In fact, it was French and Spanish espionage that was of greater concern. In an address after the war, Washington—no doubt remembering his financial difficulties during it, especially when he needed to slip cash to his agents—stressed the need to establish a “competent fund” to pay for espionage services. Such a fund would “enable me to fulfill my duty in that respect, in the manner which circumstances may render most conducive to the public good, and to this end [allow] the compensations to be made to the persons who may be employed.” Accordingly, in 1790, Congress created a “Contingent Fund for Foreign Intercourse,” earmarking toward it forty thousand dollars. Within three years, this figure had ballooned to one million dollars, or nearly one-eighth of the national budget.
What had caused this fiscal explosion? The revolution in France, followed by her declaration of war on Britain in February 1793, was mostly to blame. Despite France’s invaluable aid during the war, Paris—no matter whether under the ancien régime or the newer radical one—was not an entirely natural ally of the United States. Her intervention had been prompted more by a desire to do ill to Britain than good for the Americans. Indeed, having read of the horrors in France, many of her most ardent American admirers were rethinking their Anglophobia. Washington, famously, maintained a position of strict neutrality.
Statesmanlike his decision was, but neutrality invited trouble from the spooks. Like neutral Spain and Switzerland in the Second World War, America became infested with spies from every land fighting their countries’ battles on someone else’s turf. France, for instance, immediately began plotting against Spain, Britain’s ally, and sought to tip the Americans into Paris’s camp. France’s chief diplomat in America, Edmond Genêt, coordinated covert attacks on Spanish territories in Louisiana and the Floridas, while his successor, Joseph Fauchet, opened a secret channel with Edmund Randolph, the American secretary of state. Documents captured by a British vessel, Cerberus, in an attack on the Jean Bart, a French corvette, and helpfully passed to Washington, seemed to indicate that Randolph, a Francophile, had been soliciting a bribe as he attempted to torpedo the signing of the Jay Treaty with Britain. Though Randolph denied doing any such thing or acting improperly, the French government certainly regarded him as a volunteer agent of influence within the Cabinet, if not a paid partisan. Heightening American suspicions of France’s motives was the arrival of some twenty-five thousand Jacobin refugees after Robespierre’s execution. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that some of these might be sleepers and agents-in-place deserving of closer surveillance. However, instead of creating a domestic counterintelligence agency dedicated to unearthing, uprooting, or penetrating the enemy networks, the government instead decided to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that allowed the legal prosecution of suspects on a broad, and not terribly well-defined, range of charges.
As for Spain, her principal objective from 1786 was to separate the western territories from the United States and attach them to her possessions in Louisiana. To this end, James Wilkinson, a former brigadier general in the Continental army, was hired at an annual salary of two thousand dollars. Wilkinson, an accomplished cheat, blackguard, and traitor, settled in Kentucky (formerly part of Virginia) and sought to persuade his fellows to secede from the United States and become part of the Spanish empire. Upon the recognition of Kentucky’s statehood, Wilkinson’s intrigues fizzled out, and while he continued taking Spanish gold (at a reduced level), he was forced to regain a commission in the U.S. Army to pay the bills. In 1796, Wilkinson was appointed commander-in-chief of the army, which means that a former Spanish agent was running the United States military for a time, even if Spain and America had signed a treaty the year before Wilkinson’s elevation.76
It was a new and dangerous secret world that awaited this young nation.
