God Knows All Your Names: Stories in American History

© 2009, 2011 Paul N. Herbert. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 08/14/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4389-4512-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4389-4513-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-1634-4 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Part I:

The American Revolution

Benjamin Church: Revolutionary War Doctor Spy

John Champe’s Audacious Adventure

The Newburgh Conspiracy

The Plot to Kidnap George Washington

An Early America Health Care Crisis

Christopher Ludwick: the Baker-General

The English-language Controversy

Revolutionary War Finances

The Revolutionary War Lottery

Revolutionary War Privateers

Founding Fathers Observe Hot Air Balloon in 1793

The Revolutionary War Draft in Virginia

The Raid on Monkton and Weybridge, Vermont

The Words of Cato in the American Revolution

The Presidential

Cheese Caper of 1802

The Impeachment of a Supreme Court Justice

Part II:

The Civil War

Virginia (Finally)

Joins the Confederacy

Devilry on Duke Street: The Alexandria Slave Pen

The Attempted Slave Insurrection in Fairfax

Frank Padget:

Virginia’s Honored Slave

Peyton Anderson:

First Confederate Wounded

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

Professor Lowe’s Flying Machine

The Nest of Slave Pirates

Blenker’s Germans

Vice Crackdown

Some Californians—aka: the Second Massachusetts Cavalry, fight in Fairfax

Colonel John S. Mosby

Edwin Stoughton:

The Luckless Sleeper in Fairfax

An Audacious Raid in Cumberland

Catastrophe on the Potomac

Shipwrecks and the Blockade

Corruption in the Civil War

Civil War Pensions

The Bogus Proclamation of 1864

Shocking Advertisement Leads to Arrest

Civil War Graffiti

The Soldier’s Home: Lincoln’s Summer Retreat

Abraham Lincoln’s Personal Finances

Oh, Why Should the Spirit of Mortal Be Proud?

The Saga of Wilmer and Virginia McLean

The 27th Michigan Regiment’s Fighting Indian

The 27th Michigan Regiment Quells a Race Riot

First Woman on American Currency

Confederados in Brazil

Book Review: Black Horse Cavalry, Defend our Beloved Country

Book Review:

Summers with Lincoln

Book Review:

Alexandria Goes to War: Beyond Robert E. Lee

Book Review:

Virginia’s Civil War

Book Review:

John M. Schofield and the Politics of Generalship

Book Review:

Lincoln Unmasked, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo; Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest, by Jan Morris

Part III:

Other Stories

Radithor and the Radium Girls

Anti-Immigrant Fury in World War One

The Trans-Atlantic Cable

Ulysses, the Poem

The Little River Turnpike

Send Books to Soldiers: WWI Posters

Dissent in Wartime

Oval Office Veterans

The Retrocession of 1846

The Lee Highway Blues

War Takes a Holiday: WWI Christmas Truce

The Lee-Jackson-King Holiday in Virginia

100th Anniversary of Appomattox Surrender

I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag

Former Holidays in Colonial Virginia

White Indentured Servants

Early American Terror: Blackbeard

History of the OED

A Duel in Virginia

NASA and the Moon Landing

POWs in America During World War II

Afterword

Notes

Dedication

To Dad, the gambling maverick, and to my mother, for whom the Indian word ‘vomonte’ fits perfectly. It means good to everybody.

And to Eileen, who has the wisdom to learn and the courage to stand out within a herd of wicked conformity.

Columbia ever will know you,

From her glittering towers;

And kisses of love will throw you,

And send you wreaths of flowers.

Ever in the realms of glory,

Shall shine your starry fame;

Angels have heard your story,

God knows all your names.

Monument inscription honoring soldiers from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

Preface

The four horsemen of the Apocalypse gallop wildly through these pages. War carves its ugly name in tales of terror and tragedy. Famine wields its thunder too, especially in stories about the baker-general’s heroic attempt to feed the army as well as the miserable conditions leading to a near-insurrection of Continental soldiers. Pestilence covers bone-weary soldiers with disease-laden blankets, malignantly befriending those too weak to reject its choking and destructive embrace. And death, violently swinging its hard scythe of finality, rides last.

