The Spies Who Saved the American Revolution
Another great success resulted from the unwelcome, but as it turned out fortuitous, quartering of British officers in the Townsend family home in Oyster Bay. One of Robert Townsend’s sisters overheard an officer, John Andre – Benjamin Tallmadge’s British counterpart in charge of intelligence – mention the defection of a prominent American hero. She passed that on to her brother, and from there it worked its way through the Culper Ring to Tallmadge. It eventually contributed to the discovery that Patriot hero General Benedict Arnold was a traitor. It came in the nick of the time, in the late stages of a plot to betray the important American fortifications at West Point to the British. Andre was arrested in civilian clothes with incriminating documents and hanged as a spy, while Arnold fled to the British.
Townsend also discovered that the British knew that the French, who had joined the war on America’s side, were about to send a fleet to land soldiers in Rhode Island. The powerful British Royal Navy planned to intercept and capture or sink the French at the sea before they disembarked their troops. Armed with Townsend’s report, George Washington fed the British false information about a nonexistent plan to attack New York City. As a result, the British stayed put in New York and prepared to defend it against an attack that never came, while the French safely landed their forces in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1780. That link up between French and American armies ultimately doomed the British. The allied Franco-American forces won the war in 1781, when they trapped a British army in Yorktown, Virginia, and forced its surrender.