The First Conspiracy Read online

  We don’t know if this horrific punishment, called drawing and quartering, was carried out, but in total six of the Regulator leaders were hanged, others were jailed, and the movement never recovered. Tryon’s swift, brutal response to the uprising set an example for anyone who dared question royal authority.

  Tryon’s North Carolina governorship lasted six years until 1771, when he was transferred to serve as Governor of a larger and even more tumultuous colony: New York.

  Now, in 1775, Tryon is a nine-year veteran of the colonies with long experience in government. In New York City, he is a powerful man and a cunning politician. He understands the levers of power in the city, and curries the support of the most influential families and wealthy merchants. On his return from his trip to England, he’s determined to strike back at the revolutionaries and reassert his own power.

  * * *

  As for Washington and his officers, after a post-parade ceremonial dinner, they settle down in their Manhattan lodgings. They need rest for the next day’s journey toward Boston. But that night, Washington is uneasy. He has learned about Governor Tryon’s arrival coinciding with his own, and is uncomfortable about the proximity. He knows of Tryon’s past in North Carolina, and his violent repression of the Regulator movement.

  Now he has a feeling that New York City could pose some future danger to his army—and in particular he distrusts the Governor.

  As tired as Washington must have been that night, he takes the time to write a letter to his general Philip Schuyler, whom he has just put in charge of the New York region. Washington relates his uneasy feeling, and gives Schuyler specific instructions:

  Keep a watchful eye upon Governor Tryon; and if you find him attempting directly or indirectly any measures inimical to the common cause use every means in your power to frustrate his designs … if forceable measures are adjudged necessary respecting the person of the Governor, I should have no difficulty in ordering of it.

  When Schuyler receives the instructions, he writes back only that Governor Tryon’s conduct has thus far been “unexceptional,” and doesn’t seem to share Washington’s concerns about Tryon.Schuyler declines to take any concrete actions against the Governor, let alone “forceable” ones.

  But Washington is right to be worried. The coincidence of these two opposing men arriving in the city the same day—the Continental Commander-in-Chief, George Washington, and New York’s royal Governor, William Tryon—is a foreshadowing of a dark confrontation that lies ahead, when these two men cross paths once again.

  PART II

  Spies in Boston

  8

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  July 1775

  On Sunday, July 2, 1775, George Washington and his aides arrive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the outskirts of Boston, after an eight-day journey from New York City. The trip was made both longer and more exhausting by obligatory ceremonial stops in every town and city along the way, so local leaders and public crowds could see and meet the now-famous George Washington in person for the first time.

  But for the Commander and his generals, there is no joy in making this trip.

  During his journey up to Massachusetts, Washington had received news of yet more bloodshed in Boston. On June 17, a group of colonial militias occupied Breed’s Hill and nearby Bunker Hill, north of the city, as a defensive posture against the British troops stationed in Boston. British officers in Boston learned in advance of the militias’ plans, and led fifteen hundred soldiers from their downtown garrisons against the colonists. In a dramatic battle, the better-armed British troops charged Breed’s Hill with successive waves of infantry. The British soldiers eventually prevailed and took the hill from the colonists, but only after paying a price: 226 soldiers killed and 828 wounded. The Patriots, after a bloody retreat, counted 140 deaths and 310 wounded.

  Word of the battle—soon known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, although the actual fighting occurred on Breed’s Hill—quickly spreads around New England and throughout the colonies. The heavy casualties, as well as reports that British soldiers had slaughtered with bayonets the injured colonists who lay on the hill in the wake of the fighting, underscore the gravity of the circumstances and heighten patriotic resolve.

  Once again the violence is followed by a tense cease-fire, as both England and the colonies determine a response.

  In the aftermath of this battle, Washington’s arrival in Massachusetts takes on even more urgent dimensions. Although the Continental Congress continues on its course of reconciliation, colonists feel more than ever the possibility of a full-scale war.

  Upon their arrival outside Cambridge, Washington and his generals are met by a greeting committee consisting of two of the most prominent Patriots in Massachusetts: Moses Gill, a politician who had overseen supplying arms for the rebels at Bunker Hill, and Dr. Benjamin Church, a member of the legendary Sons of Liberty who also served in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. In keeping with his name, Church is someone people trust: a Harvard-educated physician and Patriot who once served as John Adams’s personal doctor. In a few weeks the Continental Congress will appoint him Chief Physician & Director General of the Army’s Medical Service, effectively making Dr. Church the army’s first Surgeon General.

  These two local Patriots, Gill and Church, escort Washington to a formal officers’ dinner, where Washington learns more from local leaders about the Massachusetts militias and additional volunteers from nearby colonies that have gathered and await his command. These militiamen and new recruits, currently encamped in fields fanning out west of Boston and numbering somewhere around fourteen thousand, are the beginning of his new army.

