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Abraham Woodhull, Anna Strong, Benjamin Tallmadge, Caleb Brewster, Heather Lind, Jamie Bell, The American Revolution, The Culper Ring, Turn: Washington's Spies
Some day soon I hope to get back to a more regular posting schedule. But my egregious work load last semester seems to be continuing this semester too. I’ve just been way too busy prepping for a new course to get much blogging done. Sorry.
But I did manage to find time to watch the first season of AMC’s Turn: Washington’s Spies. I put off watching it for quite a while because I think I expected a Revolutionary-era Reign. And the first few episodes aren’t easy to get into. But as I watched it, I started to notice something quite interesting. The show is actually moderately serious about using real historical characters. At one point late in the season I watched two scenes with a total of about 8 speaking characters and I suddenly realized that every character with dialog was a verifiable historical figure. Given that the average historical TV show is lucky to have more than 25% of its characters be real people, I find myself kinda impressed.
It helps that the series is rooted in a specific book, Alexander Rose’s Washington’s Spies: The True Story of America’s First Spy Network (New York: Bantam, 2007). Rose tells the story of George Washington’s efforts to establish a network of spies who could get him intelligence about Loyalist-held New York City, a major focus of the war efforts. Although Rose discusses a couple of different spies, he focuses his attention on the Culper Ring, which centered on Abraham Woodhull, Richard Townsend, and their handler Col. Benjamin Tallmadge. The book has been very useful to me in checking the facts in the show.
The Revolutionary War
Modern Americans, when we picture the American Revolution, tend to imagine that everyone in the American colonies hated the British and whole-heartedly supported the war. The reality was far more complex than that. At the start of the war, only about 25% of the population actively supported the Revolution, while around 20% were die-hard Loyalists (or Tories, the term for the faction in British politics who championed the power of the king). The remainder of the population either wanted to remain neutral or felt caught between the two competing groups and simply had to navigate the war as best they could, which sometimes involved making hard choices and sometimes involved being plundered by both sides.
The Mid-Atlantic zone during the Revolutionary War was something of a patchwork. New York City, Long Island, parts of Rhode Island, and patches of New Jersey were basically Loyalist territory, whereas Connecticut, much of rural New York, and parts of New Jersey and Rhode Island were held by the ‘Patriots’ (also called Whigs, the term for the faction in British politics that wanted a weaker king). That patchwork of Loyalists and Patriots created challenges for men and women trying to live their lives and go about their business. A Patriot household could easily be located in the middle of a Loyalist community and vice versa. Merchants traveling for business might have to cross the lines between Patriot and Loyalist communities, and Patriot farmers might have to sell their produce to the British Army.
That sort of messiness created fertile ground for espionage, as Rose repeatedly demonstrates. The fact that New York City and Long Island were linked through the city’s need for food from the farms and yet the region was not far from Connecticut particularly created an opportunity for Patriots on Long Island to spy on New York City for General Washington, who was badly in need of information about troop movements, preparations for military campaigns, and the like.
That need ultimately drove the creation of the Culper Ring, so-called because its two major spies, Abraham Woodhull and Robert Townsend were referred to in correspondence as Samuel Culper Senior and Samuel Culper Junior. The ring was organized by Col. Benjamin Tallmadge, who recruited two men he knew from childhood, Woodhull and Caleb Brewster. Woodhull then recruited Townsend. Using a combination of code, cipher, and invisible ink, these men provided Washington with much-needed intelligence on New York City and its environs.
Col. Tallmadge
The basic system they used is that Townsend wrote out his report, give it to a courier who got it to Woodhull’s town of Setauket, Long Island, and buried it in a box on Woodhull’s farm. Woodhull retrieved the message, added his own observations to it, and then had a local woman, Anna Strong, signal Brewster by hanging a black petticoat out to dry (along with a number of handkerchiefs that signaled where Brewster was to meet Woodhull), and when Woodhull passed him Townsend’s report, Brewster would get it to Tallmadge, who then sent it to Washington. (The detail about Strong’s washing line has never been proven, but relies on local tradition and fits what is generally known about the ring’s operation.)
Between 1778 and 1781, the Culper Ring had a number of major successes. It alerted Washington to a planned assault on French forces at Newport, helped thwart a British attempt to collapse the young American currency through counterfeiting, warned Washington that a raid on Connecticut was actually a diversionary feint, and revealed that a high-ranking American office was planning to turn over West Point to the British, although they were unable to identify Benedict Arnold specifically.