But these stories also tell humorous, obscure and fascinating tales. That road you’re driving on might have been built by slave labor and captured Revolutionary War Hessian troops. That non-descript building in Alexandria, Virginia that thousands of cars pass everyday once held auctions of human beings. Over two thousand vessels sank in the Civil War, including eleven in Chinese waters alone. You may not know it, but the Civil War started and ended at the residences of a couple named Wilmer and Virginia McLean. Imagine any historic event, let alone a civil war, starting and ending in your house.

Was there really an attempted slave insurrection in Fairfax three decades before John Brown went to Harper’s Ferry? Everyone knows John Brown, but who ever heard of John Windover? Who knew a monument was erected in Virginia to honor the brave deeds of a slave, six years before the Civil War? With stories of Mary Todd Lincoln’s oft-repeated spending habits, how did Mr. Lincoln save the tidy sum of $84,000 during his presidency?

An instructor who can’t make history fascinating should find another vocation. Once you peel away the decades to get to the personalities, you find it’s page turning stuff, almost like fiction. In fact, a fellow named Andre Gide, who is long forgotten, if in fact he was ever known in the first place, said: Fiction is history that might have taken place, and history fiction that has taken place.

Time shortens when learning about the people who walked before us. The Civil War was fought almost a century and a half ago, which sounds like a very long time until you realize that anyone born in 1959 was alive when its last soldier was still living; until very recently, a couple Civil War widows were still alive. We are five years from the Centennial Anniversary of the start of World War One, a long time indeed, but alas, a few (precious few) doughboys have not yet gone over the top, or as they said at that time, gone west. It’s probable that someone living now had a grandfather who fought in the Mexican War. It wasn’t that long ago.

Researching these stories has been an incredible joy. It’s amazing how quickly the hours pass while poring over dusty, barely legible documents in old town hall basements. It’s not work at all when you put the stories together a little at a time never knowing when, where or how you’ll find the next precious details. It may be an account of a property bought or sold, or a last will and testament where your grandfather with eight greats in front of his name left instructions for how his nine-dollar estate should be divided. Once rescued from that great dust-heap called history these fragments go from forgotten to memorable.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (now Bodrum, Turkey) earned the sobriquet ‘the Father of History for writing about the Greeks twenty-five-hundred years ago. His purpose in writing was so the vestiges of humankind might withstand the erosion of time and that great and wonderful exploits might be saved from ignoble obscurity. Two and half millennia later, that still perfectly summarizes the purpose of history. The parents of history, if there were such a thing, according to one writer, were epic poetry and science. An Arab historian named Ibn Khaldun who lived through the Black Plague of the Fourteenth Century wrote: On the surface history is no more than information about political events, dynasties, and occurrences of the remote past, elegantly presented and spiced with proverbs…The inner meaning of history, on the other hand, involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanations of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of events.

Sometimes we learn from history. But sometimes we don’t. Hegel said the only thing man has learned from history is that man hasn’t learned anything from history.

Historian William Thayer provided this motive for those trying to provide accurate portrayals of the past:

"We need to know the words actually spoken, the speech actually delivered,—not the expurgated or embellished revision, purveyed by Hansard or by the Congressional Record,—because those words were integral strands in the web of history. We need to know each actor’s estimate of his fellows: for however unjust, mistaken, or over-favorable that estimate may be, it determined action …Unless the historian comes to this knowledge, the past will be dead to him, an affair of mummies, a deciphering of mummy-cases, which no display of erudition concerning economics, commercial statistics or documents can bring to life."

Appreciate the quest for knowledge, possibly the most enjoyable journey that life offers. As DeWitt Clinton eloquently expressed in his 1823 Phi Beta Kappa Address:

Pleasure is a shadow, wealth is vanity, and power a pageant; but knowledge is ecstatic in enjoyment, perennial in fame, unlimited in space, and infinite in duration. In the performance of its sacred offices it fears no danger, spares no expense, omits no exertion. It scales the mountain, looks into the volcano, dives into the ocean, perforates the earth, wings its flight into the skies, encircles the globe, explores sea and land, contemplates the distant, examines the minute, comprehends the great, and ascends to the sublime. No place too remote for its grasp; no heavens too exalted for its reach. Its seat is the bosom of God; its voice the harmony of the world. All things in heaven and earth do it homage, the very least as feeling its care, and the greatest as not exempt from its power. Both angels and men and creatures, of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all, with uniform consent, admiring it as the parent of peace and happiness.

