It Happened Here   ... and more Spies

   (Part II. The Covert War -2 more Spies

and the Plot to Kidnap Gen.Schuyler

Joseph Bettys (Bettis)  was raised in Norwalk, Ct. and moved to Ballston, NY, where his father, Joseph (Sr) became a  well regarded innkeeper in Ballston.  He was recruited into the  American Army by John Ball, son of Eliphalet Ball the founder of Ballston  because he knew him to be "bold, athletic and intelligent  in an uncommon degree" and he arranged for him to be appointed as a sergeant.  

                         

Bettys' Inn--Marker is in  error Joseph (Sr) was proprietor

 

Young Joseph, however,  appeared be  thin skinned, and ready to take offense at any slight and soon was reduced to corporal for insolence to an officer.   Ball arranged for him to be transferred to the force that Benedict Arnold was recruiting to defend Lake Champlain.  Arnold, desperate for seamen, was eager to get Bettys who had  some experience as a sailor and reinstated him as a  sergeant.  But Bettys' aggressive volatility had  already been noted as he came with a note from General Gates' command to Arnold recommending he be put on board a ship on arrival to prevent him from running away!  Bettys served courageously as first mate on the gondola Philadelphia at the Battle of Valcour Island.  When it sank, after repeated mauling by the British fleet, he transferred to the row galley Washington, where he assisted the wounded General Waterbury relaying his commands to the ship's crew.  The Washington  was also badly damaged and could not keep up with Arnold's retreating fleet. Overtaken by the British, it surrendered. 

 Much to the surprise of the prisoners from the Washington, they were treated with kindness, and given parole in exchange for a promise not to aid the rebel cause any more and promptly returned to the Americans.  The experience must have profoundly effected Bettys and perhaps with some unrecorded negative experiences in the rebel camp in the months that followed, led him to change sides. By the following fall he was in Burgoyne's camp leading eight others volunteering to join Loyalist forces. 

 His initiative and talents were quickly recognized.  He was, first, put to work scouting the American lines; then, he  guided a group of Loyalist recruits to Burgoyne's army. He would become one of the most effective recruiters for  Loyalist regiments.  Operating behind American lines he enlisted not only  Tory-leaning whites but encouraged enslaved Blacks to flee their Whig masters with the promise of freedom, as well. Working for General Burgoyne, he was sent  to discover Lt. Gen. Henry Clinton's position and access if he was close enough to assist   Burgoyne; and finally, he delivered the message to British Gen. Vaughn and Gen. Howe that Burgoyne was surrendering. For the remainder of 1777 and much of 1778 Bettys carried out secret operations for Sir Henry Clinton  in New York and Connecticut including distributing official printed proclamations on an 80 mile circuit in (rebel) Connecticut.  But in January 1779 he was picked up by a party of rebel soldiers, stripped and confined in shackles first in Peekskill  then Fishkill until April  when he was officially tried and condemned to be hanged by a military courts marshal.  His execution, however, was delayed by the pleas and petitions by his family and family friends, prominent whigs and military men who knew of his valorous service on Lake Champlain.  On July 4th, 1779  George Washington, himself, pardoned Bettys along with two other condemned spies, in a display of mercy on America's  fourth Independence Day.  Bettys was free but filled with hatred for the rebels who had imprisoned him and after a month of recuperating at home, from his confinement he disappeared again for St. Johns, taking with him ten recruits  for the loyalist cause.  In the spring of 1780 he participated in raids on Skenesborough  and Sir John Johnson's raids in the Mohawk valley.  In the later part of the year  he focused on recruiting in the Ballston area, the Helderbergs,  and communities within a few miles south of Albany.