So with that in mind, let’s take a look at the American characters in Turn: Washington’s Spies.
Abraham Woodhull
Abraham Woodhull was a farmer in Setauket who was recruited by Tallmadge in 1778 to act as a spy because selling his produce gave him a good excuse to be heading into New York City occasionally. Whereas Jamie Bell’s Woodhull is a brave man willing to take risks but reluctant to engage in physical violence, the real Woodhull seems to have been a rather nervous man, constantly worrying about being found out; Tallmadge had to learn to manage the man’s anxieties. But I suppose centering your show around a character like that seemed like a tough sell to audiences.
Jamie Bell as Abraham Woodhull (that cap, incidentally, is not an unreasonable take on Revolutionary-era headgear)
But other changes are more problematic. The series gives Woodhull a rather complicated back story. He studied law at Yale and was courting Anna Strong (Heather Lind) until his other brother died and his father, Judge Richard Woodhull (Kevin R. McNally), pressured him to return home to Setauket and marry his brother’s fiancé Mary (Meegan Warner), thus creating a rather complicated romantic knot for the characters in the show.
Unfortunately, virtually every word of the preceding paragraph is false. Woodhull never studied at Yale and seems to have just been a farmer. His father was a judge who by the time of the show was in his mid-60s; whether he was a Loyalist, I haven’t been able to determine. There’s no evidence that Abraham ever had any sort of romantic relationship with Anna Strong, who was married to his cousin Selah Strong (the show gets that detail right) and who was a decade older than Woodhull. Woodhull didn’t marry Mary (another cousin of his) until 1781, and there’s no evidence that she had ever been betrothed to his dead older brother.
As a result, the show winds up inventing things for Woodhull to do that are highly implausible. For example, he’s show giving Tallmadge intelligence that leads to Washington’s famous raid on Trenton. That basic idea isn’t unreasonable (someone must have gotten Washington that information), but the raid on Trenton happened in 1776, and Woodhull didn’t start working as a spy until 1778. In other episode, Woodhull uses his legal training at Yale to act as the prosecutor of a bunch of accused rebels (maintaining his cover while finding a way to demonstrate their innocence), but the real Woodhull had no legal training. Nor did he burn down his own farmhouse to cover his murder of a British soldier. But other incidents in the show, such as him encountering a bandit while traveling to New York City and him using a code-book for his reports, are based on fact.
Anna and Selah Strong
In the show, Anna and her husband Selah (Robert Beitzel) run what appears to be a very successful tavern in Setauket, given that they own that tavern, a very large house, and a substantial number of slaves (who seem to be farmhands, suggesting that Selah is also a farmer). At least, they do until the British government confiscates it all from them because of Selah’s support for the rebels. Anna actively works with Woodhull, hanging her black petticoat to send messages to Caleb Brewster. Later, thinking her husband dead, she goes to New York and spies on the British by disguising herself as a prostitute. Selah, meanwhile, becomes a Patriot soldier.
Lind’s Strong and Bell’s Woodhull
Most of that paragraph is made up too. Selah Strong was a minor figure in the Patriot movement; he participated in New York’s three provincial congresses in 1775 and 76, which were Patriot organizations. He is described in one letter as a ‘justice’, so he was clearly a figure of some local importance. He was arrested and imprisoned, either in the New York sugar house or on the HMS Jersey (which the show does depict). But they seem to have just been farmers (Rice describes them as ‘neighbors’ of Woodhull, which suggests that they did not live in Setauket proper). So far as I know, there’s no evidence that they ran a tavern (and the fact that he was a justice probably points away from that as well). While it’s possible that they owned slaves, since some residents of Long Island did, in order to own the number of slaves the show gives them, they would have to have owned a large plantation. By the start of the Revolution, they already had six children (none of whom appear in the show).
Anna’s involvement with the Culper Ring is poorly-documented. The whole black petticoat story rests on no better authority than family history, making it possible but not provable (and remember, family authority is the basis for the spurious idea that Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag). Beyond that, her only known contribution to Woodhull’s espionage was occasionally pretending to be his wife as he traveled to New York City (a man traveling alone was more likely to be suspected of espionage than a husband and wife traveling together). She may have used Tory family connections to get Selah freed from his imprisonment. Afterward, he took the family’s children to Connecticut, while Anna remained on Long Island, probably because if they had both left their house in Setauket, the British authorities could legally have confiscated the property as abandoned.
