by Brad Meltzer
Washington quickly replies to the letter, writing that he and his army will provide any assistance to help “root out or secure such abominable pests of society,” and that the Fairfield committee’s “zeal & activity upon this occasion is truly commendable.”
He refers the letter to the New York Provincial Congress for further discovery, urging action. However, none of the committees in either colony is able to uncover more information about the plot. With no names or other details to follow up on, there’s little that Washington can do with his army in New York City.
The Connecticut authorities put some of the implicated Loyalists in jail, but the true leaders of the plot are never discovered, and an attempt to locate and arrest one of the alleged organizers on Long Island is not successful. For all anyone knows, more boatloads of Loyalists associated with the scheme could already be en route to Long Island.
The day after Washington receives the report from Fairfield County, he receives an even more distressing letter from the King’s County Committee of Correspondence, representing the region around Albany, New York. The letter, written by the chairman of the committee, begins this way: “By the enclosed you will discover the glimmering of such a plot as has seldom appeared in the world, since the fall of Adam by the Grand deceiver & Supplanter of Truth.”
That’ll get your attention.
The letter goes on to announce a complex Loyalist plot against Washington’s army and the American cause: “Believe it the plan is as deep as Hell, many other circumstances and things perfectly agree with this information and we depend on it, that the Tories have a set time … to rise against the country.”
As ominous as this language may be, the most horrifying part of the message comes in the form of two depositions enclosed with the letter, from witnesses who make an extraordinary claim: One of the masterminds of this Loyalist plot is one of Washington’s own generals—Philip Schuyler, stationed in the northern part of New York near Canada.
The depositions claim that General Schuyler is actively recruiting a Loyalist army, including from the ranks of his own Continental troops, with the goal of securing the entire Albany region for the British, thereby cutting off a critical section of the Hudson River.
The accusations are stunning. George Washington’s own man—a turncoat.
Washington must have thought about the terrible affair with Dr. Benjamin Church in Cambridge. From that past episode, the Commander-in-Chief learned that even the most outwardly Patriotic friend of the revolution could be secretly consorting with the enemy and committing treason. Anything and everything is possible.
Nonetheless, Washington believes that this situation is different.
Philip Schuyler is an aristocrat from a respected family, a man of advanced age with a strong reputation for honesty. More important, Washington had gotten to know him personally at the Second Continental Congress, where Schuyler was one of the delegates representing New York. Unlike Dr. Church in Cambridge, Washington considers Schuyler a personal friend. He can vouch for his character. For George Washington, nothing matters more than character.
Still, he can’t be sure. Whatever the truth, time is of the essence to manage this crisis. Once rumors begin to spread among officers and soldiers that one of Washington’s top generals is in fact a traitor, the army will be thrown into chaos.
Indeed, the very next day, as Washington determines how to respond, he learns that the King’s County committee has already shared the accusation with the Governor of Connecticut, Jonathan Trumbull, as well as with members of the New York Provincial Congress.
With no more time to deliberate, the Commander-in-Chief decides to trust his instincts about one of his top generals.
Washington immediately writes a letter to Schuyler, enclosing copies of the damning accusations. The letter makes it clear that he believes the accusations are false, the work of enemies who are trying to divide the army: “From these you will readily discover the insidious and diabolical arts & schemes carrying on by the Tories and friends to government to raise distrust, dissension & divisions among us.”
Washington goes on to assert his faith in Schuyler’s honor. “Having the utmost confidence in your integrity and the most incontestible proofs of your great attachment to our common country and its interests, I could not but look upon the charges against you with an eye of disbelief and sentiments of detestation and abhorrence.”
Washington further suggests that these accusations serve to highlight how vigilant they must be against these and other Loyalists in the colonies, because “our internal enemies have many projects in contemplation to subvert our Liberties.”
Upon receipt of Washington’s urgent letter, Schuyler does what Washington hopes. He immediately and forcefully denies the “diabolical tales” and vows to clear his name and bring to justice those who spread them. “It [is] now a duty I owe myself and my country to detect the scoundrels,” he writes, “and the only means of doing this is by requesting that an immediate inquiry may be made into the matter.” Until there is an investigation, “I cannot sit easy under such an infamous imputation as on this extensive continent numbers of the most respectable characters may not know what your Excellency and Congress do of my principles & exertions in the common cause.”
These words are reassuring, as is his demand for an inquiry. Still, Schuyler could be writing all this while still masterminding a treasonous plot. Therefore, the inquiry remains critical. Fortunately for Washington, a team of local colonial authorities in western Massachusetts, not far from Albany, where the accusations originated, has already begun conducting an investigation.
On May 26, the leader of this investigation, a lawyer and former militia officer named Mark Hopkins, writes a letter to Washington to share their findings about this “plot being formed for the destruction of these United Colonies.” In investigating the plot, they pay particular attention to the scandalous accusations against General Schuyler.
According to the letter, they have reached a clear conclusion: “The said Convention … took all those methods they could devise to find out the sentiments of the General. And it is with the greatest pleasure we are now able to acquaint your Excellency that said Convention are satisfied that their suspicions respecting him were wholly groundless.”
