It Happened Here  -- Spies, Spies and more Spies

(Part 1. Spies and the Burgoyne Invasion)

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Every war produces spies.  The need to get accurate information about an enemy's capabilities, intentions, movements, strengths and  weaknesses  is paramount to success in war.   Direct observation can provide some of this information, but often to get closer to an enemy it is necessary to apply stealth, subterfuge and deception.  Equally important is the desirability of  planting misinformation to misdirect an enemy.  

George Washington, who according to popular legend declared 'I cannot tell a lie,' relied heavily on spies. He took a personal interest in their recruitment, using them  to monitor the British encamped in New York City, to thwart their attempts to undermine the Continental Currency, to penetrate British defensive strategy around Yorktown, and  to ahead off assassination plots against him, among many other British plans and operations. He also used them to plant misinformation.  Before the battle of Trenton, for example, he used a spy to convince the Hessian commander that the Americans were in no position to attack, lulling him into a false sense of security, so that the commander allowed Christmas celebrations to proceed. When the Americans attacked on December 26, 1776, they confronted a Hessian soldiery hung over and stupefied from a previous day of celebration.

Additionally, civil wars--(and American Revolution was a civil war of deeply divided loyalties)--require both sides develop networks of "intelligence" to distinguish potential friends from foe and to prevent the enemy from  recruiting  and mobilizing citizens.  The American rebels were particularly successful in this, establishing from nearly the beginnings of the rebellion, "Committees of Safety" whose jobs were to not only carry on the basic functions of government, but also identify and keep an eye on people of Loyalist persuasion, stepping in to arrest and imprison anyone who might pose a threat to the rebellion, or attempt to join or enlist others in joining Loyalist forces.

Washington's first attempt at placing spies was a dismal failure. A young Yale graduate, masquerading as an unemployed teacher, looking for work in New York City was promptly picked up and hung as a spy. The whole incident might have escaped historical attention except that a British officer at Nathan Hale's execution noted his defiant last words and commented on it in his diary. Details are sketchy, as are those of many episodes of spying.

On this site, from 1763 to 1874, stood “Mount Pleasant”, the mansion built by James Beekman. It was used as a headquarters by Lord Howe during the Revolutionary War because of its commanding view and here Nathan Hale, American patriot, was imprisoned and tried. On the gallows in an orchard nearby he spoke the famous words “I only regret I have but one life to give for my country.”--plaque, 1st Avenue and 51st St., Manhattan

Silas Towne (aka. Town, Towns), according to his own accounts, had been living along the St. Lawrence River and reporting on local support for the rebellion since the earliest days of the revolution  until he fell under scrutiny of area Loyalists and was confined to his farm for nearly two years.  Escaping, he was tasked by American General Phillip Schuyler to observe British activities along the shore of Lake Ontario.  He was there when a large British force of Loyalist troops and Indians landed on the gravelly shores of a small island at the mouth of the Little Salmon River.  Creeping in the undergrowth up to where Brigidier Barry St. Leger was conferring with his officers,  he heard him detail his plans for a raid on Fort Stanwix (now known as Ft. Schuyler.).  Depending on surprise and swiftness, St. Leger decided heavy siege artillery would not be necessary. Towne successfully slipped away and raced the 50 some miles to the fort.  When St.Leger arrived at Stanwix he found a garrison  hunkered down and prepared for a siege, while he was not--with no heavy siege guns, and allies (his Indians) neither trained for, or constitutionally prepared for the style of grinding European siege warfare. The siege would last just twenty one days before intervening events and a "crazy" reluctant turncoat "spy" would cause it to unravel and the besiegers to turn against themselves.

Silas Towne would come to see his spying activities as the seminal event of his life.  He would settle in Vera Cruz (later called Mexico Point) near the island at the mouth of the Little Salmon River and tell his story over and over. (In fact,  his testimony is virtually the only historical account we have of Towne's spying career!) When he died he asked to be buried on the island .  Sixty years later an obelisk was erected at his grave site, then known as Grave Island.  In 1932 state historical markers were erected. Grave Island had become known as Spy Island.

                                                                                                    Obelisk+ Grave

                                                                                                      Spy Island
                                                                                                                                      Oswego, Co.Rte 40,  Mexico,  NY    

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St. Leger's  siege of Ft. Stanwix /Schuyler would set in  motion  a series of actions that would ultimately not only frustrate his efforts to take the fort but would cause the dissolution of his army and prevent him from sweeping down the Mohawk Valley  rallying Loyalist support and linking up with Burgoyne.  And so-called "Spies" would play a critical part.

