The First Conspiracy Read online

  Within hours after the newspapers publish his words, a crowd gathers in the city to mock and curse the proclamation—and soon they’re marching loudly through the streets. The crowd stops at Bowling Green and, shouting jeers and insults, raises an effigy of Tryon with a placard around its neck reading: “William Tryon, late Governor of this Province, but now a … traitor to its dearest rights.” Around nightfall, the mob raises and hangs Tryon’s effigy on a fake gallows, then burns it and kicks it around the streets until it disintegrates.

  Meanwhile the remaining Loyalists in the city, far from being emboldened by Tryon’s proclamation, cower in their homes with their doors locked, afraid the angry mob could come after them next.

  Tryon learns of this outrage in the dark, cramped quarters of his ship. There is nothing he can do to stop the spectacle. All he can do is reflect on the cursed state of his colony.

  Two years ago, he was a strong and popular Governor who commanded the respect and admiration of the public. Now, thanks to the rebellion, his name and likeness are literally being dragged through the street.

  Tryon doesn’t have long to stew over the newest outrage that has befallen him. A few days later, he hears the remarkable news that has changed the world: The Continental army just chased the British forces out of Boston. All over the colonies, George Washington is being lionized as a hero.

  Like other Loyalists in the colonies, Tryon’s first reaction is shock and horror. The Governor literally can’t find words to express his outrage. “My feelings on this occasion,” he writes to the British Secretary of State, “are not to be expressed.” It’s almost unthinkable that the British army would allow itself to be humiliated on the world stage by the ragtag colonial forces.

  Surely the mighty British must retaliate. Surely they will now unleash their full power against the colonies and crush the rebellion for good. But the question remains: Where and when will the British strike back?

  Tryon is one of the first to learn the answer. New York City. The British will now send the full force of their army and navy with a plan to occupy Manhattan and make it the new seat of war. The colonial army will try desperately to defend it.

  That means something else. George Washington will be coming back to New York City.

  It’s around this time, and soon after this realization, that Tryon, in the dark underbelly of his ship, begins to formulate a plan.

  For this plan to succeed, the Governor will need to marshal all his resources, all his spies, and all his men.

  It’s a complex scheme and a deadly one.

  Everything about it must be secret.

  It’s a plot against the Continental army. Against the army, and against the army’s leader. It’s a plot against George Washington.

  23

  Boston, Massachusetts

  March 1776

  The public is stunned.

  The British are retreating from Boston.

  For the next few days following General Howe’s surrender to the Continental army on March 8, the city is thrown into chaos as roughly ten thousand British soldiers empty their forts, abandon their lodgings, haul belongings through the street, and throw fortifications and artillery into the harbor rather than leave them for their enemies.

  Among the civilians in Boston, no one is more terrified than the Loyalists. Now that Washington’s army is about to move into the city, these civilian British sympathizers fear imprisonment or worse for themselves and their families.

  They “carry’d death in their faces,” as one onlooker wrote of the Loyalists, and a few supposedly committed suicide by throwing themselves in the harbor. Many more of them, over a thousand, pack their belongings and board the British ships, ready to leave their birthplace and homes for an uncertain future in England or whichever British colony the Crown is willing to relocate them.

  By March 17, 1776, the last of the British troops board their ships. Washington, ever the gentleman, allows his Boston-born general Artemus Ward to make the first grand entrance into the city, while he himself stays back. He carefully monitors that any soldiers who enter be inoculated for smallpox, for fear of vulnerable soldiers catching the disease and further spreading it. He gives instructions that his soldiers are forbidden to attack any straggling British troops, forbidden to loot buildings, and forbidden to harass any citizen regardless of allegiance.

  Meanwhile, the remarkable news spreads around the colonies. Against all odds, the Continental army just forced the British out of Boston. For those who support the Patriots, the response is jubilation.

  More than ever, the praise and glory are bestowed on one man: George Washington, the Commander-in-Chief, who led the new army to this unexpected success.

  The “Glorious Cause,” as the rebellion is now sometimes called, needs a public face; Washington, whether he wants it or not, is now the official embodiment. Washington’s image, in portrait or on horseback, is printed in newspapers and pamphlets in every colony. Two new merchant schooners in Massachusetts are christened the George and the Martha in honor of the Commander-in-Chief and his wife. One of Washington’s favorite officers, Nathanael Greene, names his newborn son George Washington Greene. In an elaborate ceremony, Harvard College bestows on Washington an honorary degree. In Philadelphia, the Continental Congress creates a special medal for Washington, to reward the Commander’s achievement.

  One person, however, is not sharing in all the joy and adulation: George Washington himself.

  Washington knows, in a way the public does not, that he has so far faced only a tiny fraction of British power. The British troops in Boston were originally sent there to quash a local rebellion—they were not outfitted to wage a proper war. There has still been no actual battle in which the Continental army has had to face the might of the British army. Boston had been merely a standoff, a staring contest, with one clever strategic move that suddenly ended it.