Incidentally Selah’s sister was Benjamin Tallmadge’s step-mother. The family ties between the Woodhulls, the Strongs, and the Tallmadges were an important element in the Culper Ring. They tended to recruit people they knew they could rely on, so tapping their family connections was a logical choice.
Benjamin Tallmadge and Caleb Brewster
The series is actually pretty faithful to the facts of Tallmadge’s life. The historical Tallmadge was the son of Rev. Benjamin Tallmadge Senior (who appears in a couple of episodes, although they call him Nathaniel, presumably to avoid audience confusion). The show glosses over Major Tallmadge’s impressive education. He was already fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew before he arrived at Yale, where he was a classmate of the unfortunate spy Nathan Hale.
Tallmadge enlisted early in the war and in 1778 Washington assigned him to assist General Charles Scott in gathering intelligence. Scott found this work boring and his somewhat traditional view of espionage meant that Scott achieved little of note. Eventually Washington reassigned Scott and gave Tallmadge charge over intelligence, perhaps in part because Tallmadge was a childhood friend of Caleb Brewster, the one relatively effective agent Washington had. Tallmadge proceeded to recruit another friend of Brewster, Woodhull. So Tallmadge is the one who established the Culper Ring (which, incidentally, was named by Washington, not Woodhull as the show claims). Seth Numrich’s Tallmadge is pretty true to those facts. The early episodes show him chafing under Scott’s approach, which seems broadly true.
Seth Numrich as Tallmadge
Caleb Brewster was a whaleboatman before enlisting in the Continental Army. In August of 1778, he contacted Washington and offered to act as a scout to provide information on troop movements. His intelligence proved good enough that Washington assigned Gen. Scott the task of managing Brewster and recruiting other agents. So Brewster was responsible for the project that give birth to the Culper Ring. As noted, Brewster’s role in the Ring was primarily to act as a courier, picking up Woodhull’s report and getting across Long Island Sound to Connecticut. Occasionally he added his own observations to the report. The show doesn’t give explore him deeply enough as a character for it get facts wrong or right, although it shows his father Lucas being murdered by Col. Simcoe, which seems to be fabricated (and his father’s name was Benjamin, again probably changed to avoid audience confusion).
In 1776, the British forced Washington to withdraw from Long Island, and Setauket was occupied by the British troops, who seized Setauket Presbyterian Church, which was the parish of Tallmadge Senior. They used it as a stable for their horses, and pulled up gravestones to use to establish a defensive perimeter around the church. In August of 1777, Brewster participated in an amphibious assault on the church. Six whaleboats ferried men across Long Island Sound and the troops laid siege to the church when the British Col. Hewlett refused to surrender it. A fierce gunfight erupted, which the Patriots had to abandon when they discovered that British warships were approaching.
This incident is depicted in the series in relatively true form, except that neither Woodhull nor Tallmadge Junior were present, and Tallmadge Senior was not killed during the siege; in fact, Tallmadge Senior only died in 1786. (Woodhull, incidentally, is buried at the church.) Also note that the attack on the church happened before the establishment of the Culper Ring, not after it.
Daniel Henshall as Caleb Brewster
So although the show takes a lot of liberties with the facts in order to create action and drama, I’d have to rank it several steps above a show like Reign in terms of accuracy. It’s at least trying to remain grounded in fact. In my next post, I’ll tackle the three major British characters: Major Hewlett, Col. Simcoe, and Major Andre.
Want to Know More?
Turn: Washington’s Spies is available on Amazon.
Alexander Rose’s Washington’s Spies: The True Story of America’s First Spy Network is the basis for the whole series. Rose isn’t a professional historian, but he does a good job of laying out the facts around the Culper Ring, as well as around the unfortunate Nathan Hale, and Benedict Arnold, and he makes extensive use of surviving letters (including the Culper Ring reports). He emphasis narrative over analysis more than I would prefer, but it’s a good introduction into Revolutionary-era espionage.
An Historian Goes to the Movies 
Where does the relative strength of the colonists’ loyalties come from? I’ve heard similar percentages (usually a third each) for a long time, and long accepted them, but recently have started to question that. Given that the political leadership of all colonies were overwhelmingly for the revolution, and that the state militias and Continental Army kept getting recruits while Loyalist militias were never high in number, it doesn’t seem to me that the ratios given can be right. Nor do I think any middle group between them was indifferent or neutral. The more likely scenario is that most of them were sympathetic to the revolution, even if they preferred not to become involved in combat. Obviously the Loyalists were significant. But almost equal to the patriots? Where do those numbers come from, and how realistic are they?
