided with the Politicals.

  Thankfully, when the clock rolls forward to 1765, Townsend was not faced with another crisis of conscience. Quaker businessmen from north to south strongly opposed the imposition by Parliament of the Stamp Act and the Townshend Duties. Only six days after the Stamp Act came into force, for example, the Philadelphia merchants organized a Non-Importation Agreement; over eighty Friends signed it.30 They could square this stand with their pacifist principles because American resistance to the government in the 1760s was generally confined to petitions and declarations, and there was nothing in Quakerism barring peaceful opposition to iniquitous laws and tyrannical behavior.31

  By the mid-1770s, Samuel Townsend was known throughout Queens County as a moderate, respectably old-fashioned Whig opposed to radical independence talk; even so, the great majority of its residents regarded him as a dangerous firebrand dead set on dragging them into a war with the Mother Country.

  Queens, in short, was for the King. In 1775, of the 3,074 white adult males living there, Whigs amounted to 368 (12 percent), while the number of Tories was more than double that, at 824 (or 27 percent). The “Don’t Knows” came to a minuscule 27 (barely 1 percent), but the so-called neutrals outnumbered them all together at 1,855 (60 percent). Neutrals were not genuinely neutral. They were men who generally steered clear of signing petitions or of announcing their political allegiance. International affairs and highbrow perorations on Our Ancient Anglo-Saxon Liberties were of little interest to them, local and personal issues being of far greater concern. Most were farmers or other rural folk, and while they may have grumbled in their cups at the local tavern about the corrupt ministers in London, by their own inaction and acceptance of the status quo they were passive Tories/Loyalists.

  Focusing on Oyster Bay, in 1775 there were 660 adult males; of these, 23 percent, or 150, were Quakers. And of that 150, fully 89 percent—or 134—can be classed as neutral or Tory. Which leaves Samuel Townsend as just one of 16 outright Quaker Whigs living in Oyster Bay.32

  The geography of Queens County also helped define its politics. In the 1680s, following the English conquest, Long Island was divided in three. Kings, the westernmost county, was the smallest but also the nearest to the city of New York; occupying the eastern two-thirds of the island was Suffolk. Between them was Queens, thirty miles long. At 410 square miles, Queens stretched the width of Long Island so that the Sound formed its northern coast and the Atlantic, its southern. Its total population in 1771 was 10,980. Blessed with fertile soil and a leavening of commercial wealth from the city, northern Queens County was richer than the south, where the residents tended to be subsistence farmers. There were also more Anglicans in the south, further predisposing that already inherently conservative half to Loyalism (or neutralism, at least).

  In Queens County, enthusiasm for the Congress and its works was distinctly lackluster, much to the Whigs’ disappointment. “A great deal of pains has been taken to persuade the counties to choose delegates for the Congress,” Lieutenant Governor Colden cheerfully informed the Earl of Dartmouth on October 5, 1774, yet “several counties have refused. In Queens county, where I have a house, and reside in the summer season, six persons have not been got to meet for the purpose, and the inhabitants remain firm in their resolution not to join in the Congress.”33

  Between December 30, 1774, when Samuel Townsend, as town clerk, moderated a public meeting in Oyster Bay to “take into consideration the resolves of the [First] Continental Congress” (which had convened in Philadelphia in September), and the British invasion of Long Island in the summer of 1776, he played some very dirty politics as he tried to wrest power from the Tory Loyalists who ran the county.

