The Commissary's Other War

My official title was Commissary General of Prisoners. My official duty was to negotiate with the British for the exchange and welfare of American soldiers held in captivity. What I also did, from my home in Elizabethtown, was gather intelligence — and I did it because Elizabethtown was the place where two worlds touched.

The Arthur Kill is not a wide body of water. On a clear day, you can see the buildings on Staten Island from the New Jersey shore. Boats cross it regularly — fishermen, traders, ferry passengers, and, during the war, everyone with a reason to move between British-held territory and the patriot side. My work with prisoners gave me a legitimate reason to communicate with British officers. We exchanged letters. We arranged meetings under flags of truce. We negotiated the terms under which captured soldiers would be returned. Each of these contacts was also an opportunity to observe, to listen, and to learn.

I maintained a network of informants. Some were patriots living within British lines, passing information at great personal risk. Others were people whose loyalties were uncertain but whose willingness to share what they knew could be purchased or encouraged. The information came in fragments — a report of troop movements on Staten Island, the name of a ship arriving in New York Harbor, a conversation overheard at a British officer's dinner. I assembled the fragments into intelligence reports and forwarded them to General Washington's headquarters.

The work was dangerous. The British were not fools, and they understood that the traffic across the Arthur Kill carried more than prisoners and trade goods. They maintained their own intelligence operations, and several of my contacts were discovered and dealt with harshly. I spent my own money — a great deal of it — to fund operations, purchase information, and support the families of agents who had been captured or killed. Congress reimbursed me partially and late, which was Congress's way in all things during the war.

Elizabethtown was suited to this work because it was a border town. Everyone here had connections on both sides. The same families that produced patriot leaders also had Loyalist branches. The merchants who traded with New York before the war did not all sever those connections when the fighting started. The waterfront, the ferries, the small boats that crossed the Kill at all hours — all of this created an environment where information moved as freely as goods and people. I used what Elizabethtown offered, and what it offered was proximity to the enemy and a population that knew how to navigate between worlds.

I do not claim that the intelligence I gathered was decisive. Washington had many sources, and the war was won by soldiers on battlefields, not by spies in parlors. But the information that flowed through Elizabethtown contributed to the Continental command's understanding of British intentions at critical moments. And the work itself — the careful, patient, dangerous work of maintaining contacts, verifying reports, and transmitting intelligence — was as much a part of Elizabethtown's war effort as the militia patrols along the waterfront or the sermons James Caldwell preached from the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church.

The other part of my duty — the official part, the prisoners — was heartbreaking. American soldiers captured by the British were held in conditions of deliberate cruelty. The prison ships in New York Harbor were death traps. Men died of disease, starvation, and exposure, crowded below decks in filth. I spent months negotiating exchanges, begging Congress for funds to purchase food and medicine, and writing letters to British commanders protesting the treatment of prisoners. Some of those men I was able to bring home. Others I could not.

When the war ended and I was elected President of Congress, I presided over the ratification of the Treaty of Paris from a position earned not on a battlefield but in the murky space between the two sides, where information was currency and trust was the scarcest commodity of all. Elizabethtown gave me the geography to do that work. The Arthur Kill, that narrow, unremarkable waterway, was the seam along which the war was fought in ways that never made the history books.