None of the Culpers ever told a soul what they had done. Almost as if the war had never happened, they resumed their normal lives. Two were betrothed within the year. Brewster married Anne Lewis, daughter of Jonathan Lewis of Fairfield (who partly owned a wharf there, much used by Brewster during his whaleboating days), and Tallmadge settled down with Mary Floyd, the eldest daughter of William Floyd, signer of the Declaration of Independence and kinsman of the long-suffering Colonel Benjamin Floyd.1
In 1791, the hated Colonel Simcoe became the first Lieutenant-Governor of Canada, where he abolished slavery and has a lake named after him. The later career of Nathaniel Sackett, the great innovator of American espionage, was one of perennial disappointment. In 1785, his plan to establish a new state in the west bordering the Ohio, Scioto, and Muskingum rivers and Lake Erie was ignored by Congress. Four years later, evidently suffering from grave mental illness, he wrote a disjointed, incoherent letter to Washington begging him to remember the services he had rendered. It, too, was ignored.2 The intrepid John Clark fared better. After peace was declared, he went on to practice law in Pennsylvania. His wife inherited land, so he was never obliged to exert himself greatly, but he was always on call to liven up a dull evening with his wit and sarcasm. Rousing himself for battle one last time, he volunteered for service in the War of 1812, unsuccessfully ran for Congress in March 1819, and died on December 27 that same year.3
After returning to Long Island, Robert Rogers, captor of Nathan Hale, continued to annoy British regular officers with his recruitment of “Negroes, Indians, Mulattos, Sailors and Rebel prisoners,” according to Alexander Innes, who in January 1777 was appointed Inspector-General of the Provincial Forces. Innes found that the Rangers had declined to one-fifth of its original size through desertion, and reports of their voracious pillaging were becoming embarrassing. General Howe asked for Rogers’s resignation, to which he, uncharacteristically, assented, because he was getting too old and was also disheartened by his imminent divorce from his beloved Elizabeth. He never saw her again, nor his son.4 In the fall of 1778 he was in Quebec recruiting soldiers. Then he was seen in London, but was back in New York in April 1779, all the time in desperate debt and drinking heavily—a habit acquired in debtors’ prison. He was finally captured by the Americans while aboard a schooner bound for New York from Quebec, and jailed in 1781. A broken man, he left for England with the rest of the army after the British defeat. For the rest of his life, he lived penuriously in London, boozing, and boring listeners—who thought this grizzled, muttering Yankee mad—with his interminable war stories. He contracted a wasting cough which made him spit up blood-clotted phlegm and prone to frenzies. The wretched end came on May 18, 1795, when, following a fall that “hurt his mind,” Rogers died.
From the day his treachery was uncovered to the day he died, Benedict Arnold never escaped his past. After the War, in London, Arnold did not find the adulation he craved; the Whigs loathed him and the Tories distrusted him. His enemies knew Arnold could never return to the United States for fear of hanging, but then again, opined one newspaper, “as to hanging, he ought not so much to mind it. He thought the risk of it was but a trifle for his friend Major André to undergo.”
André was Arnold’s personal albatross. André was everywhere feted as the handsome, doomed, Romantic hero: There was a marble monument dedicated to André, erected in Westminster Abbey—the ancient burial chamber of sovereigns and warlords—and the bestowal of a knighthood on his brother, just for being related. Worse was to come. Every one of Arnold’s financial and military schemes in Britain, the West Indies, and Canada came to nought, and he rapidly gained the reputation of being an embarrassing nuisance. By the late 1790s, Arnold was broken in spirit and in body.
Owing to an asthmatic cough, he got two hours’ sleep a night. On June 8, 1801, his throat grew so hellishly inflamed he could barely draw breath. Two days later, he became delirious: It is said that he dressed in his old Continental uniform and fearfully begged God to forgive him for ever donning another. On June 14, “after great suffering, he expired … without a groan.” The papers barely noticed his death.
