American History Hit - Espionage & Enslavement in the Revolution

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

Claire Bellerjeau tells Don the the story of Liss, an enslaved Black woman in 18th century New York, and her involvement with one of George Washington's spies. Her story sheds light on the experiences of people of colour in New York from the colonial period, during the revolution and into the early republic.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Aisha Deva & Tom Delargy. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Hi, everybody. Welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. Today, we're telling a tale of 18th century America in the revolutionary period,

but not the usual colonists versus a crown conflict. No, this is more a story that resides in the seam of everyday life, but which nonetheless involves an epic struggle for freedom and self-determination, all set against a backdrop of military conspiracy and espionage. Have I got your attention? Good. The tale begins in the settlement of Oyster Bessor Bess. Long Island, New York. As the Queens Rangers, dressed in resplendent forest green uniforms, as opposed to those bright red coats worn by the British regulars, ride into town to set up operations. This is November 1778, and we've reached the turning point in the tide of revolution.

The British have evacuated from Philadelphia. France has just recognized the United States about six months earlier. The British are therefore shoring up their defenses in the New York region. The Queens Rangers are here to hunt down rebels. Observing their arrival is a local teenager named Elizabeth, known by her nickname, Liz. This young lady has passed her entire life in enslavement in Oyster Bay, bound to the prosperous Long Island merchant Samuel Townsend. Here she has worked as a domestic in the Townsend household, preparing meals, washing laundry, mending clothes, tending to the Townsend daughters. This house and these people have been Liz's whole existence. But in the coming months, thanks to the sudden arrival of the Queen's Rangers,

Liz's life is about to change. It's all told in the book Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution, co-authored by Claire Belizeau, who I'm pleased to say is with us today. Claire, welcome to American History Hit. Thank you so much, Don. I'm so glad that we're sharing this story

with your listeners today. Your book has a subtitle, The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth. I want to be careful at the outset. This story gets very complicated. So let's lay down the basics. Elizabeth, Liz, is her nickname. she was born in Oyster Bay, right?

Her parents were enslaved to the Townsons, is that correct? We don't really know much about her father, but we do know that her mother was enslaved by members of the Townsend family. So, yes, she was born there. This is going to be the story of a relationship between Robert Townsend and Liss. Robert is one of Samuel Townsend's three sons, Solomon, Samuel, and Robert, and he's following in the family business living in New York City. He's a merchant, that's right.

His father is an importer of goods, and he is a seller of goods in lower Manhattan. This is the subtle stuff about the revolution that many people don't really think much about. Oyster Bay, Long Island is not rebel territory. I mean, a lot of New York is a British stronghold. Obviously, they're occupying New York City. And therefore, it's primarily Tory, or at least a lot of Tory, as opposed to those sort of rabble-rousing New Englanders up there. And this certainly goes for Samuel Townsend.

Yeah, Samuel Townsend was a patriot surrounded by. loyalists. So even though he was this wealthy merchant, he had joined the New York Provincial Congress. And unlike the majority of his townsmen, his neighbors, he was fighting for America's liberty. This very interestingly becomes the story of Washington spies, the Culper spy ring, which Robert is a big pardon. How did he become one of Washington spies? I believe that he originally started as an informant of the other main spy whose name was Abraham Woodhull. Abraham Woodhole was way out on Long Island in Suffolk County and the town of Satakot. But in order to get the information from British headquarters in New York City, he had to travel by horse. And so when he would arrive in the city, he relied

upon a network of informants. And this was all happening in the fall of 1778. By the spring of 1779, he had handed over the reins of New York City's intelligent network to Robert. Because traveling back and forth became quite dangerous and the British kept stopping Woodhull and questioning him. So for his own safety, he begged Robert to take over the lead in New York City. Robert was an unlikely sort for this job, right? A very quiet man, very unassuming, but then again, perfect for the job for that reason. Yeah, he was right in the heart of Lower Manhattan in a place called Hanover Square. And because his family were shipping merchants, he could go down to the docks and speak with these ship's captains who had just encountered all of the activities at sea, and he could talk to them like a person that they

had known all their life. He also had the British officers and soldiers coming in and out of his store at all times. So he was in a particularly good place. He also rented a room from Abraham Woodhull's sister. So the act of exchanging information between these two spies was made easier by being inside of his apartment. What were they preparing for? Why did Washington need this spying? Well, you know, today we're so used to being able to text people. We can go on Snapchat and get information. There are satellites up in the sky that can look down and see what's going on. But once the British had overtaken Manhattan and Long Island. Washington had no idea what they were up to.

