Nathan Hale Statue

Part II: War & Occupation

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Nathan Hale’s statue in City Hall Park memorializes perhaps the Revolution’s best known spy, and one of its earliest martyrs, a 21-year-old Patriot hanged in east Midtown soon after the fall of New York. Hale, and Gen. Washington’s more recently celebrated spy ring on Long Island, underscore the importance of espionage for the rebellion — particularly in New York City, which became the most important location for divining British strategy as its military headquarters. But these well-known figures are just a small part of a much larger story.

  • Here, as elsewhere in the colonies, knowledge typically passed mouth to mouth, through both formal and informal communication networks: women overhearing conversation between officers in a tavern or coffeehouse, enslaved men and women moving goods from city to country, families crossing battlefield lines to visit relatives, ordinary people reporting on the army’s health in correspondence or merely sharing observations in conversation. These were the more common ways the rebel army, staged outside the “Neutral Zone” above New York, gathered intelligence during the war.

    While less glamorous than official spy-craft, this form of information-gathering was more pervasive and arguably had no less value. It also reflected the growing disenchantment with British rule. 

Can you spy this 13-foot bronze sculpture in City Hall Park? It faces the government building, lying behind its gates. But you can see it from Park Row, or by walking north from the southern cross-path.
Two plaques in very different locations claim to mark the site of Hale’s execution in today’s Midtown. There are no other historical markers for New York’s many other spies, except for some of the locations on Long Island’s Washington Spy Trail.

Abraham Woodhull

Abraham Woodhull has recently become perhaps even more famous than Hale, and the best example of a colonist driven to espionage because of military occupation.

The son of a magistrate in Setauket, Long Island, Abraham largely stayed out of the war during its first two years, politically moderate and the only son of aging parents. But he came to resent the British over the death of his beloved cousin Nathaniel, a leader in New York’s rebel Congress who died as a P.O.W. after fighting in the Battle of Brooklyn. By some reports, the Brigadier General was cut by sword and bayonet first, then denied food and medical care.

Because Abraham was a farmer in the agricultural suburbs feeding the city, he could travel regularly into New York and report on British activity. Perhaps for this reason also, his childhood friend Benjamin Tallmadge (Hale’s roommate at Yale), recruited the 27-year-old after the death of his cousin. Woodhull adopted the pseudonym “Samuel Culper” and became the leader of Gen. Washington’s eponymous spy ring.

  • Abraham drafted his brother-in-law, who owned a boarding-house on Hanover Square; Robert Townshend, a prosperous merchant at Peck Slip with a coffeehouse the British frequented, and Anna Strong, the daughter of a wealthy Patriot estate-holder on Long Island, with a husband imprisoned on the Jersey in Wallabout Bay. But secret rebels in New York, like Haym Salomon and Hercules Mulligan, and wartime opportunists, like the King’s printer James Rivington, also provided key information.

    The Culper Ring maintained fierce secrecy, using cyphers, invisible ink, and masked letters to relay intelligence about British strategy, troop movements, and provisioning centers. And they used a variety of deceitful tactics to gather this data— enabling them to avoid capture when Benedict Arnold defected and instructed the British to scour the area for spies. But there were close calls. Woodhull very nearly betrayed himself to Loyalist soldiers under the command of the former governor William Tryon, and narrowly escaped capture by John Graves Simcoe, head of the Queen’s American Rangers. Historians debate the value of the spy ring, but they achieved more than any other in the war. The group is featured in the AMC historical drama TURN.