Not Your Father's Founders (25 page)
Read Not Your Father's Founders Online
Authors: Arthur G. Sharp
Brookhaven or Setauket, New York
February 25, 1754âMarch 7, 1835
Spymaster
Yale graduate Benjamin Tallmadge was the superintendent of the high school at Wethersfield, Connecticut, when the Revolutionary War began. The fever of rebellion burning in so many patriots in the early 1770s afflicted him after the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill. He joined the army in 1776 and set up the “Culper Ring,” a group of spies, to keep General Washington apprised of British movements in and around New York City. He operated in secrecy, while many of his friends worked openly to defy the British. His undercover role was what made him so valuable to the American causeâand set him apart from his fellow patriots.
Like so many of his fellow patriots, Tallmadge was from a middle-class background. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and there was nothing special about the young man's upbringing. By the time he graduated from Yale in 1773, the country was on the brink of war. Once the fighting began, he joined the army.
Extensive training was not an option for young soldiers in the 1770s. They enlisted one day and fought the enemy in the next battle. That was the case with Tallmadge. He received a commission as a lieutenant dated June 20, 1776, and engaged in the Battle of Long Island on August 27 that year. He was willing to do anything for the causeâespecially after his brother died.
One of the Americans captured by the British at the battle of Long Island was Tallmadge's oldest brother William. The manner of his death infuriated Benjaminâhe was starved to death, and the British did not allow any visitors to relieve his suffering. The cruelty and grief provided him with a personal incentive to defeat the British.
The Battle of Long Island was the first major meeting of British and American troops after the Declaration of Independence was signed. It also turned out to be the largest single battle of the war, and a significant victory for the British.
After the Battle of Long Island ended, the newly promoted Major Benjamin Tallmadge transferred to the Second Dragoons. The unit fought up and down the East Coast for the rest of the war. They were especially busy during 1777. By mid-1778 they were back in the New York City area, and Tallmadge began a new career.
In 1778, General Washington asked Tallmadge to provide intelligence for the Continental Army about British operations around New York City. Tallmadge responded by setting up the Culper Ring, the most successful group of spies on either side in the Revolutionary War.
Tallmadge sought some trustworthy people who would be willing to place their lives on the line to help the patriots' cause. He visited Setauket, Long Island, and recruited a group of his childhood friends to conduct covert operations behind British lines on Long Island. From that point, the British found it difficult to make a move near New York City without a spy reporting on their activities.
Tallmadge realized that secret agents could not operate under their own names. He adopted the name John Bolton. One of his operatives, Abraham Woodhull, became Samuel Culper Sr. A third member, Robert Townsend, who joined the group later, assumed the moniker Samuel Culper Jr.
Even though Tallmadge became one of the Continental Army's premier spies during the Revolutionary War, one of his classmates at Yale was less successful. That was Nathan Hale, whom the British hanged on September 22, 1776, for spying.
The Culper Ring set up an elaborate network to uncover and transmit information to General Washington. Woodhull gathered information and observed British naval operations. He compiled reports he thought would interest Washington. Then, he gave dispatches to Caleb Brewster.
Caleb Brewster was particularly daring. He operated a fleet of whaleboats on Long Island Sound, which gave him access to several ports in the area. The British knew he was a spy, but that did not deter him from slipping in and out of places under their noses and collecting information about their operations.
Brewster carried the dispatches across Long Island Sound to Fairfield, Connecticut, and turned them over to Tallmadge. He, in turn, delivered them to General Washington.
Woodhull always felt as if he was one step away from being captured, so in 1779 he recruited a prominent New York City merchant, Robert Townsend, to act as the ring's primary agent there. Townsend provided significant services to the operation.
The Culper Ring operated for five years without detection, although its activities tailed off after 1780. Some of the information it uncovered paid off handsomely.
In 1780, members thwarted British plans to ambush the newly arrived French army in Rhode Island. That same year it helped unravel the plot between British intelligence officer Major John André and Benedict Arnold to turn the American fort at West Point, New York, over to the British army, although historians are at odds about their actual role in doing so.
One of the ring's cleverest ruses was the use of a clothesline to air the British's “dirty laundry.” In 1778, the British confined one of Woodhull's neighbors, Selah Strong, a patriot judge, to a prison ship. The judge's wife, Anna Smith Strong, was on her own as a result. She joined the Culper Ring. Reportedly, she arranged the laundry on her clothesline as signals to let Brewster and Woodhull know where to meet.
Tallmadge's spy activities did not interfere with his military obligations. He continued to lead his troops in battle, including members of his ring. Caleb Brewster fought with Tallmadge in November 1780, when American troops captured Fort St. George at Mastic, New York.
Tallmadge was a faithful ringleader during and after the war. To the end, he would not reveal who the members wereânot even to George Washington.
After the war, Tallmadge settled down in Litchfield, Connecticut. He became the town's postmaster in 1792, and a successful banker and merchant.
