America’s First Traitor

On October 3, 1775, at his Cambridge headquarters, George Washington gathered his leading officers around a table and laid out a single sheet of paper covered in characters that looked like the husks of an insect’s trail. The talk was quiet and direct. A senior official stood under suspicion, a ciphered message had been opened, and the implications were heavier than the room’s timbered ceiling. After weighing the circumstances, the council resolved to adjourn until morning and bring the physician himself to face the paper. The next day would supply the answers. That night supplied the dread.

George Washington did not waste words on drama. When he wrote to John Hancock a few days later about a certain eminent Boston physician, he called it a painful, necessary duty. He had discovered a rot inside the ranks, a man trusted with lives and secrets who had been writing to the King’s general in Boston. The name was Dr. Benjamin Church, the first Director General of the Continental Army’s Medical Department, and the shock of his exposure rattled the camp before Boston like a cold wind off the bay.

Church looked the part of a patriot carved for the moment. Harvard trained, polished, eloquent, and long in the public eye, he had examined bodies after the Boston Massacre, thundered in anniversary orations, and served in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. He sat on the Committee of Safety and knew where the powder was supposed to be and where it was not. In July 1775, Congress raised him to the highest medical post in the army, a move that signaled perfect confidence in his loyalty. That aura of trust would make the fall that followed feel like betrayal twice over.

You could say the story begins with a love letter written in a curious hand. You could also say it begins with a useful fool and a woman Washington called an infamous hussey. In July 1775, Church composed a ciphered message to a British officer in Boston, Major Maurice Cane, and passed it through a woman described as his mistress. She was to carry it to Newport and get it aboard a royal sloop or deliver it to the customs collector for safe transit into the town held by General Gage. It did not go as planned. She lacked the chance to make contact and handed the strange paper to a Newport man, Godfrey Wainwood, who took one look, saw the cipher, and chose caution over obedience. Weeks later, a second letter from the woman pressed him for news, a sign that she had her own channel and feared the message had failed. Caution finally gave way to action, and Wainwood took the letter to Henry Ward, the secretary of Rhode Island, who sent him on to Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge. That is how a secret arrived in camp. That is also how the secret died.

Washington did not guess. He arrested the woman, and after a day of silence she confessed that the author was Dr. Benjamin Church. Church did not deny it. He admitted the letter was his, though he tried to soften the blow. He said it was not for a British officer at all, but for his brother in law, the Loyalist printer John Fleming, and that it was really a clever device to overawe the enemy with phantom strength and steer them toward reconciliation. You can almost hear the smooth voice of a man who had talked his way through every Boston drawing room. You can also hear the shove of reality as the army gathered to read the words he had really written.

The cipher was not sophisticated by the standards of later wars. The codebreakers needed patience, pencil, frequency counts, and courage in the face of tedium. Reverend Samuel West, once Church’s classmate, took the lead. Elbridge Gerry and Colonel Elisha Porter joined the work. They noted the common symbols, matched them to the common letters, and watched meaning bloom on the page. By October 2, the message lay open. Its contents were, in Washington’s phrase, much against the writer. Numbers, supplies, plans, and that particular tone traitors favor, a mix of confidence and pleading. There were nineteen or twenty thousand men in camp with Washington and Lee, said Church, and more coming. Provisions were plentiful. Powder mills stood up and running. Saltpeter was made in every colony. Congress looked united and resolute. A view toward independence grew more and more general. For the sake of a convulsed empire, solicit peace, repeal the Acts, or Britain is undone. And then the plea that became the title of this story, make use of every precaution or I perish. It would be hard to script a clearer case.

Washington convened a council of general officers who sat in judgment on October 4. They agreed unanimously that Church had carried on a criminal correspondence with the enemy. Then the new army collided with an old problem. The Articles of War did not tell them what to do with a man who had done this particular thing. There was no penalty fit to the moment. Washington wrote to Congress the next day and asked for guidance. A young revolution had met its first high case of espionage and discovered that its rulebook was fit only for a world that had ended. Congress answered within a month. On November 7, it amended the Articles of War, adding the death penalty for spies. Harsh, decisive, and a measure that announces a government has learned a lesson it would rather not learn again.

Church tried to win in writing what he could not win in fact. In a long letter to Washington he owned the foolishness and asked for mercy. He insisted his aim had been peace. He said the letter’s brag about numbers, discipline, and supplies was inflated on purpose to scare the British out of reckless attack while the army stood vulnerable. He called the hair raising travel narrative in his message a lying legend and argued that the end apologized for the means. He reminded Washington of his service and swore that he had never swerved from duty through fear or temptation. He begged the compassionate general to shield him from undeserved infamy. It reads like a performance written for a man famous for patience. It also reads like a plea made a week too late.