Burnt Hills Baptist Church Cemetery

Kingsley Rd., Burnt Hills

As mentioned  above,  as the war continued, the British desire  to capture  'valuable' prisoners increased.  Sherwood and Smyth developed a plan to kidnap eight prominent Whigs across upstate New York simultaneously, using small groups of four to about a dozen kidnappers.  Bettys would lead a lead a group of four to abduct  Dr. Samuel Stringer of Ballston, an ardent Whig and member of the Albany Board.  But the Ballston operation fell through, when,  according to Bettys report,  the other three of his team abandoned him!  Bettys, despite having a wife and two children, thereafter, decided to pursue a romantic relationship with the daughter of a staunch Loyalist farmer living south of Albany, and he returned to Saint John's with his lover.  The Tory farmer, Jellis Lagrange, appealed to the Albany board to stop him, and though they failed to catch Bettys, were made aware of increased kidnapping operations.  As a result of the heightened awareness an operation directed at a Hoosick Falls patriot was broken up and a list of the targets of the kidnappers  was revealed.

Bettys' return to St.John's presented a problem and an embarrassment for the British authorities. How could they support and encourage Loyalist "Friends of Government" in the Colonies and persuade them to offer up their sons to fight in the King's Armies if their agents were coming down  into America and seducing and abducting their daughters!  Bettys was defiant, hiding away the girl and refusing to give her up, while his handlers fumed and restricted him to the fort in St. Johns.  After several months they decided to let the whole matter blow over, and in a surprising turn of events they offered the willful spy a commission as an ensign in the 2nd Regiment of the King's Rangers.  Perhaps they thought, as an officer in a regular military unit,  they could better control him.  [4]

While  fighting had all but ended by 1782,  peace had not yet come.  In March  1782 the Albany Board minutes show Joseph Bettys was apprehended on the farm of John Fulmer (according  to one account, in Ballston or another in Newtown in the town of Halfmoon.)  By one account, he was alone; by another, he was in the company of one Jonathan Miller, who would escape, and one John Parker, who would be hanged with him.   John Fulmer  was out in his woods collecting maple sap with his two daughters, when they spotted   him/them  with  backpack and snowshoes armed with a musket(s).  Summoning his stepson, a neighbor, John Cory and two others they tracked him/them to the cabin of a local Tory named Hawkins.  Bursting in, they overpowered him/them, and took him/them to Fulmer's house where Fulmer's wife and wife's sister identified Joseph Bettys. They took them to Cory's House.  Seated before the fire, Bettys asked if he could smoke. The spy produced his tobacco box and pipe and in the process of preparing his pipe, threw something into the fire. The quick reacting Cory thrust his hand into the fire to retrieve the object along with a handful of burning embers.  Amongst the glowing coals was a small lead box.  It contained a note written in a cypher and another note addressed to the the mayor of British-occupied New York directing him to pay the bearer of the note 30 pounds, sterling. A desperate, undone Bettys offered the captors 100 Guineas if they would burn the notes. When they refused, he declared "I am a dead man.". The spy was taken to Albany, under heavy guard, quickly tried and convicted of being a spy.  The Albany Board was taking no chances of losing him again.  Parker was hanged; the ever defiant Bettys, with the noose secured around his neck,  jumped to his death from the scaffold, to deny the hated Whigs the satisfaction of hanging him.  [5]

                                                                                          *****

John Walden Meyers was born in southern Albany County to German parents with his name appearing in documents over time in a variety of German and anglicized renditions.  (Johannes, Hans, Waltermeyer, Waltenmeyers, Mayers, Mires, Myres) and the place of his birth reported variously as Redhook, Rhinebeck, or Coeymans. From his farm in Coeymans,  Meyers travelled to the Fort Edward area where he joined Jessup's Loyal American Regiment.  Soon after joining, he volunteered for recruiting and before leaving,  was given a courier assignment to deliver a packet to Dr. Smyth at Albany.  Though his first recruiting efforts were successful, as he headed for Burgoyne's Army he was frustrated to learn of Burgoyne's defeat. 

 Returning home, he discovered his farm seized by rebel militia, his crops seized by the rebel army, and his family living with his father.  He continued south to join Howe's forces in New York City and  enlisted in the third battalion of Delancy's Loyalist Brigade.  There, he was given a "beating warrant", (a commission authorizing him as an official recruiter--traditionally, in England, recruiters were accompanied by a drummer who signed up volunteers to the beat of a drum.)  He spent the winter, there in quarters  with other courier- recruiter-spies including  William Bettys. 