  Now, everything is different. The British army has just been officially humiliated on the world stage.

  There is no longer any ambiguity. This means all-out war. The British Empire wields the greatest military force on the planet, and there can be no doubt that they will send the vast might of their navy and army across the ocean to destroy the Continental army and subdue the colonies once and for all.

  Where will they attack next?

  All the intelligence points in one direction. New York City. Washington knows he must go there.

  It’s a hostile and unfamiliar place, full of intrigue and treachery.

  In George Washington’s mind, the greatest danger in the city is from the British army.

  But what he can’t possibly realize is that the true greatest danger may be posed by a very different enemy—an enemy now aboard a ship floating in New York Harbor.

  PART III

  A Bloody Summer

  24

  New York, New York

  March 1776

  The British are coming for New York City. Everyone knows it.

  Centrally located along the Atlantic coast, surrounded by waterways, and with a massive harbor sufficient to house even the largest navy, New York City seems the ideal seat of operations for England to launch a full-scale attack against the colonies.

  Furthermore, if the British can capture New York City, they will also control the Hudson River due north of it. Once the British control the Hudson, the colonies are essentially bisected, with New England cut off from the rest. “The Hudson naturally presented itself as a very important object,” the British general Henry Clinton writes in his journal. If the Crown’s forces can control it, “communication between the colonies to the north and those to the south would be effectively severed, making it impossible for them to join forces, or even for the northern colonies to feed their troops.”

  The colonists understand this too. As John Adams puts it, New York City is “a kind of key to the whole continent,” and therefore “No effort to secure it ought to be omitted.”

  In short, the British desperately wan
t to occupy New York City and the Americans desperately want to defend it from them. The problem for the Continental army is that New York City, encircled as it is by water, is essentially indefensible against a naval attack—and the Royal Navy is the largest in the world.

  For Washington and his generals, New York City has long been, truly, the stuff of nightmares. Back in early January, Washington’s second-in-command, Gen. Charles Lee, wrote to Washington:

  The consequences of the enemy’s possessing themselves of New York have appear’d to me so terrible that I have scarcely been able to sleep from apprehensions on the subject—these apprehensions daily increase.

  New York City had also occupied Washington’s mind, for reasons beyond just military strategy.

  For one thing, there is the Governor, William Tryon.

  Even up in Boston, Washington had heard reports about Tryon’s activities in New York City. Rumor had it that Tryon was running spies from his ship, ferrying intelligence up and down the coast. Washington was frustrated to learn that the exiled Governor still wields so much power—“The city seems to be entirely under the Government of Tryon,” he complains to Joseph Reed—and he recognizes the danger in allowing an enemy to control such a critical city.

  Washington’s concern about Tryon’s influence extends to a broader fear that Loyalists in the New York City region present a major threat. While in Boston, Washington had heard reports from the New York Provincial Congress—the colony’s governing Patriot body—that the region around New York City was full of Loyalists secretly and not so secretly plotting against the Continental army, especially in Staten Island, Queens County, and other parts of Long Island.

  As one contemporary said of Long Island in particular: “It was well wooded, well stocked with foxes, and of good reputation for apples, mutton, and Loyalists.”

  In general, Washington feared that these “internal enemies,” as he calls the Loyalists, could be just as dangerous as the British army. Whether by operating as hidden spies, or themselves raising arms, Loyalists are a constant menace. The New York City region, it seems, is a hub of this activity.

  By January, while Washington was in the midst of planning to seize Dorchester Heights outside Boston, he decided to take preemptive measures to protect New York City. On January 8, he sent Gen. Charles Lee—the one having nightmares—on a mission to monitor the city and its surrounding counties.

  “Knowing it to be of [great] importance to the interest of America, to prevent the Enemy from getting possession of these places,” Washington wrote to his officers, “I have dispatched General Lee with orders to repair to New York with such volunteers as he can raise on his way … to put the city & the fortifications up the river in the best posture of defence.”

  Lee’s mission is threefold: to try to fortify the city militarily, to suppress the Loyalists in the surrounding areas, and, last but not least, to attempt to put a stop to Governor Tryon’s activities.

  Washington becomes especially alarmed when he hears that Tryon might be trying to raise his own army to control the colony by force. Just after Lee departs from Boston, Washington writes him a letter to update him on this development:

  There is good reason to believe that Tryon has applied for some troops … so that you will see the necessity of your being decisive & expeditious in your operations in that quarter—the Tories should be disarmed immediately … you can seize upon the persons of the principals.… And happy should I be, if the Governor could be one of them.

  Unfortunately, as much as Washington or Lee might like to “seize” Governor Tryon, the task is now impossible. Tryon’s ship the Duchess of Gordon is anchored right next to the massive British warship Asia. The colonies have no warships of their own, so if any vessel even so much as approached the Duchess to try to grab Tryon, the Asia could blast it out of the water. The Continental army will have to find other ways to challenge the Governor’s power.