  That night, Washington sleeps in the Harvard Square home of the college president, who had offered it for the Commander-in-Chief’s use. Early the next morning, July 3, 1775, Washington and his generals ride to the encampments, where the sound of fifes and drums greets them.

  It’s time to meet the troops.

  Nothing in Washington’s experience, as an officer for the British during the French and Indian War or as a leader of the Virginia militia, could have prepared him for what he is about to see.

  The troops are, as one observer says, “the most wretchedly clothed, and as dirty a set of mortals as ever disgraced the name of a soldier.” In fact, many of them aren’t really soldiers at all. They are farmers, common laborers, ex-criminals, and beggars—some suspiciously old, some suspiciously young.

  Many wield pitchforks and shovels as weapons, while others carry no weapon at all. Some of them wear the uniforms of the local colonial militias from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey, but a majority wear dirty work shirts and tattered pants.

  The men had arrived and are still arriving from all directions, from different colonies, with no system in place for how to organize or feed them. They are spread out in disorganized encampments over a stretch of several miles, with no running water or sanitation system. The stench of brimming open latrines is overwhelming, and, as one orderly describes it, when the latrines are full the men spread “excrement about the fields perniciously.”

  The soldiers are housed in makeshift tents, cobbled together using whatever materials they can find: “Some are made of boards, some of sailcloth.… Others are made of stone and turf and others again of birch and other brush … curiously wrought with wreaths … in the manner of a basket.”

  This is the army, and these are the men, with whom Washington is supposed to fight against the biggest, most powerful, most feared military in the world.

  And these are just first impressions. Beyond the initial sights, sounds, and smells of the camps, Washington has more to learn about the state of his new army. Not just their lack of supplies and accommodations, but the lack of training of most men. “[I] found a numerous army of provincials under very little command, discipline, or order,” he writes.

  Recruitment poster for the brand-new Continental army, under the leadership of Gen. George Washington. Althou
gh the poster appeals to the Patriotic spirit, the finer print also highlights the payment offered. Most of the new recruits come from poor backgrounds, with no military experience.

  Aside from their poor personal hygiene, the men’s profane language and lack of soldierly manners goes against everything Washington has learned as a proper soldier and officer. In a letter to John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress, Washington complains that “licentiousness and every kind of disorder triumphantly reign” among the militias and volunteers, and he worries if this motley crew of men and boys can ever be trained.

  Washington’s grim assessment also applies to many of the militias’ officers, who had supposedly been providing guidance to the fledgling army. Although a few of the men who had led troops in the earlier Boston battles have provided heroic leadership—and these men will soon become Washington’s top officers—overall Washington is dismayed to find that many officers are simply in it to make money, and some are even scamming to earn a little extra.

  Of the Massachusetts militia he writes: “Their officers are generally speaking the most indifferent kind of people I ever saw. I have already broke [punished] one Colonel and five Captains for … drawing more pay and provisions than they had men in their companies.” In general, Washington encounters a great “dearth of public spirit and want of virtue … such a dirty, mercenary spirit pervades the whole that I should not be at all surprised at any disaster that may happen.”

  Of all the setbacks and disappointments that Washington encounters in his army-to-be, one perhaps alarms him most: the lack of gunpowder. Back at the Congress and during his journey to Boston he had repeatedly made requests for proper quantities of powder, without which even the finest troops in the world would be defenseless. At first, on arrival in Cambridge, he is told the troops have 308 barrels of powder, a modest but serviceable amount. But soon, a brigadier general named John Sullivan sheepishly informs him that the number is a mistake, and doesn’t account for the powder already used during the Bunker Hill battle. The real number is thirty-eight barrels.

  As Sullivan describes it, after he informed the general of this laughably small amount, Washington “did not utter a word for half an hour.” The army has barely enough ammunition for training drills, let alone to fight a battle.

  The enemy forces are just across the Back Bay in Boston, barely a mile away, and fully armed. Should the British choose to attack tomorrow, Washington’s soldiers would be slaughtered, unable even to defend themselves.

  One thing is clear: Nothing in this war will be easy.

  9

  New York, New York

  August 1775

  New York City is slipping. The Governor can sense it.

  Ever since the so-called Commander, George Washington, and his procession of generals marched through New York City earlier in the summer, Governor William Tryon of New York has watched as upstart radicals and revolutionaries threaten the authority and governing principles that he believes are the foundation of the city.

  As far as Governor Tryon is concerned, revolutionary fervor has ripped New York City apart at the seams. Former friends have become bitter enemies. Neighbors attack neighbors. Mobs of rebel demonstrators, with no respect for the law, bring chaos and fear to the streets. What used to be a war of pamphlets—New York City is home to many printing presses, and writers and activists on both sides are waging a propaganda war—has become a war of intimidation, mob violence, and destruction.