 In 1779 he made several trips carrying dispatches between British headquarters in New York, Dr. Smyth's Claverack home outside of Albany and St. Johns as  British commanders and intelligence operatives shared information and attempted to divine Americans intensions as the Americans prepared for their invasion of the Iroquois homeland.  Meyers was able to arrange for his wife and family to find refuge in British controlled Manhattan or Long Island but a few months later in a contentious clandestine meeting with his parents and younger brother he would learn that they had come to side with the Americans.  Shortly after, he would abandon his family name of "Waltermeyer" for "John Walden Meyers." [4]  The summer was spent in what must have been frustrating idleness in Quebec as Haldimand busied himself with building Canadian defenses and fretting about a French invasion and the potential of revolt by the French Canadian population. 

 In the fall, Meyers was sent to New York with dispatches for British headquarters, spending the winter with his wife and children.  On a visit to headquarters he met Col. Robert Rodgers of  (French and Indian War) Roger's Rangers fame who was attempting to raise a new battalion of Loyalists to be based at St. Johns.  Meyers enthusiastically resigned from Delancy's Brigade to come recruit for Rogers'. 

Meyers spent the spring and summer secretly recruiting in the many Tory-leaning hamlets and isolated settlements around Albany and  the southern Saratoga area acquiring over sixty commitments from Loyalist to enlist. His many appearances and frequent hairsbreadth escapes from militia patrols made him something of a legend/folk hero.  (Albany mothers were said to discipline their children with the warning that if they didn't behave "Waltermeyer" would come and eat them!)  At one point General Schuyler, himself, would be consulted on how to capture him and a whole regiment of Albany militia would be out looking for him .  This unwelcome attention made it extremely difficult to bring more than a few recruits at a time through rebel territory to St. Johns.  Meyers would find, that, over time, many of his recruits had reneged on their commitment or had been snapped up by recruiters for other regiments, when he came for them. [5]   On one of his more successful trips, Meyer staged a night time raid on Ballston, attacking the jail and freeing Loyalist prisoners,  recruiting two of them, while he took food and weapons.  

The following Spring, in 1781,  Meyer was enlisted as a key player in a plot to kidnap prominent whigs in New York State. The plan called for eight teams to kidnap eight Whig leaders simultaneously on  July 31st.  His role would be to lead a team of eight to kidnap General Phillip Schuyler in his home on the outskirts of Albany.  General Haldimand insisted that two of each team be British regulars to prevent the Loyalists from straying from their mission to visit friends or family or stopping to recruit.  The Brits were instructed not to speak to anyone, to avoid their accents raising suspicions.  They dressed like common militiamen/farmers, most likely in buckskin with linen or wool hunting smocks, older french pattern muskets and a variety of sidearms--knives or tomahawks. Outside of Albany,  Meyer enlisted the help of four Loyalists living along the Norman's kill  ( creek) .  Quartering his men in one of their barns, he learned from them and his own scouts  of increased militia patrolling activity, the result of Joseph Betty's affair and the uproar it caused.  After a few days, fearing the barn would be searched, Meyer moved his men to a "cave" along the Hudson, [6]  where he waited  until August 7th for the alarm to pass. 

Meanwhile, General Schuyler concerned about reports of plans to raid his summer house delayed  sending his family there, and the increased Tory activity around Albany prompted him to ask for an additional militia guard of two soldiers for his  Albany house.  

Schuyler mansion was/is an impressive three story classic brick Georgian mansion on the (then) outskirts of Albany.  During the war it was surrounded by a log stockade.  Attached to the back were two one story "wings" housing Schuyler's office and a kitchen and perhaps a nursery/ greenhouse.  Attached to them were a series of smaller outbuildings with a "necessary," an ash hold,  washroom, small smoke room/room to mash meal in, a harness/tack room, and lumber loft which, together, formed a hollow square compound.  The mansion, itself, had a grand 20ft. wide hall  running from the front entrance to the rear entrance with an open  partition about two thirds of the way to the rear.  On either side of the hall were two drawing rooms in the front and the dining room and a library in the rear A grand curving staircase ran from the rear of one side of the hall to the second floor where the layout was repeated with a pair of bed rooms on either side of a large central hall.  The third floor contained a nursery.