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I will be honest–those statistics come from a book I read on the war several years ago, but I cannot tell you where. It was a scholarly book rather than popular history (I don’t read a lot of popular history), so I’m inclined to accept it. That said, a certain amount of what circulates in scholarly history is repetition of ‘accepted fact’ and may be open to challenge.
Another reason I am inclined to accept that statistic is that close to 20% of the British population of the colonies left for Canada, the Caribbean, or the UK after the war was over because they actively wanted to remain British subjects. So it’s clear that somewhere around 20% of the population remained Loyalist to the bitter end. The challenge for the Patriots was to find a way to swing the 50+% that wasn’t deeply committed to either side. That’s why the Declaration of Independence was written, to sway public opinion toward the war, although it didn’t really work very well, probably because the document’s sleight of hand about the facts is fairly obvious. But over the course of the war, my understanding is that about half of the non-committed population gradually swung toward independence, in part because the British were good at alienating their supporters.
“The more likely scenario is that most of them were sympathetic to the revolution, even if they preferred not to become involved in combat.”
I’m not sure that there’s any reason to assume that the population were generally pro-Independence. Groups like the Sons of Liberty engaged in a great deal of domestic terrorism to discourage support for the British.
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I am just using facts from Google, so I can’t confirm their accuracy but they seem good general numbers. The population of the United States in 1776 is estimated to be around 2.5 million. The total number of loyalists who left the United States were around 70-100,000. So that is around 3-4%, not 20%. So the hard core loyalists appear to be small. Certainly there were loyalists or at least loyalist sympathizers who choose to remain so their actual total was larger. But how active were they?
They don’t seem very active, but for some reason they are attributed to the loyalist portion and not the indifferent portion. On the other hand, that 25% patriot seems to be very active. But instead of including patriot sympathizers (but who did little) in that column, they have somehow been slotted into the indifferent column.
The total number of colonists who served in the patriot armies at some point during the war (Continental Army or militias), seems to be well over 200,000. Then there are around 50-70,000 who were privateers. So we are talking around 250-300,000 total. In contrast, only around 20-25,000 loyalists seem to have fought. Patriots seem to outnumber loyalists by more than ten to one! And all of the colonial legislatures were overwhelmingly controlled by patriots. Why would that be if the percentage of the population was so close? If that was true, shouldn’t we expect more comparable numbers?
We’re supposed to believe that despite being near equal in numbers, the loyalists were incapable of contesting any of the legislatures, unable to raise numbers anywhere close to the patriots to assist the British, and not resisting more in those areas controlled by the patriots. This doesn’t pass the smell test.
How could the Loyalist population be possibly anywhere close to the Patriot population but constantly lose lopsidedly in every category of comparison?
It doesn’t seem to me that whoever came up with those figures are using the same standard for each group. If the total loyalist population is around 20%, it has to include a lot of weak sympathizers inflating their numbers. In contrast, the patriot figure only seems to include the hard contributors while their weaker sympathizers are sent to the indifferent column instead of the patriot one.
So I’m very interested in how these numbers are estimated because I think once I look at them, they’re going to fall apart. They CAN’T be describing the same things.
I’ve read and enjoyed this blog for years without comment, so I’m sorry my first post is disagreement with you! But the more I’ve thought about this issue over the years, the more I think these percentages can’t be right. Which is why I want to know how they were decided.
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I see that Chris beat me too it, but here you go:
http://www.breedshill.org/The_Breeds_Hill_institute/The_One_Third_Myth.html
I knew that the oft repeated “one third one third” claim was taken from a throwaway passage from a letter by John Adams, but I didn’t know that he wasn’t even writing about the War of Independence!
Anyway, historically by the end of 1775 British civil authority had been driven from every location in the thirteen colonies, aside from Boston which was garrisoned by British troops, in fact further afield if you count Quebec, with governors taking refuge on British warships off shore and very little in the way of recorded resistance to this, just two battles in the southern colonies. Much of the replacement of British authority with that of the “committees of correspondence” occurred in 1774 (note also that in two colonies, Connecticut and Rhode Island, the governors themselves were already elected and so the entire colonial government was on the patriot side from the start).
