This blog post might better be called "Back to the Future." Not because it is about the iconic 1980s time travel film and its subsequent franchise but because we are traveling back to the original premise of this blog and the Yankee Doodle Spies book series, espionage.
The American Revolution was, for many years, a war in
the shadows. Since shortly after the 1763 Treaty of Paris ended the French and
Indian War, a slow-fused powder keg of resentment, misunderstanding, and
ill-conceived policies drove a wedge between the North American English
settlers and their cousins back home. Disputes over taxation, governance,
Indian relations, western settlement, and trade began percolating.
The governance issue, in some ways, was a mirror image
of the Whig–Tory divide in Britain, but it was mostly a uniquely American
problem. What should be the relationship between a home country and its
colonized overseas possessions when those possessions had evolved and matured
into growing and prosperous polities in their own right?
By 1775, Great Britain's population is estimated at around
8,000,000 people. But the American colonies had grown from a handful of
settlements clinging to the Atlantic coast in the early 17th century
to a land of 2.500,000 people, with some frontier settlements over 100 miles
westward.
The standard of living in the colonies rivaled any
European country. Agriculture was king, but tradesmen and merchants prospered
as maritime commerce grew between the colonies, the West Indies, and some
European states.
The cities of Newport, New York, Boston, Philadelphia,
and Charleston were increasing in size, wealth, and culture. Philadelphia was
the third largest city in the British domains after London and Edinburgh. The
great distances between these centers made coalescing around shared ideas and
action challenging.
A series of British policies beginning in the 1760s
started to grate on many. Political unrest brewed at first with the educated and
business classes, but with each step to quell the unrest, it began to seep into
the rest of the populace. With political turmoil came political organization.
Political leaders throughout the colonies secretly
stood up committees to avoid action by the royal authorities and their loyalist
supporters. These organizations, which occurred at local, county, and colony
levels, communicated political thought and coordinated activities within and
among the colonies.
By 1775, most colonies had Committees of Correspondence (communications and propaganda), Committees of Safety (local defense and militia), and other committees for various purposes. Many later leaders during the American Revolution cut their teeth by participating in the committees, which were the precursors to future American governance.
As the Royal Governors stepped up the enforcement of
British policies on the colonies, the committees learned to operate covertly
and sometimes clandestinely. Groups like the Sons of Liberty or The Green
Mountain Boys developed. But those with unswerving loyalty to the king, the loyalists,
also countered these groups, often reporting on their activity and sometimes
taking action.
The advocates for colonial rights waged a political
war, often in secret, sometimes in the open. The committees developed protocols
for hiding their actions and intentions and identifying those supporting the Crown.
Political agitation morphed into armed insurrection (especially in
Massachusetts) with the outbreak of combat at Lexington and Concord and the
siege of British-occupied Boston.
The stakes were exceptionally high between the loyalists and the rebels, whose mutual disdain was far greater than the disdain between the patriots and the British. By then, both sides were using informants against each other. They developed techniques for identifying possible spies and for spying.
The covert and clandestine measures that evolved over a decade of
secret meetings, passing information covertly, and discreetly building up political
networks and organizations, would now be used in an open rebellion and then a
war for independence that stretched from the backcountry of the Appalachian
Mountains to the capitals of Europe.
Next, we will look at some of the tradecraft, which I
call spycraft, used during the time of the Yankee Doodle Spies.