Tallmadge served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1801â17 as a Federalist, where he butted heads often with his fellow revolutionaries turned political opponents, particularly the Democratic-Republicans Jefferson and Madison.
By the time he died in 1835, he was retired from politics and businessâand was living life completely in the open.
Barnstable, Massachusetts
1754â1844
One Significant Contribution
James Thacher was twenty-one years old and just out of medical school when he began treating Revolutionary War soldiers in 1775. He is best known for his writings, including an 1823 military journal which revealed valuable information about the qualityâor lack thereofâof medical facilities and treatment available to soldiers during the war. Harvard and Dartmouth presented him with honorary master of arts and doctor of medicine degrees, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences named him a fellow. He wasn't always a popular “fellow” with his colleagues, though. He was sometimes outspoken and critical of American medical services during the war, which is something historians tend to overlook.
After James Thacher finished medical school in mid-1775, he apprenticed to the Cape Cod physician Abner Hersey, one of the early members of the Massachusetts Medical Society. Thacher was barely of legal age when he became a doctor in the Continental Army.
Even though the Continental Army did not give soldiers' medical treatment a high priority at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, it did apply strict criteria to the selection of doctors. In Thatcher's selection group, sixteen candidates for assignments as doctors with the Continental Army assembled for their entrance exams in early July 1775. They appeared for four hours in front of a board for examination. Board members grilled them about four subjects: anatomy, physiology, surgery, and medicine. Only ten of the candidates were accepted. The others were rejected as being unqualified.
Thacher cleared the qualifying hurdle and earned acceptance into the army's medical corps. He was appointed to a post as a surgeon's mate in the provincial hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where John Warren was the senior surgeon. Thacher looked at that as a benefit, because of Warren's excellent reputation and his compassionate care of the soldiers.
Smallpox, which John Adams said was “ten times more terrible than Britons, Canadians, and Indians together,” killed more people than bullets during the Revolutionary War.
Thacher started working on July 15 in “hospitals.” They were really large private homes in Cambridge which were open to accommodate the soldiers who had been wounded at Breed's (Bunker) Hill or contracted one of the various diseases that ravaged them and the population in general at the time. As bad as the hospitals were in 1775, they got worse as the fighting intensified.
Thacher did not stay in Cambridge long. Later, he participated in the expedition of Ticonderoga and at the siege of Yorktown. Thacher witnessed the surrender of General Cornwallis and the execution of Major John André before retiring from army service in 1783 and settling in Plymouth, Massachusetts. During his eight-year enlistment, he produced some intriguing observations.
Thacher's written contributions did not reveal any major medical milestones. Rather, they gave vivid pictures of hospitals, doctors, and treatments at the time. Thacher had the opportunity to work with Dr. Jonathan Potts, who managed the army's northern department of medical services. Potts, like so many other department heads, was overworked, understaffed, and poorly supplied.
Thacher was a hard worker. At the hospitals in Saratoga in 1777, he cared for patients daily from 8
A.M.
to late evening. Generally, he had twenty wounded men under his care at any one time.
Because Thacher spent so much time working with wounded soldiers, he had little time for research, which was not unusual as the war progressed. Whatever new techniques or treatments he applied were learned through repetition, practice, and osmosis.
Very few doctors had a chance to do any innovative research during the war, since the demands on their time limited their abilities to find new ways to treat sick and wounded soldiers. They did what they could. Thacher simply reported on their endeavors, rather than contribute significantly to research efforts.
Among his observations, Thacher alluded to the fact that the medical community had not made any groundbreaking inroads into treating disease or illness six years into the war in an April 20, 1781, journal entry. He commented that 187 soldiers in his regiment had contracted smallpox. Worse, he noted, the lack of food hindered any treatment.
The military medical community was unhappy with the perpetual shortage of food and supplies at its disposal throughout the war. Men like Thacher and Benjamin Rush did their best with what they had.
When the war ended, Thacher returned to Massachusetts and established a private practice. He had not distinguished himself from other military surgeons with whom he had served. His most significant contribution came forty years later.
Thacher busied himself with his medical practice and civic projects in his hometown of Plymouth. In 1796, he and his brother-in-law, Dr. Nathan Hayward, established the first stagecoach line between Plymouth and Boston. Thacher introduced the tomato plant and the use of anthracite coal in Plymouth.
Like his mentor, Dr. Hersey, Thacher became a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society. His willingness to adopt new ideas and advance ideas that most of his peers had not even considered made him one of the most respected members of the association.
He wrote several books, including
Observations on Hydrophobia
(1812),
A Practical Treatise on the Management of Bees
(1829), and
An Essay on Demonology, Ghosts, Apparitions and Popular Superstitions
. His military journal became Thacher's biggest contribution to the history of the Revolutionary War.
James Thacher's name may never be mentioned in the same breath with John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or other Founding Fathers, but he did make that one significant contribution to the lore of the war. That was all it took to preserve his memory.