So initially, he sent spies like Nathan Hale, spies from American holdings to come behind enemy lines and gather intel. But those spies were unsuccessful. So he needed spies who were already living behind enemy lines. And that's what made the culper spy ring different. It didn't work out so well for Nathan Hale, yeah. If I have one life to live, all that sort of thing. It's also in preparation, as I understand, for the fact that France is now in the war.

And Britain knows that Long Island sticks way out there. There's lots of deep water ports and so forth. They need to lock this whole thing down. And that's why the Queens Rangers are sent out to Oyster Bay. They actually set up camp here, a headquarters, I guess, of operations, right? And there is a very important person named John Graves Simco, the colonel, who's ahead of this unit. And if you think of Long Island this way, while Manhattan might have been British headquarters, Long Island served as a sort of R&R space for British regiments in between fighting.

So especially in the winter, regiments would take up whole towns, and not for purposes of fighting, but just wading out the cold weather. And that's what the Queens Rangers were doing over the winter of 78 to 79. Now, regiments had already been coming in and out of town, 300 soldiers at a time. And the house where Liss was enslaved was British head. headquarters. Every British commander who came to this town with their regiment stayed in that house. So she met several of these commanders, but Colonel John Grave Simco was really different. And that was because of his belief system. He believed slavery was morally wrong.

I want to understand how she escapes, because that's the real embarkation point for this adventure, really, of this young girl. How old is she at the time when the Rangers come to town. Well, she was about 17 in the spring of 1779. And so she was a young person who had her whole life ahead of her. And perhaps for the first time, she's dreaming of a life where she isn't enslaved. I want to be sure the audience understands. I mean, despite this being a cosmopolitan family, I mean, this is a very prosperous merchant family. The sons go sailing around the world. They have ships and so forth. Liss, Elizabeth, would only know this place. Oyster Bay, Long Island. She grown up her entire life there and served this family in this household. Suddenly she's pondering the

idea of leaving. How is it managed that she's able to do this? You know, she would have known that the risk of escape was really terrifying. Every town in New York by law had a whipping post and a paid slave whipper. So she would have experienced witnessing people who were in the enslaved like her in her town being whipped in the public square for violations of the law, like trying to escape. We should have mentioned this at the top of the show. There may be some in the audience that don't even know that slavery was such a big deal in New York State.

I mean, until 1799, I think it is, 1800 at least, slavery is a perfectly legal and very busy industry. Yes. And though that law was enacted in 1799 to abolish slavery in New York, it didn't become law until 1827. Correct, yes. New York had 201 years of legal slavery. And guess what, Don, we haven't had 201 years since.

There have been more years of legal slavery in New York than not. And New York was the epicenter of slavery in the north. More slavery than all of New England combined in Liss's lifetime, even more than the colony of Georgia. Yeah, we kind of invented the machine there. How does this escape happen? How does Elizabeth get away? So the Queens Rangers had three wagons in their company.

I don't know specifically how she escaped, but I can see in Samuel Townsend's ledger book that Colonel Simco purchased in the days before they left, two large door hinges and a whole lot of nails from Samuel Townsend. So I wonder whether he didn't create a hiding place for her in one of those wagons. So we don't know exactly how. she escaped, but his son, who was the spy for George Washington, wrote to his father just a few

days after Liz's escape and mentioned it in this existing letter. We should mention that you are actually the historian and director of education at that house, right? I used to be the director of education and the historian at that house museum, but in the past year, I have actually begun my own nonprofit, specifically to share Liz's story called Remember Liz. So rememberlist.org is a place your listeners can go and get the new student book that I've created to tell her story. This house where she lived and worked still exists and still stands.

It is the museum. It's called what the Rainham Hall Museum. Rainham Hall Museum in Oyster Bay. Anyway, that's why you're so familiar with the nuts and bolts of this story. Well, I've been researching it for, believe it or not, 18 years. So I wasn't working there the whole time, but the story began there and then I just became obsessed. I think it mentions in your book that she slips away in the midst of the Queen's Rangers in whatever form that takes. Where does she go to? Where does she end up? Well, we know from Robert Townsend's letter that when he wrote a few days later to his father,

the whole regiment had gone beyond King's Bridge, which was a physical toll bridge at the top of the island of Manhattan. So they have left Manhattan Island. Where they were headed was up on the Hudson to the Battle of Stonian for Plank's Point, which the British would win. But we also know that the Queens Rangers returned to Oyster Bay three months later, and Liss was not with them. So she did not stay with Simco and the Queens Rangers. I know from later letters that I discovered that she was re-enslaved in Manhattan, where Robert was now the lead spy of the Culper Spy Ring. Does Robert know of her presence that she has escaped? It's interesting. He knows she has escaped because he writes to his father, and he says that he will talk to officers of the Queen's Rangers if he sees them and ask about lists and where she is.

