YESTERDAY PART 1 INTRODUCED US TO John Honeyman, George Washington’s double agent who played a crucial role in turning the tide of the American Revolution. Today in Part 2 is the event that did so: Washington’s crossing of the Delaware.
Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, 1851. Image at the Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikipedia.
Crossing the Delaware. Wikipedia notes, “On the night of December 25–26, 1776, with 2,400 troops, Washington made the well known crossing of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania to New Jersey north of Trenton. The next morning, the Continental forces surprised the Hessians in a rout, giving the Americans a much-needed victory at the Battle of Trenton.”
“It was all over in less than an hour,” Leonard Falkner recounted in “A Spy for Washington,” “One hundred and six of the mercenaries had been killed or wounded. Some 900 captives were ferried across the river into Pennsylvania, many of them to be paraded through the streets of Philadelphia to show that metropolis of colonial America that the Revolution was still very much alive. Of the patriots, only two officers and two enlisted men had been wounded.”
Capture of the Hessians at Trenton by John Trumbull. Image from Wikipedia.
A Honeyman House Search. Drama continued for the Honeyman family, with Falkner giving details worthy of a spy flick: “Honeyman was not among the prisoners taken at Trenton…. But word of his arrest and escape from Washington’s encampment had reached his home village. A crowd of patriots surrounded the house when a rumor spread that he was hiding there. Honeyman’s eldest daughter, Jane, then ten, remembered that night in vivid detail for the rest of her life.”
Falkner continued, “She heard the crowd threaten to burn the house unless her father came out. Mrs. Honeyman, her children huddled behind her, denied he was there or that she knew where he was. The crowd closed in.”
“Mrs. Honeyman asked the name of the leader,” Falkner recounted. “A soldier came to the door. By the light of a candle Mrs. Honeyman let him read a letter she unfolded. It was dated ‘American Camp, New Jersey, Nov. A.D. 1776’ and ordered that ‘the wife and children of John Honeyman, the notorious Tory, now within the British lines, and probably acting the part of a spy’ were to be protected from harm.’ ”
“The soldier had seen Washington’s signature on other papers,” Falkner noted. “He decided it was authentic and persuaded the crowd to go home.…John Honeyman apparently played out his lonely and dangerous role of ‘Tory and British spy’ to the end of the war, for his family saw little if anything of him. But no details are known of his activities after the Battle of Trenton.”
But the Honeymans were safe. In true sequel-prompting fashion, the “probably acting” bit retained Honeyman’s double-agent cover.
Headstone. Image by Alice Martin LaRue in findagrave.
Falkner’s article cites, “John Honeyman lived to be 93 and became a prosperous farmer in the neighboring village of Lamington, where he moved from Griggstown ten years after the war. There were reports that the government rewarded him for his services, but the incomplete records of the time fail to support them.”
Image by Seva Zaslavsky from The Historical Marker Database.
As noted, this surely sounds like sequel territory. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024