Washington’s instincts were correct. The outrageous claims against General Schuyler are false.
Still, the matter is deeply unsettling. The Massachusetts report also suggests, “That there has been a plan forming among our enemies in the colonies, is beyond doubt.”
How far along is this plan? Apparently, the false accusations against Schuyler are in fact part of a larger scheme: “some wicked designing men … falsely asserted diverse persons of distinction & merit to be concerned in it, in order to influence the timid, and ignorant, and promote jealousies amongst us.”
Secret plots, disinformation, and subterfuge. In an environment where no one can be trusted, and unknown dangers lurk around every corner, these tactics sow fear, confusion, and paranoia. Most of all, they destroy trust.
As with the plot discovered in Fairfield, Connecticut, the scope and nature of the real Albany plot are never fully uncovered. Aside from clearing Schuyler’s name, the Massachusetts inquiry fails to offer many other specific details or clues. In the end, most of the participants in the supposed uprising are not identified or apprehended. Presumably, whatever the scheme is, it continues undetected.
Rather than clarify the state of Loyalist activity in New York City in May 1776, these cases and others like them serve only to further confuse Washington and the Patriot authorities. Uncovering these various plots leads not to answers, but to more questions: How many and how strong are the Loyalist ranks in and around the city? Are these different groups connected in any way? How can we separate fact from rumor?
And finally, how much of this activity outside the city can be traced to the former Governor of New York, William Tryon?
Despite these questions, one thing is a
bundantly clear. Washington’s army and the local rebel authorities need a better, more robust system for detecting and investigating the many schemes and conspiracies in and around New York City.
They need a better method of gathering information.
They need to learn whom they can trust, and who is working for the enemy.
They need a system to uncover and prevent the plots against them.
What they need is counterintelligence—and they need it fast.
35
Goshen, New York
May 1776
James Mason is a working man. He’s a miller by trade.
Unfortunately, for tradesmen like James Mason, finding work is not so easy these days.
Employment is what Mason is looking for when he arrives in the town of Goshen, New York, on or around May 15, 1776. Goshen is in Orange County, about fifty miles north of New York City, to the west of the Hudson River. Goshen is home to one of the largest iron mills in the region, commonly called Ringwood Ironworks. This is where James Mason is hoping to find a wage.
Getting work at the mill apparently isn’t easy, though, because Mason gets only a few partial shifts here and there. The mill can’t offer him a full-time job.
Soon, he learns of a very different kind of opportunity.
On his days off from the mill, Mason needs a place to board. His search for lodging is what leads him to the home of a man named William Farley, who lives about five miles away and has a room to rent.
Farley, it turns out, is an interesting man—or at least, he has an interesting proposition for the out-of-work James Mason. Within a few days after the two men meet, Farley shares a secret with him: Back in April, he spent four days aboard one of the British ships in New York Harbor.
It was the Duchess of Gordon. The ship where the exiled Governor, William Tryon, is headquartered.
That’s not all. Farley tells Mason that ever since he went on the ship, he’s been working for the Governor. His main job is to recruit men from the colonies to secretly join the British side, all of them ready to take up arms when the British forces arrive.
For any man who is willing to join this treasonous plan, Farley tells Mason: “Governor Tryon would give five guineas bounty and two hundred acres of land for each man, one hundred for his wife, and fifty for each child, upon condition they would enlist in his Majesty’s service.”
This money will be paid in small weekly installments—about ten shillings a week—and that land is promised in the future, after the British successfully take the city in battle.
Two hundred acres of land for free, plus a salary. It’s a pretty good deal, and Mason wants in.
Farley gets something out of it too, for recruiting people to join. He tells Mason that he “was to have a bounty from the Governor for every man he could get … that the Governor had desired him to go up and get as many men as he could; that the recruits were to assist the King’s troops when they came.”
A few days later, Farley and Mason depart Goshen with a plan to travel to the Duchess of Gordon, where the new recruits will swear an oath to work for the Governor. Just before they leave, Farley recruits another young man, William Benjamin—a full-time worker at the mill—to join them for the trip and also take part in the Governor’s offer.
The path to the Duchess of Gordon is dangerous, with sentries from the Continental army now monitoring the roads and waterways. The trio passes through Elizabethtown, New Jersey, where a local contact tells Farley that the routes to the king’s ships that used to be easiest—taking a boat directly from Bergen Point, New Jersey, or Staten Island—are now closed off because “there are riflemen staged there,” sent by the Continental army to surveil suspicious travelers.
As an alternative, the local contact advises them to catch a ferry to New York City, where they can then secure a boat ride to the Duchess of Gordon. The contact gives the name and address of a Manhattan shoemaker near the East River who secretly works for Governor Tryon. The shoemaker will arrange a clandestine ferry from Manhattan to Tryon’s ship.
The next day, the three men—William Farley and his recruits, James Mason and William Benjamin—board a boat at Elizabethtown, en route to Manhattan.
