The First Conspiracy

by Brad Meltzer

  Another set of legends regarding the conspiracy is born not in America, but in England. In these, George Washington and the Continental authorities are generally painted as the villains, and the entire plot was a sham cooked up by the authorities to imprison good Tories and loyal English subjects under false pretenses. In many of these accounts, to further besmirch his character, George Washington is also portrayed as having a secret mistress.

  Essentially, these versions are postwar British propaganda, used to discredit the Americans and the Continental army. The most striking example comes in 1786 when a London writer publishes an elaborate text soon to be called Minutes of a Conspiracy Against the Liberties of America that purports to be the full story of the plot and the investigation based on original documents. In fact, the text cleverly intermixes real information with fake names and events. Two fictional women make an appearance, one named Mary Gibbons and the other a mysterious “Judith,” with the former in the role of Washington’s supposed mistress. Despite these sensational elements, the overall presentation of the text is convincing enough that to this day researchers and writers sometimes mistake it for a legitimate historical source.

  Yet, in the end, all these legends raise a basic question about the conspiracy that the authorities never quite answered at the time: What exactly were the conspirators planning to do to George Washington? Was it really an assassination plot or was it something else?

  We may never know for sure. But one compelling answer comes from an unexpected source: the former Mayor of New York City, David Mathews.

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  Since the day Mayor Mathews offered testimony to the investigators on the Committee on Conspiracies—back on June 24, 1776, four days before Thomas Hickey was hanged—he had very few open lines of communication with anyone from his former social circle. For the most part, his only company were fellow inmates, most of them common criminals, in the city jail where he was held.

  Not a very nice way to spend time, especially for a man used to mingling with politicians and aristocrats—and also known for his expensive clothing and tastes.

  As a result, during his imprisonment, the Mayor suffers. A lot.

  Of all the suspects and prisoners who were enmeshed in the elaborate conspiracy plot, Mathews is also the one who most loudly continues to proclaim his innocence.

  Almost immediately after his imprisonment, Mathews writes numerous letters to friends and city officials, disparaging the charges against him and insisting he has been unjustly accused.

  He claims to be appalled, in particular, by the idea that he was involved in any plan to kill George Washington, which, in the wake of Hickey’s execution, became the accepted belief as to what the conspirators were plotting.

  In July, the New York authorities, now confronted with the arrival of the British fleet, transfer Mayor Mathews and the other prisoners associated with the conspiracy to a jail in Litchfield, Connecticut. There, the Mayor is to await trial indefinitely for his role in the plot.

  On August 20, after a month in Connecticut, Mathews writes a letter from jail to a former friend who is now a colonial official and who Mathews hopes can help gain his release. Mathews asks him to provide a written certificate that will vouch for his innocence:

  [Your certificate will] enable me to contradict a most hellish report that has been propagated, and is verily believed throughout this colony, that I was concerned in a plot to assassinate General Washington, and to blow up the magazine in New York. The Convention well know that such a report prevails; they also know that it is as false as hell is false.

  The New York colonial authorities, when they learn of this letter, send a letter back to Mathews directly, rejecting his claim of innocence:

  You well know the cause of that treatment which you deem so cruel. You well know that you stand charged with being concerned in a deep conspiracy against the rights and liberties of America; and … it is the duty of the Convention that you be secured for trial: that you were privy to it, in a great measure, your own examination evinces.

  Mathews continues writing more letters, appealing for any chance to exonerate himself. Today, after reading Mathew’s pleas of innocence—a few of them genuinely despairing—some might argue that he may, in fact, have been unjustly accused and unfairly treated.

  After all, back when the Committee on Conspiracies first examined Mathews in June, he claimed that his only involvement was brief and tangential, limited to that one occasion on the ship when Governor Tryon asked him to deliver money to Gilbert Forbes, whom Mathews said he didn’t even know. Furthermore, Mathews said he did so only very reluctantly, and even tried to dissuade Forbes from engaging in the plot. If this is true, his role in the plot was less significant, and his imprisonment perhaps unduly harsh.

  However, David Mathews himself will soon show that his elaborate proclamations of innocence are, in fact, “false as hell is false.”

  In early September 1776—just after the British occupy New York City—Mathews manages to escape from his jail cell in Connecticut. He sneaks back down to Manhattan, where he reconnects with William Tryon. When Tryon becomes Governor again, he likewise grants Mathews the Mayorship of the city. Mathews remains mayor until 1783, when the British ultimately lose the war and relinquish the city.

  But the real twist comes after the war, when Mathews is appointed to a very different part of the British Empire—Cape Breton Island, off Nova Scotia. There he holds a few managerial positions and eventually becomes attorney general.

  Soon, it will be former Mayor David Mathews, of all the conspirators, who will finally reveal one of the most compelling details about the plot.

  He doesn’t do it to correct the record. Or even to brag. He does it for money.