  But Tryon remains optimistic. He still believes that at its core, New York is a city of Loyalists—that is, colonists who maintain their allegiance to the Crown. The city’s powerful merchant classes, dependent on secure trade with the mother country, support England and oppose the upheaval of rebellion. Many of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the region—and Governor Tryon knows all of them—retain close ties to England. The farming communities of Long Island, Staten Island, and the Hudson Valley are also full of Loyalists.

  Furthermore, Tryon believes that in the end, most people will follow strength, and it’s just a matter of time before England’s clear superiority, military and otherwise, will lead the public to abandon the foolish idea of rebellion and return to good sense: the good sense of strong British rule.

  When Tryon returned to New York City from England that day in late June 1775, he had to endure not just the insult of George Washington parading through his city, but also the jeers from an unruly crowd of rebels shouting at their Governor. He had returned from a yearlong visit to England, lobbying there on behalf of the colony, only to be received with insults from the rabble.

  Nevertheless, a few days later, on July 5, when Tryon addresses a gathering of the top officials in the colony, he makes sure to adopt an elevated and conciliatory tone:

  I receive with satisfaction your congratulations on my return to this Country … and of your continued confidence in me at this melancholy crisis of public affairs, already carried to an extreme much to be lamented by every good man and well-wisher of his King and Country.

  He wants to make clear that he, Tryon, is on the side of the just and the good—which is to say, on the side of the Crown’s clear authority.

  I confess my disappointment at the change of circumstances in this Government, and feel the weightiest distress at the present unfriendly aspect of the times.… At the same time, my breast glowing with an ardent zeal for the honour of my Sovereign.… [I] cherish the wish of the Nation for a speedy and happy reconciliation between Great Britain and her Colonies.

  Tryon ends his speech with a message of reconciliation on behalf of the King himself: “I am authorized to say, that nothing can give greater satisfaction to the royal breast, than to see us again a happy and united people.”

  Tryon had hoped that his return as Governor after many months’ absence, together with his generous remarks, would serve to bring good sense back to the city, and dampen revolutionary fervor.

  Instead, the opposite is true.

  The city has slipped even further into chaos. Throughout the late summer Tryon has borne witness to all manner of unspeakable acts. The city’s businesses have been subjected to boycott and abuse by radicals. Some of the established city leaders, those who proclaim steadfast loyalty to the King, have been tarred and feathered, or jailed.

  Earlier in the summer, a mob of revolutionaries had stormed King’s College, forcing the Loyalist college president, Myles Cooper, to flee the city by boat in the middle of the night.

  In some counties just outside the city, local prisons are overflowing, mostly with men sent there for refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the American colonies rather than to England.

  Now, as summer turns to fall in 1775, a particularly gruesome practice known as “riding the rail” has become common. Angry mobs, when wishing to inflict pain and humiliation on someone deemed an enemy, seat their victim astride a long sharp beam of wood, apply weights to his feet to enhance the pain, and parade him through the streets while onlookers spit or throw stones.

  All the while, radicals circulate leaflets containing vile language against His Majesty the King, a constant affront to the Crown’s authority.

  Governor Tryon knows that the Loyalists in the city had been eagerly awaiting his return from England, hoping that he could apply a firm hand and restore proper authority to their city. Unfortunately, Tryon now finds that many tools of his governorship have been stripped away.

  The governing bodies of the city, once consolidated under Tryon’s leadership, have during his absence fallen into weakness or have been entirely disbanded; instead new governments set up by colonists are wielding power in the city and the colony.

  In the last year and a half alone, the Patriots have created a confusing succession of ad hoc governing bodies in New York: First there was the Committee of Correspondence, then the Committee of Fifty, then the Committee of Fifty-One, then the Committee of One Hundred, then the Continental Association, now the New York Provincial Congress.
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br />   Clearly, these people have no idea what they’re doing.

  The colony’s former royal legislative body, the New York Assembly, was left to die in Tryon’s absence and superseded by the rebel-controlled New York Provincial Congress, which elected and sent delegates to the Second Continental Congress, a body that England considers illegitimate. The last bastion of royal authority in the colony is Governor Tryon himself, along with his appointed Governor’s Council.

  In New York as in many of the colonies, the revolutionaries are emboldened like never before. Now they brag about their army up in Boston, raising arms against British soldiers.

  It’s not just their army they brag about, but also their Commander.

  George Washington. His name is on every rebel’s lips, in every pamphlet, a new hero to the political movement that Tryon must fight against.

  As Tryon and other Loyalists in the colonies must concede, the very existence of this army and its new leader has unleashed a new fervor among the radicals, based on their unrealistic hope that a brand-new collection of raw soldiers can stand up to the vast might of the British army.

  The rebels’ hope may be false, but their new confidence is real—and in New York, the resulting fervor has unmoored the city. It will take a leader of strength and cunning to restore it.

  Governor Tryon wants to win his city back. It’s as simple as that. If political solutions fail, then other means are necessary. After all, before he was a politician, Tryon was a soldier—with a bullet wound in his leg to prove it—and he is not one to back down from a fight.