The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ gunpowder, or the saltpeter to make it, would somehow have to come from abroad. For now, the shortage required “a very severe economy,” as one Washington aide wrote, curtailing tactical operations and imposing a quiescent status quo on the siege of Boston. By early fall, virtually all American cannons had fallen silent but for a single 9-pounder on Prospect Hill, fired occasionally in ornery defiance.

      As Washington grappled with his powder problems, another shock jolted the American camp. On Tuesday, October 3, nine generals gathered for a war council with the commander in chief in a large front room at Vassall House. Outside the south windows, autumn colors tinted the elm trees, and the distant Charles glistened with a pewter hue. Wasting no time, Washington informed the council that an anonymous, encrypted “letter in characters,” addressed to a British major, had been intercepted in Newport, Rhode Island, and brought to the Cambridge headquarters. The original courier, a woman described by her former husband as “a very lusty woman much pitted with smallpox,” had been apprehended and bundled to Cambridge on the rump of a horse for interrogation.

      Washington dramatically placed the pages on a table. An unbroken, nonsensical sequence of letters covered the first sheet for twenty-six lines, then spilled onto a second page. After the letter’s capture, he said, two copies had been sent for decipherment to trusted men with a knack for puzzles. This code substituted a different letter for each letter in the alphabet; it could be solved by identifying the most frequently used symbols in the cipher and assuming they represented the most common letters in English, starting with e, then t, then a, then o, and so forth. Both decryptions had been completed the previous night, and the solutions were identical.

      Washington laid one of the translations before his lieutenants. The letter, more than 850 words long, provided details on American strength, artillery in New York, Bunker Hill casualties, troop numbers in Philadelphia, ammunition supplies, and recruiting. “Eighteen thousand brave & determined with Washington and Lee at their head are no contemptible enemy,” the writer had advised. “Remember I never deceived you.… A view to independence grows more and more general.… Make use of every precaution or I perish.”

      From clues in the letter and a confession extracted from that lusty, pitted courier the secret author had been identified as Dr. Benjamin Church, recently appointed as the army’s surgeon general. He had been arrested, Washington said, and was confined to a room on the second floor of his hospital headquarters, just down the street from Vassall House. A search of his papers had yielded no incriminating evidence.

      The next day, Dr. Church—forty-one, florid, and impeccably tailored—appeared under guard before the war council. He seemed an unlikely turncoat. A Mayflower descendant, Harvard-educated and medically trained in London, a writer of elegy and satire who could quote Virgil in Latin, he was an expert on smallpox inoculation, a physician for the public almshouse, and a radical firebrand who had performed the postmortem examinations of Boston Massacre victims. As a member of the Committee of Safety, he had supported Benedict Arnold’s attack on Ticonderoga and personally escorted Washington into Cambridge three months earlier. True, he had long had a reputation for high living—“much drove for money,” it was said—with a fine house in Boston, a country estate, and various mistresses.

      Church quickly admitted authorship, but he insisted the letter was a ruse “to influence the enemy to propose immediate terms of accommodation.” His intent, if foolish and indiscreet, was to gull “the enemy with a strong idea of our strength” in order to forestall a British attack. Little information had been disclosed that Gage’s officers could not read in the newspapers. “I can honestly appeal to heaven for the purity of my intentions,” Church insisted. “I have served faithfully. I have never swerved from my duty through fear or temptation.” After questioning from each general, he was dismissed and marched back to confinement.

      Not a man believed him, least of all Washington. “Good God!” John Adams wrote upon hearing the news. “What shall we say of human nature?” The infamous letter, Adams conceded, “is the oddest thing imaginable. There are so many lies in it, calculated to give the enemy a high idea of our power and importance.… Don’t let us abandon him for a traitor without certain evidence.” But what should be done? British statutes dating to the fourteenth century clearly defined treasonous offenses, including “imagining the death of our lord the king,” mounting a rebellion, or seducing the queen. Yet the articles of war recently adopted in Philadelphia failed to address espionage or treason. Uncertain about how best to proceed, Congress sacked Church as surgeon general on October 14 and instructed Massachusetts to decide his fate.

      At ten a.m. on Friday, October 27, Church was bundled into a chaise by the county sheriff and escorted by twenty soldiers with fife and drum three miles to the Watertown meetinghouse. Members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, of which Church was an elected delegate, filled many of the hundred boxes on the ground floor. Spectators packed an upstairs gallery, and armed guards stood at each exit. Summoned by the doorkeeper, Church strode down the aisle to a wooden bar below the pulpit. The Speaker, James Warren, read a dispatch from Washington describing the war council’s conclusion that Church was guilty of “holding a criminal correspondence with the enemy.” The infamous letter was produced, and the decryption read.

      For more than an hour, Church parried the accusations, invoking the Magna Carta, habeas corpus, and his pure heart. He claimed that he had refused a guinea a day to betray the American cause and that he had merely intended to confuse, if not dupe, the British. The letter was “innocently intended, however indiscreetly executed,” just a “piece of artifice,” ultimately intended for his brother-in-law, a loyalist newspaper publisher. And how, he asked, could he have conducted a criminal correspondence if the letter had not reached the British? General Greene, watching from the gallery, wrote his wife that night, “With art and ingenuity … he veiled the villainy of his conduct and by implication transformed vice into virtue.” Church “appeared spotless as an angel of light,” William Tudor, the judge advocate general, told John Adams.

      The assembly broke for a late lunch. After a chicken wing and a mug of flip at Coolidge’s Tavern, Church resumed his defense at three-thirty p.m. “Is it criminal, sir, to alarm them with a parade of our strength and preparation?” he asked. “If this is the work of an enemy, where are we to look for a friend?” Invoking his long service to the cause, he added, “Weigh the labors of an active life against the indiscretion of an hour.… To your wisdom, gentlemen, to your justice, to your tenderness, I cheerfully submit my fate.”

      That fate was sealed. The House promptly expelled him for what James Warren called “the wickedness of his heart.” Under orders from Congress, Washington sent him with a nine-man prisoner escort to Connecticut, where Church complained of being confined in a “close, dark, and noisome cell”; Congress specifically denied him “the use of pen, ink, and paper.” Not for more than 150 years, after scholars sifted through General Gage’s private papers, would Church’s guilt be irrefutably confirmed: he had been a British spy at least since early 1775, for cash, and had likely provided information about hidden weapons in Concord, among other rebel secrets.

      During Church’s lifetime, he was briefly paroled after several physicians reported that asthmatic conditions in the Connecticut dungeon endangered his health. But angry rioters sacked his Boston house and forced him back to jail for his own protection; efforts to exchange him for American prisoners held by the British provoked more riots. His wife and children made their way to London, where the king gave her a £150 pension. In 1778, Church would finally be allowed to go into exile, but the sloop carrying him to Martinique vanished without a trace. He was never heard from again, although his grieving father, a Boston deacon, refused to give up hope to his own dying day. In 1780, he bequeathed £5 and a shelf of books to his son Benjamin, “whether living or dead, God only knows.”

      All through the fall, bored, mischievous, and gullible American soldiers spread fantastic rumors: that the British had been ordered back to England, that a French fleet had put to sea on America’s СКАЧАТЬ