  In 1784, the year after the war is over, David Mathews travels from Cape Breton to visit London, England. He makes the trip in order to appeal before a parliamentary board called the Royal Commission on the Losses and Services of American Loyalists. It’s an agency set up to reimburse British colonial subjects who made unusual sacrifices or suffered financial setbacks as a direct result of the war.

  Mathews, when making a case for how he should be recompensed for his wartime efforts, tells the commissioner about his work as a public official and his loss of personal property in the conflict. But in his application Mathews also states, under oath, that in 1776 he “formed a plan for the taking of Mr. Washington & his Guard prisoners but which was not effected.”

  There it is—revealed by the man at its very center—the plot against George Washington.

  Talking to British authorities, despite all his earlier denials, the Mayor now says that not only was he part of the plan—he formed the plan.

  More important, and of greater historical significance, Mathews reveals that the goal of the plot was the “taking of Mr. Washington & his Guard prisoners.” In other words, if Mathews is telling the truth, the real goal of Tryon’s plot was not necessarily to assassinate George Washington, but rather to seize or kidnap him for the British.

  The question now is: Which was the truth? At the time, former Mayor Mathews no longer had any need to lie. In fact, if his goal was to receive even more compensation, he actually had a bigger incentive to exaggerate and say that assassination was the goal.

  While there is no definitive way to verify David Mathews’s statement, his admission of a kidnapping plot makes sense. Kidnapping generals and leaders was a tried-and-true tactic during the revolutionary era. In fact, delivering George Washington still alive to British authorities would have been the greatest possible outcome for the Crown and the British army. They could gain intelligence from him, possibly torture him, and use his capture to humiliate the colonies on the world stage. So, while many Americans at the time believed that the goal of the plot was to kill Washington, a plan to kidnap him may have been more likely.

  A century later, a similar debate would surround the death of another American President: Abraham Lincoln. To this day, we know that John Wilkes B
ooth murdered Lincoln—but at the time, many of his coconspirators insisted, until their own deaths, that the goal was to kidnap Lincoln, not kill him.

  Either way—whether the plan was to “seize” George Washington or assassinate him—the Commander’s life was most definitely at risk. Indeed, the final result of a kidnapping would probably have been exactly the same: If the British officials captured Washington, they would likely execute him—eventually—to make an example. After all, at the start of the war, Washington was a “traitor” to the British for his role leading the colonies’ insurrection—and as history shows, the punishment for treason is usually death, sometimes in public. So during the Revolution, those at the highest levels of American leadership expected that if they were captured, they would be hanged as traitors. Only at lower levels were captured officers like Charles Lee, Washington’s second-in-command, exchanged for a British general.

  In any case, Mathews’s statement under oath during an application for funds before the relatively obscure Royal Commission board—a statement made in 1784, a full eight years after the plot itself was discovered—may be the most convincing evidence of what really lay at the heart of the conspiracy.

  As for Mathews himself, he lived out his days with his family in Cape Breton, and died in 1800.

  Was he proud of his role in the plot against Washington? Mathews later named one of his sons William Tryon Mathews, after his mentor and coconspirator. So that tells us something.

  Today, unlike Tryon, David Mathews doesn’t have his name attached to many streets or public spaces in New York or Long Island, despite his years of public life in the region.

  There is, as far as we know, only one exception. Deep in the Bronx is a small public park and playground called Matthews Muliner Playground. This modest park has a few trees, a couple of handball courts, two jungle gyms, and covers about a third of a block otherwise comprising large concrete buildings.

  The two names have nothing to do with each other—“Muliner” is Thomas Muliner, a seventeenth-century English settler—but the “Matthews” part is indeed named after the former Mayor, David Mathews, albeit with an alternate spelling.

  This playground boasts a plaque whose inscription gives a bit of the history of the two men. The inscription ends with these sentences:

  “Matthews was installed as the Loyalist mayor. Matthews was known as a thief, an embezzler, and a spendthrift.”

  There, in a park in the Bronx, amid laughing children and handball players, lies the hallowed memory of Mayor David Mathews.

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  The greatest legacy of the first conspiracy has little to do with the plotters who planned and participated in it—rather, it’s the people who uncovered and investigated it.

  Throughout the history of intelligence gathering and law enforcement, this elaborate plot—and the successful thwarting of it—provides an early model of how to detect and subvert clandestine hostile operations, in particular those launched by “internal enemies” rather than by foreign governments.

  George Washington, for one, took a clear lesson from all the plotting and scheming against him in the spring and summer of 1776. By the end of that summer, after his first year as Commander-in-Chief, he came to see the absolutely critical role played by espionage and intelligence in what would be a long and complicated war.

  In September 1776, less than three months after Thomas Hickey’s death, Washington sends his first famous spy, a young officer named Nathan Hale, into British-occupied Long Island to pose as a Loyalist and learn about enemy troop movements.