Once you understand that past really is prologue, it becomes clear President Truman was onto something when he said the only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know. Or maybe the writer William Faulkner captured the essence of history best: The past is never dead; it’s not even past.

For many of us, the past keeps drawing us back. We go back frequently. Back to 1783 when our new nation almost self-destructed because there was no money to pay Revolutionary War soldiers, or to 1795 when Americans, livid with the Jay Treaty and the Whiskey Rebellion, almost went to civil war, or to 1804 when the Northern States threatened civil war because of the Louisiana Purchase.

The past is there. So, as F. Scott Fitzgerald summarized in the final line of The Great Gatsby, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

We go back because the past enlightens. It even entertains. Everything can be found in history. Humor and tragedy and irony are there. Even, as the author Bernard DeVoto eloquently stated, romance is found there:

If the mad, impossible voyage of Columbus or Cartier or LaSalle…is not romantic, if the stars did not dance in the sky when the Constitutional Convention met, if Atlantis has any landscape stranger than the other side of the moon or any lights or colors or shapes more unearthly than the customary homespun of Lincoln or the morning coat of Jackson, well, I don’t know what romance is. Ours is a story mad with the impossible, it is chaos out of dream, it began as a dream and it has continued as a dream down to the last headlines you read in a newspaper. And of our dreams there are two things above all others to be said, that only madmen could have dreamed them or would have dared to - and that we have shown a considerable faculty for making them come true. The simplest truth you can ever write about history will be charged and surcharged with romanticism, and if you are afraid of the word you better start practicing seriously on your fiddle.

Everyone has a collection of incredibly interesting stories in their past. We all share history. If you had ancestors here in America during the Revolutionary War, be assured without question, they were out there, perhaps providing medicine or comfort to a Continental soldier; they were there burying their meager foods and silver in the back yard so the enemy would not steal them. They were not hiding all day in their homes. They were out buying wares and selling vegetables, greeting people, transacting commerce, doing what people have always done.

They saw and lived through experiences and incidents that would astonish you. They were cheering as a Loyalist got tarred and feathered; they were dazzled as John Hancock, Patrick Henry or one of the other Founding Fathers made a stirring speech. Their stories, and hopefully the stories in this book, bring them back.

Paul N. Herbert

pnh9202@verizon.net

P.O. Box 2111

Fairfax, VA 22031

Part I:

The American Revolution

Benjamin Church: Revolutionary War Doctor Spy

Five years before Benedict Arnold tried to sell the fort at West Point to the enemy, a year before America declared its independence, a Boston physician with impeccable professional and patriotic credentials committed treason by divulging sensitive information to the British Army.

Just as the Revolutionary War started, a secret group of ardent patriots plotting a revolution in taverns like the Salutation and the Green Dragon were alerted they had a spy in their midst. But who? Certainly it couldn’t be Sam Adams, John Adams or John Hancock, the soul, mind and bank of the Rebellion; it couldn’t be Paul Revere, the ‘midnight rider;’ not Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., the surgeon-general of the American Army, the poet who wrote pro-rebellion verse, the hardened patriot who proudly showed off his blood-stained socks after the Battle of Lexington.

Dr. Church, witty, high strung and bombastic, according to Esther Forbes in her 1942 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography about Paul Revere, was simply an odd duck. In retrospect he should have quickly been identified as the spy. He consorted with a British officer, and in 1775 just as the war began he had a sudden increase in wealth, spending lavishly on a house and a mistress. Whether he was ever confronted about the pecuniary or the peccadillo is lost to history, but as for his association with the British officer, he dismissed it as a clumsy ruse to try and obtain secret information. With that simple explanation the man Forbes described as the noisiest patriot in Boston avoided detection for several months.

A spy is always an instant away from being caught. Every activity, every letter, every communication is like a card precariously placed on top of an already tipsey double-decker house of them. It all came tumbling down in July or August 1775 when Church misplayed the ‘use mistress to pass a letter to the enemy’ card. Unable to get a ciphered note to the British, the desperate doctor directed his mistress to have one of her friends forward the note. Deeply perplexed by this unusual request, the friend, a Newport, Rhode Island baker named Godfrey Wenwood put the note aside, not sure what to do.