This remained the pattern throughout the war. The only colony where the British succeeded in restoring loyal civil government was the least populated one, Georgia. Everywhere else, loyalists were safe only in places where the King’s troops were physically present. If they were holding a location and evacuated, as happened repeatedly, the loyalists civilians had to leave to (the Patriots were very successful in using strong arm tactics against any loyalists remaining in their areas). British generals repeatedly complained that loyalists would only assist them in areas where British forces were present in overwhelming force, and not even then.
This is just not consistent with an evenly divided population.
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Ed, thanks very much for that link. It shows what I suspected had happen – someone wrote something in a book long ago which was repeated ad nauseam despite it being wrong. That’s precisely what happens to a lot of dubious facts that sound interesting – smart people love to repeat something unusual because it shows just how much “better” educated they are than the others. I had the habit of doing that as well until I started learning how many of those “facts” were completely made up. This is why primary documents are important!
I suspect even Robert Calhoon’s figure of 20% Loyalists (mentioned in the link) overstate things a bit. I managed to find a Google Books article by that historian (it’s chapter 29 in A Companion to the American Revolution). He says Loyalists were around 15-20% of the adult white male population. But then he says around half of the population tried to avoid involvement, and that 40-45% of the white population were “active” patriots (or at best no more than a bare majority!). But almost half of the population as active patriots and around half avoiding conflict doesn’t allow for 15-20% Loyalists!
Instead, what seems to fit is that active patriots were almost 50%, active loyalists were around 5% with the remaining population avoiding participation (but which was made up of people with varying sympathies, but no more than 15% towards the loyalists with the rest including those were sympathetic to the revolution, but not active).
That makes a lot more sense and seems to match known facts and figures of the War for Independence. The much more likely breakdown is that patriots (active and sympathizers) are around 2/3 with 1/6 loyalists and another 1/6 “neutral” or not caring either way. This breakdown, of course, is not scientific, but it’s probably more accurate than the third/third/third breakdown repeated so often! And of course those numbers would have fluctuated throughout the war depending on the fortunes of the war effort, and varied greatly within each colony.
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Have you read “George Washington’s Secret Six” by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yeager? I received it as a gift a coupleof years ago and have yet to crack it. It appears to cover much the same ground as Rose’s book, but when I pulled it off the shelf just now, I discovered that Kilmeade is (or was as of publication) the co-host of Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” and two of the enthusiastic endorsements on the back cover came from Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. All of these factors automatically make the truthfulness of the book suspect in my eyes. I’d like to remain impartial about my historiography, but I’m curious if you had a professional opinion either way.
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I have not read it. My general rule of thumb is to tell people to get their history from professional historians rather than journalists, just the way we should get our medicine from professional physicians and not car mechanics. When I recommend a book by a journalist or other amateur historian, I always make clear that the author is not a historian. In Rose’s case, the book strikes me as meeting the basic requirements of accurate history–he’s using a lot of primary sources, he’s citing his sources very consistently, I haven’t caught him in an glaring errors (although, since I’m not a specialist in US history, I might have missed mistakes), and the book’s reviews seem ok. In this case, the fact that the book is the basis for the series also nudged me toward recommending it.
Given that most Fox News figures are writing for a conservative audience, I would caution you to read it with some care. For example, I would assume that he will paint a very positive picture of Washington, and will refrain from exploring things that make the Patriots look bad. He’s likely to support the basic patriotic myths (such as the idea that the colony was horrifically over-taxed when the opposite was true).
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I find it interesting that the series has completely dropped the character of Robert Townsend, at least in this first season. In fact it seems to have mixed a number of his traits with Woodhull’s.
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He becomes a character in later seasons
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About 10 years ago I tried and failed to write a script for a Culper Spy Ring movie. I got as far as a treatment that would have had Townsend as the main character. Also his sister would have been the “Agent 355” that legend associated with the Culper’s since Morton Pennypacker invented her in the 1930’s.
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Sir, in your article, you mention the writers of TURN got Caleb Brewster’s father’s name wrong, and that suggests Captain Simcoe’s murder of Lucas Brewster was a fabrication contrived for the show. In fact, in an earlier episode is was said Caleb’s father Benjamin had already died of palsy, and that his surviving Uncle Lucas, the apple farmer, also suffered from palsy but was still alive. It was Caleb’s Uncle, not his father, who was murdered by Captain Simcoe during the Battle of Setauket, on 08/22/1777. Perhaps there are historical inaccuracies in this episode, about this raid, but not for the reasons you state. For a period of time, I lived in a Revolutionary era home in Stony Brook, adjacent Setauket, and remain quite keen to know how much of the show is historically accurate, so I appreciate your effort and research.
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