But then he switches gears in this letter and he says, though I think there's no probability of you getting her again, believe you should reckon her amongst your other dead losses. So this reversal is unusual. You would think he would be telling his father, I have placed a runaway slave ad for her, which they know. never did. I will manage the reward money when she's captured, which never happened. And so I found records of him having contact with her in Manhattan when he was operating as a spy. He actually bought her a few things that he made note of in his account books. So circumstantial evidence sort of indicates that he was looking out for her, that he was aware of her being in New York. Had they communicated before she left Oyster Bay? Was this part of some sort of arrangement? Well, he was a spy, so he was being sneaky. He never wrote down if that was the case. But it certainly

appears to me as though that is possible. That is one possible scenario that he was, in essence, embedding her into a British regiment so that she could get him intel. Wow. I mean, that's real high-level conspiracy here. Well, I mean, just at the same time that she is entering Manhattan to be enslaved, by another British officer whose name I actually could not find. One of the other spies, the one out in Satakat, Abraham Woodhull, let slip in one of his spy letters that a woman had joined their operation. He refers to her by a number, the number 355, which was the code for the word lady. He goes on to say that this woman is in New York City. He doesn't know her well. He describes her as an acquaintance, and he says that she has a special ability, that she will outwit them all,

meaning the British. Wow. And you are pretty sure that this is Elizabeth they're talking about. I would like her name to be at the top of the list of possibilities. Okay. Because she had access, she had this connection to the other main spy, she was in New York City, and because she was deemed as property, she was in a way invisible. She was, in a way, invisible. She could walk in and out of rooms where things were being said by British officers and would not even be regarded as a person. Exactly. How long did this period go on that she's in New York and working in that British officer's house? I mean, she was there throughout the whole rest of the war.

In fact, in 1782, when things were really wrapping up in the Revolutionary War, she came to Robert Townsend, who had moved his apartment in hiding to an area that's now just beyond. South Street Seaport. She came to him and asked him something pretty startling. She revealed that she did not want to evacuate with the British and asked him to buy her back. Why would she do this? I mean, she could have been a free person, I suppose, back in London. Or in Canada, she might even have reconnected with Simco up there. There you go.

One way or the other. Instead, she sort of repatriates the wrong word for it. But she re-enslaves herself, essentially, or offers it up to Robert Townsend. How strange. Well, I think that she trusted him and she was also three months pregnant. Oh, there you go. With a child who would later be described of as mixed race. Okay. So this is a lot of intrigue there. Mm-hmm.

Let me just cut to the chase. Do you think that there was a relationship of sorts, major sorts, between Robert and Elizabeth? I think it is incredibly plausible and possible. He shows such an interest in her, and in the child she had, a boy named Harry. And yet he himself seems to have begun to have anti-slavery beliefs at the same time that Liss comes into his household. He hired a white Irish maid, a woman named Polly Bandvard, to do the housework. So it doesn't look like Liss, as a pregnant person, was required to do that heavy work.

And when the child was six months old, he agreed to resell them both. to a woman they both knew, a widow named Anne Sharwin, who wanted to own Liz and her son Harry. So let's review here. So in 1778 and 9, basically Elizabeth Liss escapes from slavery in New York, Samuel Townsend's household, ends up in New York City, works for several years in New York City for a British officer there. When the British evacuate, which is in what year I forget now? 1782 in this case, though they all were evacuated in 1783. At the end of the war, suffice to say, rather than escape from slavery and leave for Canada or England, vis-a-vis her working with the British, who have offered this, by the way, she instead comes back to Robert Townsend, who in a sense she grew up with, right? She's known him from the get-go and asks him to purchase her. She is three months pregnant with child. That child, you're suggesting, very likely, was also Roberts.

It could have been his. It could have been her British enslaver or another white man. But Robert showed a great interest in helping them both. Right. There's a sense of more connection between these people than just slave and master for sure. What happens then? Does he agree? So he not only agrees to bring her into his household in Manhattan, and she has the

child, this son Harry, in his apartment, but then he brokers this very unusual agreement with this widow woman named Anne Sharwin. Liss is agreeable to this. Robert is worried that this woman will then move away or sell Liss and her son to someone else. So he makes this widow promise that if she ever wants to leave New York or ever wants to sell them again, that she must come back to him and he will buy them both back again. Hmm, this actually happens. This happens, but of course, it doesn't turn out as expected. Robert starts putting his attention towards his business, takes his eye off, Liz

and Harry, and just a single year later, that widow remarried. She remarried a wealthy merchant named Alexander Robertson, but almost immediately this new married couple fought. Whether they fought specifically over Liss isn't clear, but their marriage was over as soon as it started, and to get back at his new wife, now not wife, this man Alexander Robertson sold Liss South to Charleston without baby Harry. Wow. And this is one of those examples of this ongoing tragedy, this unthinkable notion of how life was not only not in your control, to say the least, but also families are broken up on all sorts of levels. And this is the worst of all, where a mother and her young child are now separated.