  Tragically, Hale is discovered, imprisoned, and soon hanged in New York City by the British. According to legend, the young American martyr speaks these words on the gallows: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” The legend is probably not true—that line was probably crafted by a playwright—but Hale’s bravery and sacrifice are undeniable.

  After this tragedy, Washington both expands and improves his army’s espionage activity, devising increasingly complex ways to protect and communicate with undercover agents behind enemy lines.

  By 1778—now into the third year of the war—Washington is something of a spymaster, personally overseeing a top secret network of spies and double agents known as the “Culper Ring.” All involved have code names—Washington’s own code name is “711”—and they ferry intelligence throughout the New York and New Jersey region using complicated signals, letters written in invisible ink, and even coded messages published in newspapers. The leader of the group is Benjamin Tallmadge, a young officer whom Washington gives the title “director of military intelligence.”

  To this day, the methods of the Culper Ring (and a version of their invisible ink) are still used by the modern CIA. In fact, Americans didn’t even know there was a Culper Ring until the 1930s. That’s how good its members were at keeping secrets.

  For George Washington and his officers, this spycraft takes the Continental army’s operations to a new level, adding more sophistication and nuance to their war planning.

  However, perhaps the even more vital lesson learned from the Hickey plot, or “Tryon’s plot” as it is also called, is that counterespionage is just as important as espionage—and that counterintelligence is just as important as spying.

  Here, in fact, is where the first conspiracy may have had the longest-term impact. The key to this impact is not George Washington, but rather John Jay, who by the end of the summer was the official chairman of the Committee on Conspiracies.

  In many ways, the Committee on Conspiracies—created to uncover and subvert Tryon’s clandestine operations against the Continental army, and tasked specifically with investigating the Hickey plot—serves as an early example of what we now might call an “intelligence agency.”

  The committee was a top-secret team of expert civilians—not military officers—with a dedicated mission to not just gather intelligence about the enemy, but to detect and thwart the enemy’s intelligence operations against America. Along the way, Committee members used the tools of law enforcement to unmask enemy spies and traitors, and also to uncover and disable enemy plots and schemes.

  The most influential aspect of their work will not come during Tryon’s plot, but shortly after it, and as a direct result.

  In the late fall of 1776, after the British occupy New York City, the Continental army escapes west into New Jersey, and the members of the New York Provincial Congress flee the city and regroup farther upstate.

  Immediately, the members of this Congress, in communication with both Washington and the Continental Congress, recognize the urgent need for an even more sophisticated counterintelligence organization now that the British army has a base of operations in New York City.

  Led by John Jay, and using his experience investigating the Hickey plot as a model, the New York officials create a new, more elaborate intelligence committee with a slightly expanded and now formalized name.

  The Committee for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies.

  This new organization, helmed by Jay but otherwise with an entirely new set of members, takes the counterintelligence methods first utilized during the Hickey plot and enhances them.

  According to its own mission statement, the Committee is formed for “inquiring into, detecting and defeating all conspiracies which may be formed … against the liberties of America.” Just like the original group, the members are all sworn to secrecy and keep confidential records under seal, separate from standard government records. Also, like the original committee, very few people even know of its existence.

  First convened on October 17, 1776, in Fishkill, New York, the Committee on Defeating and Detecting Conspiracies operates almost nonstop in various forms for well over a year, improving its methods as it goes. The members make arrests, conduct interrogations, utilize moles and spies, and coordinate intelligence from all over the New York region regarding Loyalist plots and British espionage operations. They even have a dedicated thirty-person milit
ia team at their disposal to conduct raids and hunt down suspects.

  Although technically a body of New York State—thanks to the Declaration of Independence, New York is now a state and not a colony—Jay’s new committee is inextricably linked to the efforts of the Continental army, and the committee regularly feeds intelligence to George Washington and his generals.

  As a result of John Jay’s efforts—both during the Hickey plot and in the running of this new committee—he becomes a genuine pioneer in the fields of intelligence and law enforcement.

  Today, the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledges the Committee on Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies as the first dedicated intelligence agency, and credits John Jay as “America’s first counterintelligence chief” for his work creating the discipline almost from scratch during the early years of the Revolutionary War. The CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, even has a conference room named after Jay.

  Long after the war, John Jay has an illustrious career, spanning both law and politics. He serves as a congressman and Governor, and becomes a key framer of the Constitution of the United States; later he’ll author some of the legendary Federalist Papers to defend it.

  Over the years, George Washington develops such respect for John Jay that, when Washington becomes the first President of the United States in 1789, he gives Jay first choice of any position on his cabinet or in his administration. Jay, always ready to do the most serious work without public acclaim, chooses to be the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Of course, when it came to John Jay’s high place in the hierarchy of President Washington’s favorites, it probably didn’t hurt that Jay may earlier have saved Washington’s life—by thwarting the conspiracy against him in the summer of 1776.

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