                                                              Drawing of Ft. Stanwix at Reconstruction, Rome, NY

          Ft.Stanwix/Schuyler reconstruction, Rome N.Y.

 News of the siege caused the Tryon County Militia,  some seven to eight hundred strong, under General Nicholas Herkimer, to march to break the siege. Accompanying them were 60 to 100 Oneida Indians who sided with the Patriots.  St. Leger sent a force of about 500 Indians and Tories to head them off in an ambush.   The battle of Oriskany  was an horrendous day-long bloodbath.    The militiamen managed to hold their position but with terrible losses, some 395 killed.  British losses were around 100, with St. Leger  indigenous allies barring the brunt of the fighting.   This was not  the kind of war the Iroquois were expecting to fight!  First there was the boredom and drudgery of siege warfare; then there was this intense battle where braves had little opportunity to demonstrate audacious bravery to prove their manhood, or to reap trophies in single combat from their defeated foe by taking their enemy's personal possessions and scalps;  then there was the shock of finding themselves having to fight their own Iroquois brethren, the Oneidas,  effectively ending a confederacy that had lasted hundreds of years!  A final shock/insult came when they realized that while they were attacking the Tryon County Militia, forces from the Fort had sallied forth and raided their camp, carrying off all of their food and most of their personal possessions.

The days and weeks that followed were extremely difficult for both sides.   St. Leger's Tories struggled to keep their indigenous allies in the field, and in fact to prevent them from taking out their frustrations on them. (A Tory musket was as valuable as a rebel musket. A Tory scalp was at least some compensation for the anger, privation, and disappointment they felt.)

One of St.Leger's young officers proposed an audacious plan.  He, and a small group of Loyalists would openly travel  down the Mohawk Valley under a flag of truce heading toward Albany, ostensibly to discuss a settlement for ending the siege.  In reality,   his mission would be to gauge Loyalist support in the Valley, recruiting as he went, directing his recruits to   

                                                                                     Marker at Oriskany Battlefield

 join St. Leger.  He hoped this show of support would encourage St. Leger's disaffected native allies to remain with him. But the rebel authorities quickly realized what these "parley negotiators" clandestine objectives were.  Following an evening where Ensign Walter Butler and his associates harangued Loyalist sympathizers at Shoemaker's tavern in the hamlet of Mohawk, they arrested them, charging them with Spying.  A military tribunal condemned  all to be hanged, though Butler would be taken to Albany and later escape.*

                                                                                 W.Main St., cor. of Catherine St. Mohawk, NY  (missing?)

One of the Tories traveling with Butler was a widely known 'odd fellow'  who lived on the edge of  frontier  Mohawk Valley society.  Hon Yost Schuyler. lived  a hand-to-mouth existence, usually residing in valley Indian camps. He  was generally recognized as 'crazy' and 'feeble-minded' but the indigenous people held him in some degree of awe, as he had the ability to throw himself into a kind of a wild babbling trans-like state, they associated  with him being a witch or at least someone in touch with the spirit world.  From a distance of some 250 years it is impossible to suggest a diagnosis of his mental state or even speculate the degree that  these episodes were involuntary or calculated. ( Incredibly, but also not entirely implausibly, given the small number of individuals then living  in colonial New York,  Hon Yost,  was the son  of  a cousin of General Phillip Schuyler, head of the Northern Department, and  his mother, the sister of General Herkimer!)

Following the repulse of the Ft. Stanwix /Schuyler relief expedition, the Patriots were also scrambling to recruit volunteers for another attempt to relieve the fort and to prepare for the defense of the Valley.  General Phillip Schuyler ordered a young charismatic general, Benedict Arnold to raise forces from the farms and hamlets along the Mohawk but Arnold found little support among a population that had already lost nearly 400 of their fittest young men , with more than that still reeling  from their recent bitter pyrrhic victory.  With only about 100 volunteers, Arnold needed to convince St. Leger and his allies that he would be coming down on him with a much larger force.  As Arnold interviewed Butler and his condemned "spies" a plan occurred to him.  With Hon Yost babbling  incoherently in front of him,  Arnold stressed to the young man he would soon be hanged,  a fact highlighted by his mother and brother Nicholas, who had shown up and were present to beg for his life.  But, said Arnold, there was an alternative.  If Hon Yost would go to the Iroquois besieging  Ft.Stanwix/Schuyler,  and tell them he had escaped from the Rebels and convince them that Arnold had recruited a huge army that was soon to overwhelm  them,  and  induce  them to abandon the siege, then he could go free.  To guarantee he did as directed, his brother would be held as a hostage.  (Undoubtedly, Arnold intimated his brother would be hanged in his place if he failed.) 