  Local Tories were furious, for instance, after learning that Townsend had (self-)appointed an Oyster Bay Committee of Observation, as per Congress’s instructions. Townsend also stumbled rather clumsily when he agreed to hold the December 30 meeting at the house of George Weeks, a longtime Whig agitator: Tories instantly realized that Townsend and Weeks, the Whig ringleaders, were hoping to ram through an �
��Oyster Bay Supports Congress!” resolution right under their noses. According to a Tory newspaper report of the affair, about ninety of Oyster Bay’s freeholders showed up and voted the “meeting illegal and void” so “that no business could … be done.” During the well-orchestrated filibuster, Townsend was heckled and catcalled.34

  On March 16, 1775, the Committee of Observation (a sixty-strong body of New York Whigs detailed to organize province-wide protests against Parliament) sent a letter to Queens County towns ordering them to hold elections on April 20 to elect delegates to a Provincial Convention. From this Convention, delegates to the Second Continental Congress, due to meet in Philadelphia on May 10, would be selected.35

  Still annoyed by his embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Tories, and angered that he had failed to capture control of the town, Townsend pioneered a dubious tactic to elect a delegate—by hook or by crook. On April 12, ignoring the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Oyster Bayers, he held a secret rump meeting of the town’s Whigs. Predictably, they voted unanimously for their man, Zebulon Williams, to “represent” the town at the Convention.36

  Despite Townsend’s best efforts at ballot-rigging, Whigs could look upon affairs in Queens County only with dismay. In April 1773, Whigs had held 46 percent of all major town offices in Queens County; by April 1775, when they should have been surfing a wave of Patriotic fervor, that figure had plummeted to 32 percent. By way of contrast, in the same period the Tory share rose from 31 percent to 48 percent.37

  But within a short time of Townsend’s secret meeting, Whig spirits revived. On April 23, 1775, news of the Battles of Lexington and Concord reached New York, causing a sensation.38 The Sons of Liberty paraded through the streets en masse and there were several assaults on soldiers. Lexington and Concord instantly transformed politics and hardened political divisions. As the middle ground slipped from beneath the moderates’ feet, they were forced to choose between Loyalism and Patriotism. Townsend chose Patriotism. Then, in early May, the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, and by the middle of June, Congress had assumed control over the Boston militia as the nucleus of a new national army under Washington’s command.

  On May 29 the Congress ordered the formation of committees in each town to supervise observance of the boycott of British goods. Rather unpleasantly, activists were requested to provide to Congress by July 15 the names of those found breaking the rules. Samuel Townsend was on the Oyster Bay committee, where he kept a sharp eye out for sneakily recalcitrant Tories.39

  How many names Townsend turned over to the Provincial Convention cannot be known, but it probably wasn’t very many. Throughout Queens County, antagonism to the new regime ran extraordinarily high. Local chairmen were terrified of Tory reprisals and few of them submitted complete lists to the bosses in New York.40 Their job was not made any easier by Congress’s order in September that all weapons not belonging to Whigs were to be confiscated. Cleverly, the Congress had hit upon a ploy that simultaneously disarmed potentially lethal Tories while acquiring free guns for the new American militias.

  Unfortunately, while clever, the scheme proved unworkable, even after Congress offered a “certificate of appraisal”—a sort of IOU—for any guns relinquished. The Tories threatened open rebellion: Richard Hewlett of Hempstead, a veteran of the guerrilla tactics during the French and Indian War (and future desecrator of the Reverend Benjamin Tallmadge’s Setauket church), went so far as to raise his own, private militia company that he claimed would “warm the sides” of any rebel force that tried to take Tory guns. Even so, William Williams, a Patriot company commander from Suffolk County, was sent to Queens to enforce the law. After a few days, he gave up and reported to the Provincial Congress: “The people [of Queens] conceal all their arms that are of any value; many declare that they know nothing about the Congress, nor do they care anything for the order of Congress, and say they would sooner lose their lives than give up their arms; and that they would blow any man’s brains out that should attempt to take them.” Cheekily, some “hardy and daring” Tories were even breaking into Whigs’ houses and stealing their firearms, and on a few occasions they were reported to be “collecting together, and parading in sundry places, armed, and firing their muskets by way of bravado.” He specified that he needed at least a battalion to do his job.41

  What Williams didn’t know was that Richard Hewlett—now Captain Hewlett—had been in contact with the British and had arranged for the warship Asia to make secret arms drops beginning November 30. Powder, flints, balls, muskets, pistols, even a cannon (plus a gunner) were transferred to Hewlett’s militiamen under cover of night on the south shore of Queens County. The Tories were gearing up for a fight.