And Robert had no idea. He had actually, on the very same day that Liz entered Charleston Harbor without her son, he was joining the New York Manumission Society, an anti-slavery group begun by John Jay, with members like Alexander Hamilton, the other spy of New York, Hercules Mulligan, and then Robert Townsend himself. What year are we talking about now? We're talking about 1785. Okay. More from American History yet after this short break.

So she lands in Charleston without her son, who is, where is the son now? In Manhattan at Alexander Robertson's house, probably being cared by other black people who are enslaved. by this wealthy man. And List now ends up in the service of whom in Charleston? This is just such an incredible twist in this story. You just can't make these things up. The man who enslaved her in Charleston was already known to history and somebody who we still remember from history,

a man who was in many ways the instigator of the Boston Massacre of 1770, the spark that lit the revolutionary war in America. This man's name was Captain Richard Palms. You can see him in the picture of the famous painting of the Boston Massacre actually has a man lifting up a weapon, some sort of wooden stick, I suppose. And that's the man that you're talking about, Palms. That is the man I am talking about, the man with the baseball bat in the picture. And not a kindly apothecary, as he's been described in many other books, but actually a brute. he was arrested several times for beating people up.

He was prone to bankruptcy and breaking the law. He became a continental Marine who was brought up on charges of court-martial several times, and now he's enslaving lists. And how does that go? Well, we don't have specific records of mistreatment, but I have a bad feeling that such a violent man did mistreat her. And it went on for two long years. before Robert Townsend in Manhattan

finally found out what had happened to her. Okay, and he tracks her down? He confronted that man who still had Harry. Harry was now four years old, so I can only imagine this confrontation, but he basically interrogated Alexander Robertson, got all sorts of details out of him, who had bought lists, when exactly,

who had brokered the deal, what was the ship she had traveled on, and where was she now? And he finds her. Yeah, he sought her out in Charleston and reached out to several merchants there who he knew were against slavery and who he had connections to through his brother's business. This is what I find so useful about the story. aside from an incredibly proud and bold tale of a young woman, you know, fighting for her life, it's also the story of the history of manumission and the history of abolition in this country,

which has very earlier, much earlier roots than most people consider it. You know, most people think of antebellum period as when all this really goes. It goes way back, you know, generations before this. Yeah, Liz's story is really our opportunity to locate people of color and their challenges in the story of the founding of America. That's how important she is. I agree. So does Robert Townsend go to Charleston himself physically?

No, he writes a series of letters, and these letters tell a powerful story. Because believe it or not, though this group he had joined, the New York Manumission Society, did not succeed in ending slavery. They could not get the votes. They did succeed in passing a law while she was down there.

It was a law that prohibited slaves from crossing state lines into New York. While she was down there, it became illegal for her to return. Gosh. And in fact, the first group of people he asked to help said no, because they were against slavery. They were both Quaker men, and they said, because they did not believe that slavery was right, they would not purchase her even to help bring her home. But Robert couldn't go down there and just purchase her himself? Well, he had another. ally there, a man who was a close personal friend of the family named Adam Gilchrist, who said he would do it. But there were some other challenges too. For instance, Richard Palms had not

fully paid for Liz. He, because of his problems with bankruptcy, had taken out a mortgage on her. And that mortgage had to be paid off. Obviously central to this is, I hope it is, Robert's desire to reunite Liz with her young son. Yes, he had physically taken Harry out of that Manhattan home in arms, four-year-old Harry. He had essentially stolen him and brought him to his parents' house in Oyster Bay to live with other family members of Liss and other people who were enslaved there. Well, let's address the elephant in the room. This might have been his son, very likely. It might have been, but he could not legally free him. No child could be freed by law until they reached the age of 21. At what point does Elizabeth escape from this palms man?

I believe that they smuggled her back because Robert owned a ship called the Betsy, which was making regular voyages from Charleston up into New York and other large cities up on the East Coast. And so I believe that she probably just boarded the Betsy. I see the Betsy arriving in Boston, but on the way there, it may have just ducked into Oyster Bay Harbor and offloaded her with no paperwork at all. But there is proof that she does return there. There is. Actually, in 1789, I see her listed as a sort of quasi-free person in the Baptist Church of Oyster Bay, which was just down the block from that house, right across from her former enslaver Samuel Townsend. And is this recorded in Townsend letters as well?