According to early reporters of this story,  as this plan was unfolded to the 'madman' his babbling  stopped.

He became an engaged listener;  and he offered to enhance the plausibility of  his story by suggesting grazing shots be fired through his clothing and by arranging for cooperative Oneida Indians to enter the Mohawk and Seneca camps with stories supporting his own.  The plan was enacted pretty much as it was conceived.  Han Yost delivered a convincing (probably spell-binding)  performance.  When asked how many soldiers Arnold had, he ecstatically rolled his eyes upward to indicate "as many as there are leaves on the trees" or perhaps  "stars in the heavens!"  While the Tory leadership remained skeptical, for their indigenous allies this was the final straw.  They began to decamp immediately.  Seeing their alliance broken the Loyalists also fled en masse, fearful that if they straggled they would be set upon and scalped by roving bands of their former allies who were furious at them.  (As in fact some stragglers and rebel prisoners, were scalped.).  Hon Yost followed the retreating Tories but then broke for the rebel's Ft.Dayton.

 After  he learned his brother had been released  he disappeared, returning to Iroquois society and would  participate in Indian-Tory raids in 1780. He would live the latter part of his life among the Oneida Iroquois.                             

*****

With the threat of the Burgoyne invasion baring down on the Champlain--Lake George corridor, aimed at Albany, the amount of covert observation and communications undoubtedly greatly increased, though probably much  of this activity never made it into the historical record, or was lost in the greater events of the invasion itself.  The Helderberg escarpment, a wall of cliffs at the edge of the Hudson Valley, however, provided a unique enough environment to cause the spying activity that occurred there to be remembered. Jacob Salisbury a "Tory Spy" reputedly sheltered in a recess in the rocks 

                                                                                Albany  Co. Rte 156, Altamont
and observed  operations of patriot farmers who were providing food for the rebel army growing around Saratoga. He was captured when his tracks were found in the snow and the location of his cave discovered when smoke from a small cooking fire was spotted.

Thatcher Park State Park,  Co.Rte 157

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                                 Main St.  Hurley, N..Y.

The next "spy story"should properly be included in a future blog post about spies in the "Middle Department" since it involves activities around the British forces occupying New York City but it also is about communication between General Howe in New York and General Burgoyne during his invasion.

Lt. David Taylor, **a courier for General Howe,  must have breathed a sigh of relief when he saw an encampment outside of New Windsor of scarlet coated soldiers in front of him.

He must have been anticipating  receiving a good meal and a peaceful night's rest before he continued a long 

and hazardous journey through  enemy territory to Burgoyne's camp somewhere north of Albany.  What he got was an arrest and an interrogation!  Lt. Taylor had made the unfortunate mistake of stumbling into an encampment of a company of the Connecticut Governor's Foot Guards.  Connecticut in the colonial era had two capitals, one in Hartford and one in New Haven.  In 1771 the Connecticut Assembly provided the governor  with  the first of four companies  (two foot and two horse) to escort and protect him on his travels between capitals and to protect him during official functions. Their initial uniforms, it was said, were modeled after the British Coldstream Guards with white cross belts, buff facings and scarlet coats!  Benedict Arnold (yes, him again!) had incited Guard members to join the Rebel Army surrounding Boston in 1775 and pressured the Assembly to release the Royal (Gun) Powder stores for their use. Since then they had become part of the State Brigade supporting the Connecticut Line watching the British in New York. 

During his interrogation, the Lieutenant  swallowed a small silver ball, but given an emetic, vomited it up. When he tried to swallow it again he was warned he would be hanged immediately, and the ball cut from his stomach. He surrendered the ball, which was hollow, and sealed with a small threaded plug.  It contained a message on thin silk from Gen. Howe to Gen. Burgoyne.  

A few days before,  a large raiding party had sailed up to Kingston and burned the town with little opposition.  Before that,  Forts Montgomery and  Clinton had been taken, with the militias defending them decisively defeated.   Howe's note announced he was at Fort Montgomery, and airily asserted that  "now there is nothing before us but Gates" (General Horatio Gates had taken over command of northern army from General Schuyler), and he wished Burgoyne success.    