After the war, William Heron—blessed with
a resoundingly positive recommendation written by Parsons to Washington—retired to Redding and led a blameless life as a public official in the new republic.5 He was elected to the Connecticut assembly several more times between 1784 and 1796, and died on January 8, 1819, his knavery undetected to the last. On his tombstone in Christ Church Yard is piously inscribed, “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.”6 Parsons drowned in the Big Beaver River in November 1789. Oliver De Lancey continued in the army after the war, was appointed barrack-master general in 1794, and was elevated to the rank of full general in 1812. He died a decade later, never the wiser that Heron had played him for a fool all along. Indeed, no one suspected Heron’s extracurricular activities until 1882, when a collection of Sir Henry Clinton’s intelligence records containing the complete De Lancey—Hiram correspondence was put up for sale at a London auction house.7
As for Robert Townsend—the tortured, flawed Oskar Schindler to Woodhull’s selfless Raoul Wallenberg—he forever remained a bachelor, to the last an enigma. Of all the Culpers, only Townsend became embittered by what he perceived as his ill treatment: Washington never fulfilled his wartime pledges to provide a reward or public office for him. In the same year his comrades married, 1784, Townsend may have fathered an illegitimate son, also named Robert, by his housekeeper (Mary Banvard), to whom he would leave five hundred dollars in his will. Townsend, at the time of the child’s birth, was living with his brother and cousin, and many decades later Solomon Townsend (a nephew) suspected that the real father of Robert Junior, whom he intensely disliked, was the brother, and that Robert Senior had taken it upon himself to provide for the boy’s schooling, set him up as a grocer, and pay for French lessons. After all, Junior, with his “large head, broad face, large prominent blue eyes & large solemn features” (in the words of Peter, another nephew) bore no resemblance to his alleged father. There was perhaps something to this hunch: The brother in question, William, “a dissipate young man” who drowned a few years after the Revolution while cutting a vessel from the ice, was known by Oyster Bay’s young women as the “Flower of the Family.” He may have occupied himself in the occasional deflowering as well, such as that of Mary Banvard, while Robert took over the boy’s care after William’s death. On the other hand, Junior does seem to have suffered from the same depression that afflicted Robert Townsend. Thus, he often felt, he said, that there was “no bright prospect of any kind in the future” and he often “became hopeless—dispirited.”
Robert Junior later became a figure in the Tammany movement, and succumbed, in the words of his horrified conservative cousin, Peter, to “radical visionary politics.” For this reason, he claimed in a speech, recalled by one attendee, that he was a “working man” whose mother, “a confiding girl,” had “been deceived by a gentleman of high standing,” and that as a young boy—“the son of nobody, an outcast”—he had been “exposed to reproach and suffering.” Given Robert’s kindness toward him, there may have been an element of class-based, politically motivated hyperbole about this story since he was then hoping to run for the lieutenant governorship of New York State. He died in 1862.8
Townsend went into business with another brother, Solomon, at the end of the war, but their relationship soured (Solomon said his brother “conducted himself without temperance or moderation”) and Robert left New York, with much money owing to him, and went to live permanently in Oyster Bay with his sisters, Sarah and Phebe. He died, quietly and forgotten, on March 7, 1838, aged eighty-four. Townsend left behind, among other things, twenty shares of Manhattan Bank stock (worth $1,200), sixteen shares of the Mercantile Insurance Company ($400), three shares of the Life and Fire Insurance Company (worthless), five shares of Merchants Exchange Company stock ($350), and $4,043 in cash “in the hands of S. Townsend of New York”—he was referring to his nephew, not his estranged brother, who had died in 1811. There wasn’t much else, apart from his large and wide-ranging library, some clothes, a few trunks, two gold sleeve buttons, and one “Silver Watch not worth repair.”9
Austin Roe, who alone had married before joining the Culper Ring, ran a tavern after the war. On April 22, 1790, during Washington’s tour of Long Island, he stayed at Roe’s inn for a night, which he found “tolerably decent with obliging people in it.” It is said that Roe was so excited to meet the great warlord he fell off his horse and broke his leg. He served in a Suffolk County militia regiment after the war, and was appointed lieutenant of the First Company in 1786, with Captain Jonas Hawkins—his fellow courier—being his immediate superior, and Major Nicoll Floyd—son of William, Tallmadge’s new brother-in-law—commanding both of them. The next year, Floyd departed, Hawkins took his place, and Roe was promoted to the vacated captaincy.10 Roe died in 1830 in Patchogue, Suffolk County, aged eighty-one, the father of eight children. Jonas Hawkins seems to have opened a twenty-room tavern and store down the road in Stony Brook, but nothing more is known of him.11 Selah and Anna Strong died in 1815 and 1812, respectively, having lived quietly in Setauket their entire lives.12
Brewster, after moving to Fairfield with his wife, became a blacksmith before joining the forerunner of the Coast Guard in 1793 by taking command of the revenue cutter Active, whose job it was to stop his former colleagues’ smuggling. He held that post until 1816 (barring three years, during the Adams administration, when he left the service in protest of the president’s politics), when he retired to his farm in Black Rock, dying there on February 13, 1827, aged eighty.13 He is buried in Fairfield’s cemetery. The elements have erased the lettering on his tombstone, but, like Roe, he left behind no fewer than eight children and his wife, who herself died eight years later.