  Williams’s problems in Queens notwithstanding, the Patriots were in good shape politically, at least for the moment. On October 13, Governor William Tryon, the Crown’s representative in New York, boarded the Dutchess of Gordon in New York harbor to await the British troops who would put the rebels back in their place. Buoyant, the Provincial Congress called an election for November 7 so that its delegates—now including Samuel Townsend—could take their seats.

  The turnout was better than expected—more than a thousand men across the county cast their votes—but the result was a great deal worse than anyone suspected. Faced with a slate of Whigs (Loyalists were not allowed on the ballot) and a straight yes-or-no question, Tories derived immense pleasure from humiliating their enemies. Samuel Townsend and his colleagues were crushed, 788 to 221.42

  For the moment, the uppity Tories who dared to reject the candidates selected for them by the Whigs had to be punished. In the eighteenth century, votes were openly cast to minimize the risk of ballot-stuffing, so Congress knew the names and addresses of its 788 foes. Excommunicated from the protection of the law, they were turned into outlaws and the papers published their names as a warning.

  On January 3, 1776, Colonel Nathaniel Heard of New Jersey and several hundred Minutemen arrived in Queens County with orders to find, disarm, and arrest the guilty 788. Heard’s aggressive policy of stop-and-search (and raid-and-threaten) brought mixed results. Tories voluntarily surrendered six hundred weapons, but on closer inspection these turned out to be rusty or useless—and certainly not the brand-new English muskets delivered by the Asia. On the plus side, within a few weeks 471 of the 788 had sworn an oath of loyalty to Whig rule. Nevertheless, dozens of others had scarpered and joined the Loyalist militias.

  Heard’s replacement was General Charles Lee, who was commanded to “secure the whole body of professed Tories in Long Island.” Isaac Sears, a self-made businessman and ringleader of the Sons of Liberty’s radical wing, administered, forcefully, new oaths to recalcitrant Loyalists. These arrests were pretty indiscriminate and at one point Whigs from Oyster Bay and Hempstead complained that the rough tactics were turning even Patriots into diehard Tories. Lee and Sears were recalled, but Continental units were permitted to embark on daily “Tory Hunting parties” in the countryside to scoop up suspects and terrorize sympathizers.

  The hardline strategy succeeded, to a point. In the April 1776 elections, the number of Tory officeholders fell from 1775’s 48 percent to 30 percent. But Whigs, who increased their share from 32 percent to an unspectacular 37 percent, did not replace them. The real winners were men who ran as independents (jumping from 19 percent to 33 percent). Clearly, Long Islanders were hedging their bets: They didn’t like the Whigs, but were too scared to vote openly for the Tories. There was nothing for it but to sit tight and wait until the British army arrived to rescue them.43

  Robert Townsend, therefore, matured in this hothouse of Whig politicking, though he doesn’t seem to have participated in his father’s shenanigans. He was too busy learning how to make money in New York, following the traditional path trod by aspiring young merchants, especially those of the Quaker variety. When he was in his mid-teens, his father had arranged for him to enter the “large mercantile House of Templeton & Stewart,” whose stor
e “was in Greenwich Street a little above Morris Street with the river shore as its immediate rear.”44 (Greenwich Street, until landfill expanded Manhattan’s shoreline, was on the water.) Templeton’s was located on the island’s west side, a couple of minutes’ walk south from Trinity Church; Broadway was virtually next door.

  If Townsend walked north up Broadway, he would soon see on his right-hand side the main army barracks, the workhouse, and the jail, all located on the Common, now City Hall Park. The barracks were Spartan affairs: Two or three stories high and square shaped, and divided into small fourteen-man rooms, each contained weapons racks, stoves, cooking pots, candlesticks, and beds (two men to each) with straw mattresses six and a half feet long and four and a half feet wide. The sheets were supposed to be cleaned every thirty days, and sometimes were.45