Spycraft and the Road to Rebellion

 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.

French and Indian War

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?

Parliament

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 17^th century to a land of 2.500,000 people, with some frontier settlements over 100 miles westward.

The colonies stretched  as far as the Appalachians 

by mid 18th century

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.

American colonies were prosperous due to 

farming and trading 

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.

Philadelphia was the third city in the British Empire

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.

                                       Resistance was secretly organized but openly practiced

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.   

Committees met secretly

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.

America's future leaders learned their business while 

organizing resistance

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.

Sons of Liberty 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.

Insurrection became open rebellion when the British 

raided Lexington & Concord

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. 

Spying in a tavern

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.

Secret couriers pass information critical to orchestrating

 resistance and rebellion

Next, we will look at some of the tradecraft, which I call spycraft, used during the time of the Yankee Doodle Spies.