The leaders around Washington were not easily charmed. James Warren wrote John Adams that Church’s excuses sounded like a plea for indulgence rather than a proof of innocence. There were many circumstances, old and new, that told against him. That is the sober verdict of men who know how politics hides sin. While Church’s words danced, his acts sat on the page, black and legible. He had sent a secret report on the army to an enemy in the field. He had offered to establish a continuing channel by cipher through Newport. He had written with warm affection for a king the men in camp now swore to resist. There are times when plain facts do the work on their own.

The verdict ended his career. Massachusetts expelled him. Congress ordered him confined without pen, ink, or paper in a secure jail in Connecticut. It is a hard sentence for a writer and a physician, the twin trades of a man who lived on both words and skill. Illness softened the confinement for a time. By 1778 he appeared on the banishment list and sailed for the West Indies, a man exiled by his neighbors and mistrusted by the crown he had tried to serve. The ship vanished. No one in Boston or London received him. The sea kept its secret. There is a blunt justice in that last fact.

If you widen the frame a little, you see why his letter stung as sharply as it did. The Continental Army in the autumn of 1775 lived in a world of short rations and long promises. Washington’s correspondence from the siege records a shortage of powder so severe that he feared the army’s existence. He pleaded for tents, clothing, blankets, and money. He complained that the militia came and went like weather and that discipline could not hold in the face of expiring enlistments. A new army was trying to be born, and it had to learn to live in the open air of scarcity while it set its own bones. Inside that strain, a senior official who told the enemy about strength, powder, and plans did more than lie. He pried at an open wound.

At the same moment, the Americans tried the sea and liked it. Captures like the brigantine Dolphin at Cape Ann and the schooner Industry at Marblehead brought cattle, sheep, oatmeal, turtle, and even pineapples into Patriot hands. The General Court began to dream of armed vessels and a more regular way to hurt the enemy’s belly. It is a small window into a war that was not yet a navy’s war, yet the appetite was there. The control of supply lines is always a teacher. When you watch your neighbors eat, you learn fast.

Look north and you see the other great gamble of that season. Intercepted British correspondence said that Governor Carleton hesitated to command a militia that might not obey. Recruiters scratched up little beyond raggamuffins. The Canadians had learned a new word, liberty, and it traveled faster than the king’s orders. Meanwhile Benedict Arnold and his detachment labored up the Kennebec, sixty miles into the wilderness by late September, bent on making a hole in the British defense where the seams showed. If you read Church’s report in that light, his talk of an army raised in the middle provinces to seize Canada no longer looks like a boast. It looks like a leak.

People ask why he did it. They always do. The first answer is the one he offered. He claimed he sought accommodation. He said he meant to scare the British with exaggerated numbers and supplies. He said he kept up an appearance of distress to fool his Loyalist brother in law and milk him for information that he could use for the public advantage. Washington and his circle looked at that story and saw an old game. It is the spy’s oldest mask, the double heart that beats for both sides and serves only one. The second answer grew clearer with time. Scholars opened General Gage’s files in the twentieth century and found earlier letters that showed Church had been at this work before the intercepted cipher. It was not a one off. It was a practice. It is an ugly thing to find in the papers of a celebrated physician. It is also a comfort of a sort, because it scrapes the varnish off a portrait and leaves you with wood and nails.

The legal consequences, once Congress corrected the gap in the Articles of War, were swift for future cases. Death for espionage after November 7 announced a harder era. Yet Washington’s treatment of Church before that change shows the tone that often marks the early Revolution. He moved carefully, gathered proof, confronted the man, and kept the forms of justice even when his patience was tried by scarcity, politics, and time. It is a portrait of leadership under strain, not flashy, not vengeful, and not blind to the lesson that rules must catch up to realities. Washington’s letter to Hancock is not a bill of rage. It reads like a man who does not like the job and does it anyway. That is what soldiers notice. That is also what politicians remember.

Church’s defenders have always tried to save a fragment of his reputation by clinging to ambiguity. They frame him as a man caught between worlds, a physician inclined to moderate the fever rather than bleed the patient. The trouble is that his own words undermine the case. The ciphered report calls his intelligence sacredly true, then serves up a buffet of facts and estimates the enemy would have found priceless. He closes with a request for a regular channel and a set of precautions that tell you he knows exactly what he is doing. He signs the real confession in the line do not get me killed. It is not the voice of a man playing an elaborate prank to spare lives. It is the voice of a man who knows which rope is tied to his neck.