Weeks passed. Dr. Church somehow learned the letter had not been delivered. It might have been tossed on the pile of unrecorded history except for the fact that the worried doctor, acting like the rank clandestine amateur that he was, seemingly lost his senses over the undelivered letter and directed his mistress to inquire again with the baker. Add poor judgment to the list of crimes and indiscretions committed by the conspiratorial doctor and his pesky girlfriend.

Like leaven to flour this additional ingredient to the mix made Wenwood’s suspicions rise. The good baker passed the original note to the American Army and the doctor quickly became toast.

General George Washington initiated an investigation. When asked about the letter, the mistress hemmed and hawed, claimed to know nothing. Perhaps the threat of the gibbet made her give up Dr. Church. When interviewed, the not-so-good doctor simply lied. Yes, he wrote the letter to the British and yes, he gave it to his mistress to pass on. But no, the cipher contained nothing sinister, it was simply an innocuous code which Church, for unexplained reasons, wouldn’t share with Washington.

Clearly some evil-doing had been done. But before anyone went to the gallows, Washington had to get the letter deciphered. He assigned that task to Reverend Samuel West, who later served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787; working independently as a second team were Elisha Porter of the Massachusetts militia and Elbridge Gerry, the future fifth vice president of the United States.

The cipher must have been astonishingly elementary. Both teams quickly broke it and came to the same results. The note divulged American troop strengths, plans and movements, and ended with the warning: Make use of every precaution or I perish.

Confronted with this incontrovertible evidence, the physician lied again. The letter, which in fact overestimated troop strength and arms, was designed according to Church to intentionally mislead the British. Something smelled in the Hamlet of Boston and the traitorous skunk was brought to trial before a packed and cynical throng. Future First Lady Abigail Adams summed up the public consensus: You may as well hope to bind up a hungry tiger with a cobweb as to hold such debauched patriots in the visionary chains of decency.

Although found guilty of holding criminal correspondence with the enemy, Church could not be executed. Incredibly, that penalty for treason was not in effect at the time. The doctor spent a few years in jail before eventually being exiled to the West Indies, never allowed back to America. Nothing was ever heard again of the ship or Church. In The Codebreakers, David Kahn succinctly summed up Church’s likely fate: The first American to have lost his liberty as a result of cryptanalysis evidently lost his life because of it as well. Church’s wife later moved to England and filed a pension, citing the work her husband had done for the British Army. She was granted a British pension of 150 pounds per year.

The first printed book on cryptology, the science of analyzing and deciphering codes and ciphers, was Polygraphiae, written in 1518 by Abbott Johannes Trithemius. Two thousand years earlier, Spartans of early Greece first used cryptology in military operations.

Years earlier the great Chinese military leader Sun Tzu opined, To remain in ignorance of the enemy’s condition is the height of inhumanity…One who acts thus is no leader of men…[and] no master of victory. Chia Lin, another Chinese military strategist echoed the same theme when he compared an army without spies to a man without eyes or ears.

Washington had no love of New Englanders in general, having called them an exceeding dirty and nasty bunch.

Soon afterwards, on November 7, 1775, the Articles of War were amended to suffer death to all persons convicted of holding a treacherous correspondence with, or giving intelligence to the enemy.

John Champe’s Audacious Adventure

In Loudoun County, Virginia, a street, historical marker and monument commemorate the bravery of the principal figure of a daring and obscure Revolutionary War scheme involving George Washington, Benedict Arnold and Henry Lee.

Here was the home of Sergeant John Champe

Continental Army

who risked the inglorious death of a spy

for the independence of his country.

The mission was set into motion by Benedict Arnold, one of the finest officers to wear an American uniform, his military excellence widely recognized. Of all the Americans, the British secretary of state proclaimed, Arnold was the most enterprising and dangerous. He had performed magnificently in every assignment. He was the mastermind, who along with Ethan Allen, captured Fort Ticonderoga; his brilliant leadership resulted in victory at the Battle of Saratoga; and he came very close to capturing Quebec and all of Canada, despite enduring unspeakable hardships just to get there. He held off the overwhelming forces of the British Navy on Lake Champlain, giving the colonists critical time to fight another day.

On September 23, 1780, five years into the war, the hyper-sensitive Arnold, motivated by greed and revenge for having his feelings hurt one time too many, fled command of American-held West Point and became a traitor. Many historians have opined the prickly, thin-skinned general, who just wanted to feel appreciated, defected because he got only grief and political backstabbing. His switch to the British in New York City caused immediate fury among the American soldiers and officers as well as the citizens. In Philadelphia, an angry mob paraded an effigy of the despicable traitor through town before hanging and burning it.