A courts martial  by  officers of the company was ordered.  Lt. Taylor was convicted of spying and sentenced to be hanged.  (The sentence, perhaps unwarranted-- given the severity of the offense,  only acting as a courier, was handed  down by  a jury of Connecticut officers, who had seen their fellow Connecticut officer, Natan Hale. executed a year before.)  The company was on the move to counter the British who had attacked Kingston,  so the sentence was carried out after they arrived in Hurley, adjacent to Kingston. Taylor was confined overnight in a sturdy stone cottage, that became known as "the Old Guard House" and hanged on a nearby apple tree, the next day.  Taylor's body was allowed to hang there two days and the company was paraded before it--a tacit warning to the troops of what might happen if anyone engaged in any covert actions that would aid the enemy!

After Burgoyne's army had been defeated and captured at Saratoga the main focus of the war shifted south.  But the war in the North continued with raids and countermeasures, including a large scale invasion and destruction of Seneca and Cayuga villages deep in Iroquoia, by the Continental army supported by militias in 1779, and multiple raids by Loyalist troops and Indians in 1778, through 1781 throughout the Mohawk Valley and settlements north of Albany.  Tory spying and other covert activities

including secret courier operations, theft, arson and kidnapping  would continue at heightened levels, as would patriot counter intelligence operations, aimed at identifying and imprisoning active tories and deterring tory sympathizers . Part II of "Spies, Spies and More Spies" will continue next time with "The Covert War in the Northern Department, After Burgoyne" 

Marker of the Week  Fortnight (!)-- Crum's Place

George Speck was a successful chef working at Moon's Lake House on Saratoga Lake that catered to the Saratoga vacationing crowd in the later half of the 19th century.  A black man with an American Indian mother, Speck was more than occasionally subject to demeaning treatment by his wealthy white customers.  Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, a frequent patron of the restaurant persistently "forgot" his name, regularly referring to him as "Crum" rather than Speck.  Chef Speck shrugged it off, saying he guessed it was alright, since a crum was bigger than a speck. Another customer (some say it was Vanderbilt) regularly ordered fried potatoes, then regularly complained they were too soft and too thick. Finally,

Speck had had enough.  He took his razor, shaving off extremely thin slices of potato,  frying them HARD, and heavily salting them, to boot!  The "Saratoga Potato Chip" became a hit.  (By the way, a young Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma Moses) spent much her youth thinly slicing potatoes grown on her family's farm in Greenwich for the Saratoga  chip restaurant market,  decades before she ever picked up a paintbrush. --see NYSHMS: It Happened Here  April 14, 2013 ).

*See NYHSMS: It Happened Here posts "The Short Violent Life of Walter Butler" 8/17 and 8/23/15.

**Taylor was a loyalist from Kinderhook serving in the British Army's 9th Regiment.  He might have escaped detection but he also carried incriminating personal letters from some of his fellow officers written to their families in Kinderhook.

It Happened Here  -- The Body of Jane McCrea *

(*a little warning and apology in advance -- this blog article is both a little more macabre and grisly than I am entirely comfortable presenting )

By the first decades of the 19 thcentury the settlement near Ft. Edward had grown up, with a “proper” cemetery located along

State Street. Many colonial era graves were located here, including the grave of Duncan Campbell. (See see NYSHM: It Happened Here 6/13). Sara McNeil, Jane’s friend who survived her ordeal in 1777 was buried here in a brick vault in 1799.  In 1822 when the Champlain canal was dug, Jane McCrea’s ,remains were moved here and buried on top of Sara McNeil’s vault. 

By mid-century the settlement at Fort Edward had grown into the village of Ft. Edward,

which was incorporated in 1849.  The Champlain Canal had linked Ft Edward to cities in

Canada, to Albany and, in turn, to the rest of New York State.  Two saw mills, (built in 1846) and

two paper mills (ca. 1850) utilized the forest products of the nearby Adirondacks. Many residents

of Fort Edward achieved a modicum of prosperity and aspired to the American Victorian lifestyle. 

 By this time the Old  State Street Burying Ground seemed crowded and antiquated.  A new cemetery

was planned, one that would fit notions of a “proper” burial with a more park-like setting, “memorials”,

rather than mere gravestones, family plots, and, for those who could afford them, family vaults,

obelisks, and statuary. The community’s prominent people in life would have a place of prominence

in death. Additionally, the community looked to the Old State Street Burying Ground to see who in the

town’s history were deserving of a special place of honor in the new Union Cemetery in 1852. 

Three who were selected were Jane McCrea, Sara McNeil and Duncan Campbell. (see my blog post on

Duncan Campbell posted on 6/13). Buried next to one another in the front, to the left of the main gate

their graves were surrounded by an ornate iron fence. A new marble headstone was supplied by Sarah

Payne,  Jane McCrea’s niece.