No, this is in a list of the members of the Baptist Church of Oyster Bay. I also believe I found her the following year in America's first federal census, again, listed as free person, though she had not yet gotten her legal freedom, working as a paid household servant in a large mansion called Fort Neck House in what's now Massapequa. So at some point she gets her freedom. That's right. And in the book that you're reading, I did not know that. I only discovered her manumission certificate last summer. So in the new book, remember lists that I've created for students and teachers, we have that new information. I found her freedom certificate. She was freed in September of 1803 when she was about 40 years old. Explain that process. How was that legal?

How did that legality happen? You know, it was so complicated, and I understand when people get confused about it. But here were the basics. You had to prove age. They had to be over 21 and under 50. you had to prove ownership. You had to prove that you owned this person. You also had to prove that they had a way of making money, not just a little, but enough to be self-sufficient. And all of these things had to be shown to a group of townsmen called the overseers of the poor.

And if they attested to these requirements, they would then legally manumit or free that person. It was a rare situation, but it did happen throughout the whole of slavery that people did. I mean, even George Washington talked about, you know, releasing his enslaved workers. He didn't, but never. After his death, right? Yeah, exactly.

He never did it while he was alive. But it was a factor in life that this could happen. So after she is, she gets that manumission, where does she live and how does she operate? I did find one more wonderful crumb of what happened to list after she became free. Three years later, that Baptist church in Oyster Bay, which was just down the street from where she had been when she escaped, made another list of their membership. And so in 1806, they listed her again. And so after that listing of Elizabeth, a black woman, later on they wrote in the word dead. Now that doesn't mean that she died in 1806.

It means that whenever she died, she belonged to that congregation and was living in Oyster Bay. So she had not moved away or left that church community. And has her, does her grave exist? Do people know where she landed? Inslave people's graves in this time period were often just common fieldstones with no name, no dates. and I have not yet found a record of her death. So inside the Townsend Cemetery, where Roberts' grave is, his fathers, all his brothers and sisters, there are several rows of these unmarked rough fieldstones.

So one of those may be her grave marker. And what happened with Harry? Harry continued to be enslaved by the Townsends. And in 1799, when the law for gradual abolition was passed, that 21-year mark got turned way up for boys to 28. So he got a whole lot more years added to his sentence of slavery. Wow. But Robert tried hard to get him out before that time.

He sold him to another man who lived in the same town with the promise that that man would free him when he turned 24. And if he didn't free him when he turned 24, that man would owe Robert a huge sum of money, $1,000, which in that time was a lot. Now, I haven't seen Harry's Freedom Certificate when he turned 24, but I also don't see Robert being paid that large sum of money. So the records are sparse, but I'm really hoping that that was followed through on,

and he got to become free at age 24. Have you been approached by descendants of these people? Well, I'm proud to say that on my board of directors of my nonprofit, I have an amazing member named Tony Townsend, who's an African American, who can trace his roots back in that town to the era of slavery. But there were many, many members of the Townsend family. Because Liz has no last name, I have not been able to actually directly connect her to a living person today.

Yeah, right. This is the ongoing tragedy of this story, because while those of us, you know, who, are not from this background, can go on to Ancestry.com and find out where we come from and who we are. This is denied so many in American history. But I want to say that all these crumbs, all these evidences of her life, were in institutions of learning in archives and museums. The evidence of the lives of enslaved black Americans do exist, but you have to really, really look.

And for me, it's been 18 years and counting of really, really looking. It's such an emblematic story of survival and determination and just the will to exist that is really the story of enslaved African Americans at this time is that it's just an extraordinary story of courage. I would like her to be considered a founding figure. She didn't invent anything. She wasn't wealthy. She wasn't a politician. But her story brings representation to 20% of the New York population. whose lives have really vanished from sight.

Her story can make them visible again. The book is entitled Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution. There's a companion volume called Remember Liss, which is targeted to eight, 12-year-olds, I believe. It's an amazing story that is bound for being a giant movie someday. I mean, it's that dramatic and that proud a story of survival and determination. Well, Vanessa Williams actually owns. the movie writes to espionage and enslavement. She wrote the forward to that book, and she is part of the story. Her father's family can trace their roots to the era of slavery in Oyster Bay.

There we go. It's all happening. Congratulations. Great book. Thank you, Claire. We'll talk to you again sometime. Great. Thank you, Don.