General George Washington probably could not have been more shocked and irate. The loss was devastating. If Washington’s stoicism ever faltered and left him throwing a chair against the wall, this was the time. Arnold had almost sold West Point to the enemy, a move that would have pretty much guaranteed the colonists’ defeat. More than anyone, Washington knew the man and the fort were critical to America’s military success. The war at that time, like at most times, was not going well. It could only get worse with Arnold now wearing the British redcoat.

Henry Light-Horse Harry Lee is probably best known as Robert E. Lee’s father and for delivering the profound words at Washington’s eulogy: First in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen, he was second to none in the humble and endearing scenes of private life…vice shuddered in his presence and virtue always felt his fostering hand. But the advisor, respected officer and friend of Washington was much more. Washington was thrilled to have the talented Lee, who specialized in, the carefully calculated coup, the surprise, the raid that damaged a stronger enemy who then had too little time to strike back. His soldiers loved him because he protected and cared for them. To Lee, they mattered.

At the time of Arnold’s defection, Lee and his cavalry unit were stationed outside Passaic, New Jersey. To wrest Arnold back, Washington and Lee hatched a plot so secretive that only one other man could know about it. That man was the soldier assigned to carry it out.

Sergeant John Champe, about twenty-three years old, was described by Lee as full of physical power, with a countenance grave and thoughtful. Given the hazardous task of faking his own desertion from the ranks, riding his horse through the forty-mile barrier to New York City and making it safely to the British camp, this very promising youth of uncommon taciturnity and invincible perseverance then had to convince British General Clinton to believe his fake defection was sincere. Once that was done, he had to work with another American spy (who used the surname of Baldwin) already in New York City to drag, carry or coerce the smart, rugged, physically-fit contemptible traitor across the Hudson back to New Jersey. Insisting Arnold be returned alive, Washington bristled, my aim is to make a public example of him.

Champe was initially reluctant to accept the perilous challenge. If his fellow soldiers believed he was really defecting, they would try to stop him even if it meant killing him. He had probably seen many hangings in the American camp for desertion and he undoubtedly knew about Nathan Hale, a young American hanged in a British camp a few years earlier. (The British executed 275 American prisoners in New York City alone during the war.) Champe knew that if detected he would be hanged in either the American or the British camp. And Champe knew that despite his officers’ involvement, they would have to disavow any knowledge of the plot, unable to save his life if things went badly.

More than the risk of danger, however, the ignominy of desertion, according to Lee, deterred the intrepid Champe, but with some patriotic persuasion, Lee enticed him to accept, assuring him that his reputation would be protected…should he be unfortunate. He would be hailed as the avenger of the reputation of the army, stained by foul and wicked perfidy. Lee excited [Champe’s] thirst for fame by impressing on his mind the virtue and glory of the act.

As for the danger, Lee promised to do everything possible to give Champe a head start by delaying the inevitable chase. True to his word, at about 11:00 p.m. on October 20, 1780, Champe fled Lee’s cavalry at Tappan, New Jersey for the Hudson River. Within minutes, guards reported the escape to Lee. The normally intelligent and decisive Lee, acting befuddled and confused, delayed as long as practicable. He did not order an immediate chase like he normally would have. Instead, he directed the remaining men be checked to determine who was missing. When advised of the deserter’s identity, Lee instigated a lengthy soliloquy wondering why a man like Champe would desert.

Eventually Lee ordered the chase when it was apparent any longer delay might have caused enough suspicion to lead to the plot’s unraveling.

As expected, Champe’s compatriots, believing he was deserting, had killing on their mind. Consuming additional time because he had to zig-zag to avoid patrols along the route, Champe barely beat the chase team to water’s edge where he jumped in and swam to the safety of a British ship. The Light Horse riders who had chased Champe returned to camp several hours later, Champe’s horse in tow. Lucky Champe had survived the first danger: his fellow soldiers, pursuing him with a vengeance.

Having previously rehearsed with Lee, Champe told the British exactly what they wanted to hear: morale and conditions in the colonists’ ranks were so bad that many Americans would soon be switching allegiances. Champe talked his way into the confidence of the British leadership and was assigned to assist recruiting other American soldiers and Loyalists. He soon met the newly-minted British officer in charge of this recruiting unit: Benedict Arnold.

