This blog post might be better titled "Back to the Future." Not because it is about the iconic 1980s time travel film and its franchise, but because we are returning to the original focus of this blog and the Yankee Doodle Spies book series: espionage.
The American Revolution was, for many years, a hidden conflict. From shortly after the 1763 Treaty of Paris ended the French and Indian War, a slow-burning fuse of resentment, misunderstandings, and poorly thought-out policies widened the gap between the North American English settlers and their counterparts back home. Disputes over taxation, governance, Indian relations, western expansion, and trade began to simmer.
The governance issue, in some ways, reflected a mirror image of the Whig–Tory divide in Britain, but it was mostly a distinctly American challenge. What should be the relationship between a home country and its colonized overseas territories as those territories grow and become prosperous polities in their own right?
By 1775, Great Britain's population was estimated at around 8,000,000 people. But the American colonies had grown from a handful of settlements along 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 matched that of any European country. Agriculture was dominant, but tradesmen and merchants thrived as maritime trade expanded between the colonies, the West Indies, and some European nations.
The cities of Newport, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston were growing in size, wealth, and culture. Philadelphia was the third largest city in the British colonies after London and Edinburgh. The great distances between these centers made uniting around shared ideas and actions difficult.
A series of British policies starting in the 1760s began to irritate many people. Initially, political unrest grew among the educated and business classes, but with each attempt to suppress it, the unrest started spreading to the rest of the population. As political turmoil increased, political organizations also emerged.
Political leaders across the colonies secretly formed committees to avoid action by the royal authorities and their Loyalist supporters. These groups, which operated at local, county, and colony levels, conveyed political ideas and coordinated activities within and among the colonies.
By 1775, most colonies had Committees of Correspondence (focused on communication and propaganda), Committees of Safety (for local defense and militia), and other committees for different purposes. Many future leaders of the American Revolution gained experience by participating in these committees, which laid the groundwork for American governance.
As the Royal Governors increased enforcement of British policies on the colonies, the committees learned to operate covertly and sometimes secretly. Groups like the Sons of Liberty or The Green Mountain Boys formed. But those with unwavering loyalty to the king, the loyalists, also countered these groups, often reporting on their activities and sometimes taking action.
The advocates for colonial rights waged a political war, often secretly and sometimes openly. The committees created protocols to conceal their actions and intentions and to identify those supporting the Crown. Political agitation evolved into armed rebellion, especially in Massachusetts, with the outbreak of fighting at Lexington and Concord and the siege of British-occupied Boston.
The stakes were extremely high between the loyalists and the rebels, whose mutual disdain far exceeded the disdain between the patriots and the British. By that point, both sides were employing informants against each other. They developed methods for spotting potential spies and for conducting espionage.
The secret and stealthy measures developed over a decade of underground meetings, passing information quietly, and discreetly building 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'll examine some of the tradecraft, which I call spycraft, used during the time of the Yankee Doodle Spies.
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