If all goes according to plan, James Mason, a miller, and William Benjamin, formerly a laborer at the Ringwood iron mill, soon will swear an oath on behalf of Governor Tryon to join the British and take up arms against their fellow countrymen. In exchange, they’ll receive money and the promise of land.
But as they board the boat to Manhattan, there is something that these would-be traitors don’t know. They are secretly being followed.
36
New York, New York
May 1776
Soldiers living in filth. Soldiers getting drunk. These are two of the difficulties the Continental army is facing with so many men stationed in close quarters in a crowded urban setting.
Yet, these are nothing compared to another great vice of New York City—perhaps the greatest vice of all.
They call it the “Holy Ground.”
It’s the city’s infamous red-light district, and in the 1770s it is probably the most notorious neighborhood in all the colonies. It’s a dimly lit series of blocks toward the southwestern tip of Manhattan, west of City Hall, where brothels, gin shops, gambling clubs, and bawdy taverns line the streets. Every night, drunks, brawlers, sailors, thieves, and other ne’er-do-wells share the streets with the prostitutes and madams looking to lure customers into their houses of ill repute.
How did the Holy Ground get such a perfect name? It’s not just because New Yorkers have always been sarcastic—although that may be part of it. In fact, the blocks of the neighborhood are owned by Trinity Parish, the central institution of the Anglican Church in New York City, whose property also includes Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel.
Despite the fact that many elite citizens attend these houses of worship, apparently neither the church nor the city authorities do much to curtail the illicit activities that occur on the parish’s adjacent property. Perhaps they don’t care so long as the brothels and bars are paying their rents. As a disapproving Bostonian visitor once put it: “Look at New York, where even the church makes money from the whores!”
Still, one thing is certain. In the spring of 1776, as thousands of Continental soldiers pour into the city, business in the Holy Ground is booming.
By one tally from the era, there are about five hundred prostitutes operating in the Holy Ground during this period. The city’s entire population at the time, including the Continental soldiers, is about 25,000. That means prostitutes comprise roughly 2 percent of the people residing in the city. (Extrapolating to today’s Manhattan, that’s the equivalent of some 33,000 prostitutes plying their trade, all concentrated in one neighborhood.)
Most of the young soldiers in the Continental army, coming from their small farms and provincial towns, have never seen anything remotely like the Holy Ground. Now, they don’t just see it—they see it again, and again, and again.
A young Lieutenant from Massachusetts named Isaac Bangs, one of the relatively few Continental soldiers with a college education, writes in his journal about his first interaction with the ladies of the night: “When I visited [them] at first I thought nothing could exceed them for impudence and immodesty, but I found the more I was acquainted with them the more they excelled in their brutality.”
Apparently undeterred, Lieutenant Bangs later makes repeat visits to the neighborhood, without explaining quite why. Another young officer writes a letter home describing the “bitchfoxy jades, jills, hags, strums, prostitutes” he sees at the Holy Ground, and explains that “their unparalleled conduct is a sufficient antidote against any desire that a person can have that has one spark of modesty or virtue left in him.”
Whatever they say in their journals, the soldiers and young officers keep coming back, and as long as the army is in town, the prostitutes “continue their employ, which has become quite lucrative.”
In fact, the young soldiers’ sneering attitude toward the workers in the Holy Ground hides a deeper tragedy. Most of the women are poor, desperate, and vulnerable. The economic depression of the early 1770s has left many people destitute, and the city provides almost nothing in the way of social services. Women of all ages are forced to survive any way they can. Some of the workers in the Holy Ground are single mothers, trying desperately to provide for their children. Every night they contend with intoxicated sailors, soldiers, and criminals. It’s a brutal existence, and the risk of violence is constant.
The drunkenness and crime of the Holy Ground can lead to only one thing for Washington’s army—trouble. On April 22, a few weeks after the main forces move into the city, authorities make a gruesome find in one of the district’s brothels: two soldiers’ bloody corpses, one of them “castrated in a barbarous manner.”
The authorities can’t determine what led to the crime, but soon a gang of soldiers exacts revenge on the brothel by tearing apart the building. Not long after, the body of a prostitute is also found nearby, dumped in an outhouse and left to rot.
Just as with drinking, the army once again institutes various rules and curfews related to this neighborhood of vices. Once again, the rules prove difficult to enforce. The army institutes a special patrol in which on-duty soldiers walk the streets of the Holy Ground to break up fights, put criminals in jail, and keep fellow soldiers out of the brothels.
This is hard work for the patrolmen, because the soldiers who sneak to the brothels don’t wear their uniforms, making it difficult to distinguish them from other patrons. Meanwhile, the patrolling soldiers have to contend with the various drunks, brawlers, and prostitutes in the streets.
One young officer assigned to this duty calls it “hell’s work” and describes altercations in which he “broke up the knots of men and women fighting, pulling caps, swearing, crying ‘murder’ and … hurried them off to the provost dungeon by half dozens, there let them lay mixed till next day. Then some are punished and some get off clear.”