A model at Schuyler Mansion shows the probable layout of Schuyler Mansion in the 1790's. The stockade is gone but the one story brick wings still exist, as well as the square of outbuildings which  form the compound. directly in the rear of the mansion.

The rear of Schuyler Mansion.  The side doors connected to the office and kitchen wings, the center door to the central hall. The grass enclosure is the approximate compound.

On the evening of June 7th between 7 and 9 pm the General and his large family were finishing their dinner.  Meyers noted he saw the General through a window.  At dinner were the General, his wife and their eleven children including his two grown daughters and their children. (His son-in-laws were in military service.)  Meyers and his men broke through or climbed over the stockade and entered the compound through the kitchen and ran to the rear entranceway of the mansion. Meyers ordered two of his men to guard the front and rear entrances to prevent the General from escaping . Breaking their way through the locked door they encountered Schuyler's militia guard, as Schuyler's (enslaved) male servants armed themselves with whatever they had to protect their master.  General pandemonium broke out, as the numerous Schuyler girls and younger children screamed and cried and desperately sought shelter,  joined by Schuyler's female slaves and their children who were serving the dinner party.  A wild melee broke out in the hall.  One  of  the Tories from Normanskill was shot dead.  The two British regulars suffered bloody wounds, as did several of Schuyler's defenders.  One of the Schuyler girls, realizing she had left her infant in a cradle downstairs rushed from her hiding place in one of the upstairs bedrooms to save it and on her return up the stairs narrowly missed a being struck by a tomahawk  thrown by one of the Tories at a defender.  (The bannister still bares the scar of the errant tomahawk.)  In the confusion, General Schuyler was able to slip up the stairs to his bedroom to retrieve his personal weapons. Looking out of a window in his back bedroom he saw some of the attackers in the compound below.  He opened the window and fired two pistols at them. In a moment of inspiration he yelled from the window  'come on my lads, Surround the house the villains are in it', to make his attackers think that aid was at hand.  He quickly hid [7] as the raiders burst into his room.  Seeing the open window and apparently empty room they assumed Schuyler had jumped from the window and escaped.  When a quick search of the house revealed the General was nowhere to be found, Meyers concluded he had gotten away and ordered his men to make their retreat.  Helping the two wounded British regulars and guarding two of the Mansion's defenders, an enslaved servant and one of Schuyler's militia guard whom they had overpowered in the melee, the raiders quickly departed and made their way to Canada.

In Canada, General Haldimand was angry.  None of the kidnap operations had succeeded.  The Bettys' fiasco may have actually turned some "friends of Government" against the military in Canada.  And he, as the current military governor of Canada had likely looked at the prospect of hosting General Schuyler as his imprisoned "guest"at the  Chateau St. Louis, the Governor's residence,  as Schuyler had hosted the former military governor of Canada, the defeated General Burgoyne at his mansion in 1777. But it was not to be.  They had failed;  they presented themselves as apparent assassins; they terrorized Schuyler's wife and children; and (unbeknownst to Meyers) they made off with a considerable amount of Schuyler's silver dinnerware like common highwaymen! (Some of this Haldemand recovered and returned to Schuyler, with a humble written apology.)

Meyers did not participate in the Fall offensive, led by Sir John Johnson.  A large raid  with regulars, tories and Indians, it struck into the Mohawk valley but was  defeated at the Battle of Johnstown.  It was followed by the news arriving from Virginia of Cornwalis' defeat.  Meyers finally got his promotion to Captain when the various bits and pieces of regiments being formed by various military recruiters and their sponsors were finally consolidated to form active regiments.  With peace talks in the offing, this enabled aspiring and long frustrated would-be officers to retire at half-pay when peace was declared.  John Walden Meyers settled with his family on lake Champlain on a government grant, only to be later uprooted by the provincial government fearing that settling Loyalists too close to the American border would become a source of tension between the two countries.  Settling again, in Ontario, he built a farm, mill and several business interests at Meyer's Creek, a town that would become Belleville, Ontario.

