Five years before Benedict Arnold tried to sell the fort at West Point to the enemy and a year before America declared its independence, a Boston physician with impeccable professional and patriotic credentials committed treason by divulging sensitive information to the British army.
A secret group of ardent patriots, plotting a revolution in taverns such as the Salutation and the Green Dragon, were notified they had a spy in their midst. But who? Certainly it couldnt be Sam Adams, John Adams or John Hancock, the soul, mind and bank of the rebellion; not Paul Revere, the “midnight rider”; and certainly not Dr. Benjamin Church Jr., the surgeon general of the American Army, the poet who wrote pro-rebellion verse, the hardened patriot who proudly showed off his bloodstained socks after the Battle of Lexington.
Dr. Church, “witty, high strung and bombastic,” according to Esther Forbes in her 1942 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography about Paul Revere, was simply an odd duck. In retrospect, he should have been identified quickly as the spy. He consorted with a British officer, and in 1775, just as the war began, he had a sudden increase in wealth, spending lavishly on a house and a mistress.
Whether he was ever confronted about the money is lost to history. But as for his association with a British officer, he dismissed it as an attempt to obtain information. With that simple explanation, the man Forbes described as “the noisiest patriot in Boston” avoided detection for several months.
A spy is always an instant away from being caught. Every activity, every letter, every communication is like a card precariously placed on top of an already unsteady house of cards that has no foundation. It all came tumbling down in July or August 1775, when Church misplayed the use-the-mistress-to-pass-a-letter-to-the-enemy card.
Unable to get a ciphered note to the British, the desperate doctor directed his mistress to ask one of her friends to forward the note. Deeply perplexed by this unusual request, the friend, a Newport, R.I., baker named Godfrey Wenwood, put the note aside, not sure what to do.
Weeks passed. Dr. Church somehow learned that the letter had not been delivered. It might have been tossed in the dustbin of unrecorded history except that the worried spy, acting like the amateur he was, seemingly lost his mind and directed his mistress to inquire with the baker again. Add poor judgment to the list of crimes and indiscretions committed by the conspiratorial doctor and his pesky girlfriend. Like leaven to flour, this additional ingredient to the mix made Wenwoods suspicions rise. The good baker passed the note to the American Army, where the doctor quickly became toast.
Gen. George Washington initiated an investigation. When asked about the letter, the mistress hemmed and hawed, claimed to know nothing. Perhaps the threat of the gallows made her give up Dr. Church.
When interviewed, the not-so-good doctor simply lied. Yes, he wrote the letter to the British and yes, he gave it to his mistress to pass on. But no, the cipher contained nothing nefarious; it was simply an innocuous code that Church, for unexplained reasons, didnt want to share with Washington. Before anyone went to the gallows, Washington had to get the letter deciphered. That assignment went to the Rev. Samuel West, who later served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Working independently as a second team were Elisha Porter of the Massachusetts militia and Elbridge Gerry, future vice president of the United States under President James Madison. The cipher must have been astonishingly elementary. Both teams quickly broke it and came to the same results. The note divulged American troop strengths, plans and movements and ended with the warning: “Make use of every precaution or I perish.”
Confronted with this incontrovertible evidence, the physician lied again. The letter, which in fact had overestimated troop strength and arms, was designed to intentionally mislead the British, Church said.
Something smelled in the hamlet of Boston, and the traitorous skunk was brought to trial before a packed and cynical throng. Future first lady Abigail Adams summed up the public consensus: “You may as well hope to bind up a hungry tiger with a cobweb as to hold such debauched patriots in the visionary chains of decency.”
Although found guilty of ’holding criminal correspondence with the enemy, Church could not be executed. Incredibly, that penalty for treason was not in effect at the time. The doctor spent a few years in jail before eventually being placed on a ship bound for the West Indies, exiled forever.
Nothing was ever heard again of the ship or Church.
In “The Codebreakers,” David Kahn succinctly summed up Churchs fate: “The first American to have lost his liberty as a result of cryptanalysis evidently lost his life because of it as well.”
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