There is a human story inside the political one. Church rose by talent and talk. Boston honored him. Warren trusted him. The army needed him. A man like that starts to believe he can walk both sides of a line. He thinks he is so clever that he will be the one to slip in and out of Boston, to whisper his news to the right ear, to have the King’s men smile at his turn of phrase and the committee smile at his strict efficiency. He thinks he is essential. The war teaches a different lesson. No one is essential. You can be replaced with a quieter, less treacherous person who still gets the medicine where it needs to go.

There is also a tactical lesson that ought to make every modern commander nod. The Church affair shows why internal security and counterintelligence are not luxuries for mature states alone. They are the fence you build while you are still hammering the house together. Washington had to improvise a codebreaking cell with a clergyman and a future vice president because that is who was at hand. He had to convene a council of generals to judge crimes the Articles had not imagined because that is what the emergency demanded. He had to ask Congress for a penalty because only Congress could give one that would deter the next try. Improvisation is the mother tongue of revolutions. The better ones translate it into durable law as fast as they can.

The wider war kept moving while this drama unfolded. Riflemen still tramped into camp. Tents still wore thin. The General Court still talked about fitting out armed vessels. The Kennebec still rushed under Arnold’s boats. The British still tried to feed a garrison by sea. All of that continues in the song of 1775, a season of learning by friction. Church’s letter is a dissonant note inside that song, a reminder that betrayal is not an exotic vice. It is ordinary, practical, and often ambitious. It comes wearing good clothes and a university education. It carries a stethoscope and a little bottle of cipher. It asks for patience and mercy when the light finds it out. And it writes to the enemy that the Americans are many, brave, and supplied. That line alone earned him the cold familiarity of his comrades’ anger.

The final image of Church is fitting for a man who tried to live in the fog. He vanishes. The ship for the West Indies disappears, and with it the chance to make some courtroom speech that might have kept his legend alive. Families of Loyalists later received pensions. Researchers found the earlier letters in Gage’s files and closed the case in the way scholars close cases, with footnotes that weigh more than pleas. History has its own sort of mercy. It does not erase. It files. It leaves you in the drawer you chose.

If you want to measure the temperature of the Revolution at that moment, read the line in Church’s letter about a view toward independence growing more general. That is the heat he felt on his face as he wrote. He was telling the enemy that the fever was rising and that reconciliation had a narrow window. He tried to plant the seeds of fear and appeasement in the British mind. He also handed them a sketch of the American camp. Once you draw the map, you do not get to pick the route the enemy takes. That is why Washington moved so carefully and so firmly. That is why Congress sharpened the law. That is why every army since has watched the inside of its own tent as closely as the horizon.

There is a hard little moral at the end of this. Trust is not sentiment. It is an asset that lives on audit and proof. The movement that made a nation learned this while sleeping in borrowed blankets. The first Surgeon General of the Continental Army would stand in a crowded room and declare that he never swerved from duty through fear or temptation. The evidence says otherwise. The council believed the evidence. Congress rewrote the rules. The army endured. The siege tightened. The war moved on. The records remained, and with them a single sentence that ought to end every argument about his intent. Write me largely in cipher by the way of Newport. Use every precaution or I perish. A man does not ask for a secure channel to continue a noble deception. A man asks for a secure channel because he intends to use it. Skepticism is a virtue when it serves the truth. In this case, it serves the truth very well.

A final word for those who prefer the tidy arc. There is none. Espionage seldom gives us courtroom resolution or lyrical regret. It mostly leaves a paper trail and a hole where a man once stood, and it leaves the people he fooled a little more guarded than before. The Church affair did something useful, however brutal. It forced a revolution to think like a state, to write laws for the shadows, and to punish betrayal without weakening the justice that makes punishment legitimate. Washington’s letter to Hancock frames it without flourish. Painful, necessary. That is how adults talk when they do the ugly work that keeps a cause alive.

For readers who want the ledger as well as the story, the record is clear. The ciphered letter was intercepted, carried to Cambridge, and cracked. The contents mapped the American camp and the American mind in the summer of 1775. The council declared the correspondence criminal. Congress amended the Articles of War and ordered confinement. Later research found earlier letters and removed the last fig leaf from Church’s defense. The man who tried to straddle both sides fell into the sea, and the army he betrayed learned to guard its heart.

That is the story as the documents tell it. Not tidy. True enough to make you wince. And useful, because every generation that builds anything worth defending will face its own Dr. Church. The lesson is to keep your eyes open, your rules clear, and your mercy on a leash until you have the facts. The men at Cambridge did that much. The rest of us can at least try.