To encourage Americans to defect to the British, Arnold penned the following piece of propaganda. It appeared in the New York Royal Gazette twice a week, every week from late October through December of 1780:

His Excellency, Sir Henry Clinton, has authorized me to raise a corps of cavalry and infantry, who are to be clothed, subsisted and paid as the other corps are in the British service, and those who bring in horses, arms, or accoutrements are to be paid their value, or have liberty to sell them. To every non-commissioned officer and private a bounty of three guineas will be given, and as the Commander-in–Chief is pleased to allow me to nominate the officers, I shall with infinite satisfaction embrace this opportunity for advancing men whose valor I have witnessed, and whose principles are favorable to a union with Britain and true American liberty…Friends, fellow soldiers and citizens, arouse and judge for yourselves—reflect on what you have lost—consider to what you are reduced, and by your courage repel the ruin that still threatens you…what is America but a land of widows, beggars, and orphans? –and should the parent nation cease her exertions to deliver you, what security remains to you for the enjoyment of the consolations of that religion for which your fathers braved the ocean, the heathen, and the wilderness?…But what need of arguments to such as feel infinitely more misery than language can express? I therefore only add my promise of the most affectionate welcome and attention to all who are disposed to join me.

Champe charmed Arnold and convinced him of his sincerity. This new-found treasonous kinship must have thrilled the lonely and isolated Arnold, whose reception in the British Army had been frosty and unwelcome, due to the execution of John André, a very popular British officer. Andre had been working with Arnold and had the grievous misfortune of being captured by the Americans on September 23, 1780. He was executed a week later. Many British soldiers and officers believed Arnold should have offered himself to the Americans in exchange for the release of Andre to the British. Washington had proposed such an Andre for Arnold exchange, but it had been rejected.

Finally, a month and a half after Champe had arrived, everything was in place to make Arnold’s next night in New York his last. Champe and Baldwin would capture Arnold at about midnight as he took his nightly trip to the outhouse, a brick privy located in an alley on a path from his residence at the south end of Broadway to the Hudson. They would knock their quarry out, gag and carry him to the river. If questioned, they would claim to be taking a drunken sailor to the guard-house. The traitor would be returned to New Jersey where a noose would be slipped around his neck. A boat was readied under the moonless sky of December 11, 1780.

Arnold, however, was an incredibly lucky man. Before nightfall on December 11th, British troops, Champe included, were ordered to board ships to prepare for a voyage and attack upon Virginia. The opportunity squandered, the chagrined Champe would not be returning to New Jersey, with or without Arnold. Instead, he was stuck in a British uniform, along with 1,600 British soldiers, Hessians and Loyalists in a flotilla of forty-two ships, headed to his home State of Virginia where he would have to take up arms against his fellow compatriots.

Four months later, in April 1781, Champe managed to escape from the British ranks and rejoined his own unit. He received an honorable discharge and most likely a monetary reward. Washington had a financial account for such activity.

Masks, invisible ink, drop dead locations, ciphers, deception, and hidden compartments were effectively and extensively utilized during the American Revolution.

Information had to get communicated between people and armies and the ground between the senders and recipients was a no-man’s land dotted with thieves, spies and scoundrels adept at stealing messages. So it shouldn’t be surprising that messages were transmitted in all types of unique ways, including in the soles of shoes, the lining of coats, the hollow space of double bottom canteens, inside cloth covers of buttons, and even, and according to the author, this is actually documented— in a bullet. One spy hid a note in a secret compartment underneath various botanical plants, which is a clever idea except for the fact that moisture eventually seeped into the note. When all else failed, and the message absolutely had to get sent across hostile forces, notes were actually tied to arrows and shot into the city.

Not much is known about the spy referred to as Baldwin or how Washington, Lee or Champe communicated with him. It’s probable, however, they employed the secret code developed in 1779 by the American spy-master Benjamin Tallmadge, which assigned a number from 1-763 for various words, people and places.

The word soldier was 613 and General Washington was number 711. There were several other codes used during the war and in those Washington was referred to as James, 596, 572, 206, 4576, or the Roman numerals LXVIII. In various codes, the Colony/State of Virginia was referred to as 739, 583, 558, 205, and XXXII.