Union Cemetery, Rte 4, Ft. Edward

For the next 150 years the physical remains of Jane McCrea lay undisturbed though conflicting

written accounts of her death continued to be exhumed and examined by generations of 19th and 20th century historians. There was, however, the disturbing newspaper story written the year she was re-interred

that asserted the box containing her bones had been broken into and most of the bones “scattered all over

the country.”

In 2002 colonial archeologist David R. Starbuck secured permission from Jane McCrea’s oldest

living descendant and the Supreme Court in Washington County to exhume the bones of Jane McCrea to

determine if she had, in fact, been buried there and perhaps forensically shed some light on the circumstances

of her death. In 2003 the archaeologist and his team of forensic scientists uncovered a small 20” by 24” box in

her grave site. When they opened the lid they were astounded to find there were two sets of bones, those of

a younger women and those of a much older woman. And the younger woman’s remains were missing its skull!

It seemed likely that when the workmen exhumed Miss McCrea’s remains in 1852 they encountered a collapsed vault and the bones of the two women mixed together so rather than trying to separate the two skeletons, they boxed up both sets of bones together. Starbuck's subsequent comparison of the older woman’s DNA with a living descendant of Sara McNeil revealed it was indeed the skeleton of Mrs. McNeil. 

 

The other mystery, of what had happened to Jane McCrea’s skull is harder to fathom. In an account of the 1755

massacre at Fort William Henry during the French and Indian War, a witness reported seeing an Indian carrying

away a severed head in the chaos, probably intending to remove the scalp at a safe distance. Perhaps this was

an analgous situation, with the Jane McCrea's head being discarded!

Starbuck mentions other, but arguably no less grisly hypotheses. Could her skull been spirited away

as a "souvenir"?   Certainly there is abundant evidence that 19th and early 20th century Americans loved to collect

historical souvenirs. Fully 2/3s of “Plymouth Rock”, the glacial boulder the pilgrims reputedly stepped ashore

on in 1620 had been chipped away and carried off before a gated portico was built around the rock in 1867 to

protect it from souvenir hunters. The “Star Spangled Banner”, the huge flag that flew over Ft. William Henry

in the War of 1812 suffered chunks and even a star cut out of it. In Troy, a number of years ago, I was shown

a piece of armor plate made at the Rensselaer Iron Works, forged for the first ironclad battleship, the Monitor,

in 1862. It too had squares and round disks cut from it, no doubt given to friends of workers at the foundry,

or politicians and influential people who desired to own a piece of history.

There is also evidence that the burgeoning natural sciences spawned the proliferation of human skull

collections.

In the late 18th century, Viennese doctor Franz Joseph Gall postulated that different character traits, sensibilities

and talents were located in different parts of the brain and that the predominance of any of these could be

determined by feeling for ridges and lumps on a living person’s head or by directly examining skulls of the

deceased. One of Gall’s disciples, who coined the study “phrenology” toured the United States in 1832. 

Two brothers, Orson and Lorenzo Fowler became ardent devotees of the new “science” and soon had highly

successful careers as practicing phrenologists and publishers of books, articles, and a “scientific” Journal

of Phrenology.  They opened their “Phrenological Cabinet” on Broadway in New York City.  Advertised as

the “New York Golgotha” it featured, according to the Fowler’s Journal in 1854 “a thousand crania arranged

and labeled among the walls of the building.” An even larger collection of skulls from all over the world had

been assembled in Philadelphia by Samuel George Morton who was seeking to find a relationship between

cranial size and intelligence, “craniometry”. It was said that Morton spent between $10,000 and $15,000 –

then an extremely large sum, for that time, acquiring skulls.

“All manner of scientists began collections, taking skulls from anywhere they could find them.” Perhaps the disappearance of Jane McCrea’s skull was more than simple souvenir taking.

 

In 2005 Starbuck returned, with a court order allowing him to continue his examination and separation of the two skeletons. A digital restoration of Sara McNeil’s face was done from her skull and the two sets of remains were laid to rest in adjoining graves. Since then, more durable copies of Jane McCrea’s marble stone and Duncan Campbell’s red sandstone marker were set in place. A new marker adorned with a Scottish thistle was placed over Sara

McNeil’s new grave

Finally, (perhaps) Jane McCrea will rest in peace.

Marker of the Week  Fortnight (!)-- OMI !

This is one of the Pomeroy Foundation's most recent signs, one of their series of markers that highlight historical episodes that might not stand up to historical scrutiny, but are too good to forget.

             Columbia County   Rte 22,   Ghent, NY