Historians have long been fascinated by the intelligence efforts undertaken by enthusiastic amateurs. In more than a dozen books, researchers have tried to sort out who was involved and exactly what their roles were. The biggest mystery was the identity of Culper Junior, the chief spy in Manhattan in the later years of the war. Most of the spy ring operatives identified themselves or were identified after the war, but not Culper Junior. So when Long Island historian Morton Pennypacker revealed him to have been Robert Townsend of Oyster Bay in 1930 and then proved it with document analysis nine years later, it generated considerable attention.
Interest in the Patriots’ intelligence network soared when the AMC television series Turn: Washington’s Spies aired for four seasons between 2014 and 2017. Unfortunately, it took great liberties with the facts. These included having the ring created in 1776 rather than two years later, depicting Setauket as a neighborhood of stately stone homes rather than wooden structures, having the hamlet occupied by regular army redcoats rather than Loyalist troops, portraying Abraham Woodhull’s minister father as a Tory socializing with the occupiers rather than showing the reality of him being a Patriot sympathizer badly beaten by soldiers trying to find and arrest his son and, most ludicrously, having Woodhull and the happily married and older Anna Strong engage in a secret affair. But the series did get people reading and talking about espionage during the war.
As with Turn, Pennypacker and many of the authors who have written about the Culper Ring subsequently have strayed from the truth. Pennypacker’s books, which lack footnotes, transformed some anecdotal information and legends into fact. And later writers have often repeated that material without researching or even questioning it. And while they may have sought information from Long Island historians who have spent decades studying the subject, they didn’t always listen to them.
The most prominent writer in that category would be Fox News co-host Brian Kilmeade, who lives on Long Island. In preparing his 2013 bestseller with coauthor Don Yaeger and other writers, he convened gatherings of local historians from Culper-connected locations such as Setauket and Oyster Bay. They provided him with much information, some of which he ignored when it didn’t fit into his narrative. He also strayed into historical fiction by filling the book with invented dialogue without indicating that the words were never spoken by the participants.