"Spies, Patriots, and Traitors" Topic

"VETERAN OF MORE THAN 30 YEARS in the CIA, Kenneth A. Daigler writes like a case officer reporting from a time machine that took him back to the American Revolution. There he finds Nathan Hale, America's first martyred spy, whose statue stands outside CIA headquarters today. After noting that Hale was a Yale graduate, like many of the agency's early operatives, Daigler analyzes what happened after General George Washington sent Hale out to spy on the British. "In a professionally planned mission," Daigler writes, "all aspects of Hale's cover plan, collection requirements, methods of recording his information, and detailed escape plan would have been thoroughly reviewed with him." None of this CIA-style preparation occurred, and so Hale was captured and hanged because he had been doomed by "a botched mission."

Most Americans see the revolution as a war for independence, but Daigler, who was a senior case officer in the CIA's Clandestine Service, uses the lexicon of a modern intelligence officer to describe the revolution as "an insurgency against an established government by a force that, at best, had the active support of only about a third of the population." Spies, Patriots, and Traitors describes the espionage war within that insurgency with a cool detachment. Daigler tells the story without the suspenseful narratives usually found in nonfiction accounts of espionage. Instead, he is a meticulous researcher, making good use of the relatively scarce documents on Revolutionary War espionage and combining that with his knowledge of modern espionage…"
Full review here
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Amicalement
Armand

Too bad he falls for the old 1/3-1/3-1/3 nonsense. I know it's from a John Adams quote, but he happened to be talking about the French Revolution at the time. Further, in most of the colonies, the legitimate government (i.e., that established by the Colonial Charter) was in favor of the "insurgency".

The Charters were properly and legally seen as contractual arrangements (the "social contract" so beloved of the Enlightenment philosophers was not a new idea in English constitutional history – not by some seven centuries or more). The King was the party in breach of the contracts, and Parliament had no standing whatever.

Yes, if it was really 1/3 for revolution and 1/3 for the crown, you would think 30,000 or so regular troops would tip the balance. It would seem the Tories were way outnumbered. Also, wherever the regulars put their boots on the ground they generated unrest among the locals. That and the Whigs put the Tories down without mercy.

"Blackwell's Encyclopedia of the American Revolution" suggests a Rebel/Loyalist/Neutral split of 35:25:40, but sadly doesn't give a source – possibly just the editorial team's own calculations (a friend who runs the QR re-enactment group in the UK estimated some 40,000 Loyalists operating as privateers out of NYC alone by the last year or two of the war).

Despite the numbers of troops deployed by the Crown, the Tories had two inherent problems – one was the natural inertia of the law-abiding, who tend to presume that the authorities will deal with unrest; the other was the "flight to the cities" to escape the attacks on anyone who spoke out for the King, leaving the Rebels in control of everything outside of the city precincts.

the "flight to the cities"

And only to the cities under Crown control, like New York. Most of the other cities remained under Whig control. The British lost control of most of the 13 colonies from the start, holding only Boston until it was evacuated. Then Howe had to invade a nation that had been de facto independent since 1775.

I've done a fair amount of reading on the subject and I don't think those numbers are too far out of whack. You had supporters of the Crown, supporters of the revolution, and people who just wanted to be left alone.

This is a good book:

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