  Charles Lee is an inspired choice to carry out Washington’s multipronged mission. Although he is British by birth and background, and only emigrated from England to the colonies a few years earlier, Lee has since become one of the fiercest and most outspoken Patriots—and one of the first to argue for full independence from England.

  Lee is so famously hot tempered that during his service as a British officer in the French and Indian War, one of the Native American tribes who fought beside him gave him the nickname “Boiling Water.” Disheveled in appearance and prone to profanity, Lee often said he loved dogs more than people, and rarely traveled without a pack of canines, including a Pomeranian named Spada, a dog that from a distance was sometimes mistaken for a bear.†

  Lee’s aggressive personality could also get him into trouble. Once, he became so frustrated with the pacifist wing of the Continental Congress, he declared publicly that even if these congressmen found their wives with the Howe brothers in flagrante delicto—that is, having sex with the two British commanders—they would be too indifferent to interfere.

  Lee arrives in New York City on the afternoon of February 4, 1776, accompanied by close to fifteen hundred militiamen he has recruited in Connecticut along the way. The news of his arrival causes quite a furor in the city, sparking widespread panic that the British man-of-war Asia, already anchored in the harbor, will fire on local homes in retaliation.

  Lee tries to assuage these fears by publicly insisting that the warship wouldn’t dare do so while he has an armed militia in the city. As one newspaper prints on February 6, “Lee says he will send word aboard the man-of-war, that if they set a house on fire in consequence of his coming, he will chain one hundred of their friends together by the neck, and make the house their funeral pile.”

  Not exactly mollified by these words, many citizens start evacuating Manhattan, creating a sense of confusion and upheaval that will become the new norm for New York City in the weeks and months ahead.

  Once General Lee is in the city, he quickly assesses the profound difficulty of defending New York City without a serviceable navy, an asset the rebels have no hope of acquiring in the near future. Without any Patriot ships to defend against it, a foreign fleet could flow into the harbor and surround the city with cannons.

  In a letter to Washington, Lee concedes: “What to do with the city, I own, puzzles me; it is so encircled with deep, navigable water, that whoever commands the sea must command the town.”

  Nevertheless, Lee devises and embarks on an ambitious plan to build fortifications, redoubts, and other defenses all over Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, to prepare the city as well as he can against a potential future naval attack.

  While Lee oversees the physical labor of erecting these elaborate fortifications, he also begins to grasp the depth of the Loyalist plotting in the region. For example, in January some three hundred cannons that the colonial militias had collected and stored in gun parks in Westchester County were secretly “spiked”—that is, steel-pronged plugs had been driven into their touchholes, and their firing mechanisms smashed—making them unusable without extensive repair.

  A body called the City Watch was supposed to be guarding this huge cache of critical weapons, but according to the Town Major, many of the City Watch were secretly Loyalists, or had been bought off by Loyalists, and therefore sabotaged the very cannons they were supposed to be guarding.

  Around the same time as the cannon incident, the New York Provincial Congress was closely monitoring the activity of the Loyalist population on Long Island, defined loosely by the Congress as those who refused to sign a pledge of support for the local colonial governments. Of even more concern than their political opposition are rumors that these Long Island Loyalists are secretly stashing firearms with plans to start an uprising.

  In response, the Provincial Congress requested some nine hundred volunteer militiamen from neighboring New Jersey to disarm the offending Loyalists. This militia, led by Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Heard, conducted a raid on several Long Island towns, disarming hundreds of citiz
ens and arresting nineteen of the alleged ringleaders.

  Seemingly in every direction around the city, there are Loyalists afoot: on Staten Island; in Kings and Queens Counties on Long Island; in Westchester and Dutchess Counties; and in New Jersey and southern Connecticut.

  Such was New York City in the early months of 1776: full of dark plots and schemes—with rumors of yet more to come. While the rebels may control the local political bodies and governing committees, on the ground there are “internal enemies” all around, conspiring against them.

  True to form, General Lee takes aggressive action in the city, ruffling feathers at every turn. Needing a right-hand man, Lee appoints a controversial local rebel radical named Isaac Sears—known for raising mobs, tarring and feathering Loyalists, and smashing Tory printing presses—to lead additional raids on Long Island.

  Sears’s method is to go into towns with suspected Loyalist operatives and force them to take an oath supporting the rebellion. Those who refuse are disarmed or arrested. Sears writes a report to Lee after one of these raids:

  I … tendered the oath to four of the great Tories, which they swallowed as hard as if it was a four pound shot, that they were trying to git down.… I can assure your honor they are a set of villains in this country, and believe the better half of them are waiting for support and intend to take up arms against us. And it is my opinion nothing else will do but removing the ringleaders to a place of security.

  Sears makes a few arrests. However, General Lee begins to sense that arresting scattered farmers and townspeople in Long Island isn’t getting to the real root of the problem.

  There seems to be something bigger afoot in New York, a greater organization that is tying these schemes together.

  Lee begins to suspect that all signs point to one person as the mastermind: the exiled Governor, William Tryon, who haunts the city from the Duchess of Gordon in the harbor.