[1]  The Bettys Inn marker mistakenly refers to the proprietor as William Bettys. Actually it was Joseph, father of Joseph (the spy).

[2]  As mentioned before, it had become common practice when building/rebuilding  units, that persons who brought in a number of new recruits would be rewarded a commission in that unit--the more recruits, the higher the rank. Bettys had certainly shown himself to be a successful recruiter.

[3]  The version of the three spies captured in Ballston comes from D. Loveless' Tory Spy based on   William  L.Stone. The Life of Joseph Brant--Thayendanega.  1851.  The account of the Newtown, Halfmoon capture of Bettys, alone, comes from Michael Aikley's Journal of the American Revolution article on Joseph Bettys citing an 1840 magazine article by James L.Chester, "Revolutionary Rememberances," in The Family Magazine, v.7 . The incident of Bettys last defiant act was related to me byRick Reynolds,  Ballston Town Historian.

[4] In The Loyalist Spy. historian Mary Beech Fryer has written an account of John Walden Meyers that lies between history and historical fiction.  While there are no fictitious characters in her narrative, and there appear to be few truly fabricated events, the author generously larded her account with imagined conversations, dialogue and characters' impressions  and reactions that even the most conscious diarist would have been unlikely to record, even if one existed.  (There was not.) That being said, she undoubtedly includes a lot of granular historical detail,  and in her end notes she comments by chapter where there is more and where there is less documentation and the bases for many of her suppositions and literary creations.

[5]  In this period of history in some respects, the British Army was still less a national army, and more a feudal army--a coalition of wealthy men ("noblemen") bringing together their retainers/peasants in regiments in fealty to their king to fight for him.  Recruitment was done by, and for the regiment; they were uniformed and equipped by their regimental benefactor (with greater or lesser support from the national treasury); and they were officered by men more or less selected by their benefactor.   For recruitment in the colonies this system proved disastrous.  Not only were Loyalist recruiters recruiting covertly in enemy occupied territory they were facing competition from recruiters from other regiments, each offering different incentives.  In upstate NewYork, at one time or another Jessup's  Kings Loyal Americans, Peter's Queens Loyal Americans, Robert Roger's Queen's Rangers, Johnson's King's Royal Regiment, Delancy's Brigade and Walter Butler's Butler's Rangers would all be competing for volunteers.

To add urgency to the situation,  regiments could not expect to be deployed until they reached a full complement of soldiers,  (about 60 enlisted).  Until then, they (including officers) could expect be provided with only a subsistence allotment, and remain idle or put to work digging and building roads and fortifications.

[6] While I know of no "caves" in this area,  several streams entering the Hudson do cut serpentine gullies with overhanging folliage that would be pretty inaccessible and well hidden from view.

[7] A story was  passed down in the Meyers' family that John Meyers learned in later years that Schuyler had escaped capture by hiding in an empty or near empty wine cask.  While the image of the General stuffing himself into a wine cask may have been an amusing one for the Meyers' family it is unlikely no matter how much the General enjoyed a glass of Madiera  he would not have kept a large cask in his bedroom or the nursery.  It is more likely his bedroom contained a "kas" a large  piece of dutch furniture,  a freestanding closet or wardrobe with a large central compartment for cloaks and greatcoats which a man might be able to step into, closing the door after him.

*See NYSHMs: It Happened Here. August 31, 2015. "In Sir William's Footsteps:  Part 1,The Jessups"

Marker of the Week  Fortnight (!)-- You Don't have to be an Entomologist to love this lovely rural area around where Bedbug Hill Road runs into the town of Fly Creek , northwest of Cooperstown.

            (I didn't see any bedbugs, but I can't speak for New Jersey that has a Bed Bug Rd., or North Carolina that has a Bug Road or Massachusetts that has two  Bug Roads!)