Although no such orders existed, had someone written a coded note: 591-642-736-641, the discerning reader would know it instructed: Send the traitor to New Jersey for trial.

Here is a sample of some of the codes for words starting with the letter S:

Sail 586

See 587

Sea 588

Scheme 589

Set 590

Send 591

Ship 592

Safe 593

Same 594

Shy 595

Secret 596

Seldom 597

Sentence 598

Servant 599

Signal 600

Silent 601

Suffer 602

Sudden 603

Surprise 604

Summer 605

Speaker 606

Steady 607

Submit 608

Surpass 609

Sanction 610

Sensible 611

Singular 612

Soldiers 613

A lot of effort was spent deciphering—sometimes without much success. John Adams complained: I am on this occasion, as on all others hitherto, utterly unable to comprehend the sense of the passage in cipher. On another occasion he wrote that he had received a recent letter, some dismal ditty, but that it was unintelligible in ciphers. As for the letter’s meaning, the frustrated Adams’s lamented, I know not what.

Abigail Adams remarked about this same deciphering problem when she that her husband was no[t] adept in investigating ciphers and hates to be puzzled for a meaning. Ben Franklin, who published a book in 1748 written by George Fisher which contained a section on the use of ciphers and codes also had occasional trouble: If you can find the key and decipher it, I shall be glad, having myself tried in vain.

Often the sender and recipient used an agreed upon book to send messages. The books varied, but both parties had to be extra careful not only that they had the same book, but that they had the same edition of that book. Both Americans and Britons used the Thirteenth Edition of Entick’s Spelling Dictionary. Another book used was Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary—twenty-first and twenty-fifth editions.

After his discharge from the military, Champe returned to Loudoun County and eventually moved to what is now West Virginia. He is buried at Prickett’s Cemetery in Marion County. He never received a war pension but in 1837 his eighty-year-old widow was awarded an annual pension of $120. An unknown poet penned A Ballad of the Revolution to honor Champe’s gallantry:

"Come sheathe your swords! My gallant boys,

And listen to the story,

How Sergeant Champe, one gloomy night,

Set off to catch the Tory.

Bold Champe, when mounted on Old Rip,

All buttoned up from weather,

Sang out Goodbye, cracked off his whip,

And soon was in the heather.

He galloped on toward Paulus Hook,

Improving every instant-

Until a patrol, wide awake,

Descried him in the distance.

On coming up, the guard called out,

And asked him where he’s going-

To which he answered with his spur

And left him in the mowing.

The bushes passed him like the wind,

And pebbles flew asunder.

The guard was left, far, far behind

All mixed with mud and wonder.

The Sergeant missed ‘em, by good luck,

And took another tracing,

He turned his horse from Paulus Hook,

Elizabethtown facing.

It was the custom of Sir Hal

To send his galleys cruising,

And so it happened just then,

That two were at Van Deusen’s.

"Twas just at eve the troopers reached

The camp they left that morning.

Champe’s empty saddle, unto Lee,

Gave an unwelcome warning.

If Champe has suffered, ‘tis my fault

So thought the generous Major.

"I would not have his garment touched

For millions on a wager."

And so it happened that brave Champe

Until Sir Hal deserted,

Deceiving him, and you, and me,

And into York was flirted.

He saw base Arnold in his camp,

Surrounded by the legion,

And told him of the recent prank,

That threw him in that region.

Then Arnold grinned and rubbed his hands

And e’enmost choked with pleasure,

Not thinking Champe was all the while

‘A-taking of his measure.’

Full soon the British ship set sail,

Say, wasn’t that a pity?

For thus it was brave-Sergeant Champe

Was taken from the city.

Most of what is known about this incident comes from Henry Lee’s Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States.

The Newburgh Conspiracy

At the end of the Revolutionary War, General George Washington, calling on his keen leadership skills, innate wisdom and good judgment, diffused a powder keg known in history as the Newburgh Conspiracy, the closest America has ever come to a coup de etat. The not-prone-to-exaggerating future president warned: The predicament was as critical and delicate as can well be conceived, one that could plunge the nation into a gulph of civil horror.

