22. The Unmasking of Benedict Arnold as a Traitor
To help fulfill his tasks, Robert Townsend got a gig as a columnist for a Loyalist newspaper and visited coffeehouses to hobnob with British officers. Many of them opened up to the spy, in the hope that they would thus see their name in print. That was how Townsend learned of a British plot to flood America with counterfeit dollars to wreck the economy. His warnings enabled the Continental Congress to avert disaster in the nick of time with a recall and replacement of all bills in circulation. An equally great coup resulted from the unwelcome, but as it turned out fortuitous, quartering of British officers in the Townsend family home in Oyster Bay.
One of Townsend’s sisters overheard an officer, John Andre – Benjamin Tallmadge’s British counterpart in charge of intelligence – mention the defection of a high-ranking 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.