Little is known of the great Abraham Woodhull, who uncontroversially served as “First Judge of Suffolk County” between 1799 and 1810.14 His wife, Mary Smith—whom he had wed in November 1781—bore him three children (Elizabeth, Jesse, and Mary), and she died in 1806. Elizabeth and Jesse both married Brewsters. In 1824, Woodhull, now quite old and probably lonely, married again, this time to Lydia Terry, and they had no offspring. Woodhull died, mum to the last about his wartime secret service, on January 23, 1826.
Benjamin Tallmadge, who settled in Litchfield, Connecticut, became a wealthy man thanks to his investments in the Ohio Company and was in 1801 voted to Congress on the Federalist ticket, from which perch he attacked Jefferson and Madison on several occasions. Described as a “Puritan humanitarian” by his biographer, Tallmadge believed the continued acceptance of slavery will “ere long … call down the vengeance of Heaven on our heads,” cofounded the Litchfield Auxiliary Society for Ameliorating the Condition of the Jews, and donated large amounts to local churches.15 He retired in 1817, and devoted himself to establishing a training school for Native American and Asian missionaries. In 1824, he met once more the Marquis de Lafayette, who was traveling through New Haven. Aged eighty-one, he died on March 7, 1835—like his Culper colleagues, Tallmadge proved exceptionally long-lived for the time—his last letter (to his son) noting that “I have had a swollen face which gave me much pain, and for several days was very uncomfortable.”16
Like the rest of the Ring, Tallmadge cast off the cloak of the secret world for the raiment of a brave new one, but just once, he felt compelled to break his self-imposed silence in order to honor the memory of the sacrifices made by his friends. It was in 1817, on the eve of Tallmadge’s departure from Congress, that John Paulding, one of the trio who had captured André in no-man’s-land, applied for an increase in the war pension he (and the others) had been awarded by Congress by way of thanks for their services.17 Most Americans, recalling his virtuous acts of nearly forty years before against the supreme traitor, Arnold, were inclined to grant him his petition, and Paulding enjoyed vociferous support in Congress, where Tallmadge was one of the few surviving members who had fought in the war.
“A debate of no little interest arose on this question,” the Annals of Congress diplomatically records of what ha
ppened next. The aged Tallmadge rose to his feet and furiously denounced the three men as nothing less than murderous scoundrels who would have happily released André had he happened to have more cash on him. When they removed André’s boots, “it was to search for plunder, and not to detect treason.” The three, he continued, “were of that class of people who passed between both armies, as often in one camp as the other.” Indeed, declared Tallmadge, if he and his dragoons had come across Paulding, Isaac Van Wart, and David Williams that night, he would have arrested them himself, “as he had always made it a rule to do with these suspicious persons.”18
Tallmadge recalled his long and bitter experiences with the rapacious Skinners and their Tory counterparts, the Cowboys, the terrestrial equivalents of the whaleboatmen who had preyed on Whig and Tory civilians alike. To him, and to the last remaining soldiers of the Revolution, the Skinners and whaleboatmen were charlatans who sanctimoniously disguised their violent avarice with protestations of patriotic idealism, and they were disgraces to the republican virtues exemplified by Washington and his Continental army. It was these same sorts who had harassed Caleb Brewster on his covert missions across the Sound, who had menaced poor Abraham Woodhull on several occasions, and who had forced Austin Roe and Jonas Hawkins to take more circuitous routes than they otherwise would have taken, thereby endangering the Revolution by delaying the Culpers’ messages. Had Robert Townsend, or any of the others, fallen into their hands, they, too, would have been sold to the British as booty. That Paulding and his friends had hijacked the Patriot cause for their own ends was simply too bitter a pill to keep swallowing. In the end, Paulding’s petition came to nought, as the House Committee on Pensions, which examined his case, was concerned that if it was granted, a flood of similar applications for increases would arrive from other old soldiers. Still, Tallmadge, driven out of his habitual discretion, had finally had his say.
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