The sun had shone on young America, flush with pride and optimism from its victorious battle for independence. Now, mired in debt estimated at $25 million, only darkness and the forebodings of evil loomed ahead. An impost (tax) to raise money had just been defeated. The States were not going to voluntarily make payments and Congress could not force them. Robert Morris, the superintendent of finances, cleverly stated the Articles of Confederation gave Congress the privilege of asking for everything but gave the States the prerogative of granting nothing. Believing the very survival of America in jeopardy, many felt corrective action, no matter how extreme, was necessary. Money, not patriotism, paid the bills. But there was none.

Politicians’ whining about money is one thing. But they weren’t alone. Army officers also felt the crisis. Intrepid soldiers who had spent years fighting and suffering feared they would get neither their long overdue back-pay nor future pay, that is, the pensions they had been promised. Pay must be found for the army, lamented future President James Madison, who maddeningly wondered, where it is to be found God knows.

Time was working against the army. Fighting had ceased months earlier and American diplomats in Europe were hammering out a peace treaty. Once signed, few would pay attention to the army or its complaints. When their guns were taken away, their leverage and voice would go too. Henry Knox warned that if not paid, the army might be so deeply stung by the injustice and ingratitude of their country as to become…tygers and wolves.

Playing a very dangerous game, the conspirators threatened that money be raised quickly by the government, or else. The ‘or else’ was an implied coup, contained in an anonymous letter, actually written by John Armstrong Jr., an officer loyal to General Horatio Gates, an archenemy of Washington. Gates, Armstrong and a few others had conspired for years to embarrass, criticize and smear Washington. This threat of a coup meant that in addition to forcing Congress to raise money to pay the army, there now existed the added possible bonus of achieving their long-held dream: Gates replacing Washington as commander of the American Army.

It was a perilous time. Fifteen years afterwards, Secretary of War Benjamin Lincoln recalled that he tremble[d] for his country. But the Sage of Mount Vernon, who called the incident distressing beyond description knew how to use words as weapons. His arsenal didn’t include the sheer brilliance or eloquence of some other statesmen of his era, but he wielded the finely honed sword and scepter of persuasion and wisdom.

Sure, the soldiers were angry. They were also, as Private Joseph Martin wrote, starved, ragged and meager…[without] a cent to help themselves. Another lamented the insults and neglects of the cowardly countrymen who would damn the world rather than part with a dollar for their army. But these soldiers were still the same good men who had sacrificed tremendously. They had weathered the war’s adversities and hardships. Just as importantly, Washington knew, with very few exceptions, his soldiers and officers revered him.

Washington’s handling of the incident should be mandatory reading in management textbooks. The anonymous letter, circulated on Monday morning, March 10th, called for officers to meet the following day to redress their grievances, specifically, the coldness and severity of government towards the soldiers who had put the country in the chair of independence. The mutinous letter criticized their own country which tramples upon your rights, disdains your cries and insults your distresses.

Washington had been forewarned by Alexander Hamilton that some deviltry was brewing:

…I have often thought…that the public interest might be benefitted, if the Commander in Chief of the Army was let more into the political and pecuniary state of our affairs than he is…where there is a want of information there must be a chance medley; and a man may be upon the brink of a precipice before he is aware of the danger, when a little foreknowledge might enable him to avoid it. But this by the by.

Washington acted quickly. He authorized the officers to discuss the matter among themselves, but changed the meeting to Saturday the 15th. For the element of surprise, Washington gave the impression he would not attend the meeting, leaving General Gates, the second in command in charge.

The meeting site-the New Windsor Cantonment, called the Temple of Virtue, or simply the Temple, included approximately seven hundred huts, which could hold about seven thousand soldiers and a few family members.

The meeting started as planned on the 15th—the Ides of March. Washington walked into the mutinous den of hostility and deftly cured the mad beast with a powerful concoction of shame, pride and patriotism. He called on the soldiers to recall why they had fought so long and implored them to avoid dangerous mischief caused by a few anonymous malcontents. He appealed to their sense of honor, forcefully pointing out the folly being contemplated as wrong and dangerous. He asked for a little more patience, requesting they give one more distinguished proof of unexampled patriotism and patient virtue. He played on their sympathies, reminding them that he also had suffered greatly for eight long years. Certainly it was well understood that if things had gone the other way, Washington’s neck would have been the first one with a rope around it.

He brought out of his pocket and began reading a letter. From Congressman Joseph Jones of Virginia, the letter was dated February 27, 1783. The ‘Father of our Country,’ who had seen some tough times, pulled out a pair of spectacles, something no one had seen him with before. Military battles