Female Spies of the American Revolution

by Beth Boulden Moore

While Cecil County didn’t have any famous female spies (that we know of!) the county certainly benefited from their work. During the Revolutionary War, both the British and the Continental Armies used spies. Women were often able to access sensitive areas within enemy camps without raising suspicion due to their perceived harmlessness as household workers or family members. Female spies conducted some of the most successful operations of the war.

Nancy Morgan Hart “Big Red”

1735 – 1830 North Carolina

While her husband fought in the war, Nancy Morgan Hart took care of her household and children alone on the Georgian frontier. Her domestic responsibilities didn’t stop her, however, from sneaking away to spy on behalf of the Patriots.

She was said to be over six feet tall, with a mane of red hair and smallpox scars that matched her tough-as-nails personality. She came to be described as a sharpshooter, skilled hunter, and an expert farmwife who could bake bread on the back of a hoe.
One of her spy tactics was to dress like a crazy man and enter Loyalist camps, gathering intelligence while there.
Once, during the war, Nancy was cooking lye soap in her cabin when her daughter discovered a spy looking through a crack in the wall. Hart threw a ladle of the boiling soap into the spy’s eyes, went outside and tied him up, and turned him over to the local Patriot militia.

Patience Lovell Wright

1725 – 1780

Born in New York, then moved to Philadelphia with her husband at age 16

Patience was a sculptor who made wax and bread dough sculptures of her children. Following the death of her husband, she and her sister started a business sculpting people for money. In 1771, fire destroyed her sculptures and she decided to move to London. She was acquainted with Benjamin Franklin’s sister and through her was introduced to London society. Wright was a strong supporter of the Patriot cause, even though she was living in Great Britain. Wright associated with those in the inner circles of King George III and members of Parliament. She was able to overhear valuable information in social situations.

She corresponded with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, sharing her information. One of her favorite ways to send messages was to place written messages inside of her sculptures. She also wrote letters to John Dickinson, describing the British Army’s preparations in England.

Anna Smith Strong
1740 – 1812

New York
The Culper Spy Ring

Anna Smith Strong of Setauket, New York was an American Patriot. She was one of the few female spies of the Culper Spy Ring during the Revolutionary War.
Anna Strong and her husband, Selah, lived in Anna’s Loyalist family home on the Long Island Sound. They had 10 children. Selah was a captain in the New York militia. He was captured as a suspected spy and later paroled through the efforts of Anna’s Tory relatives. Upon his release, he spent the rest of the war in Connecticut with the family’s younger children while Anna stayed on Long Island.
Anna Strong’s role in the ring was to relay signals to a courier who ran a whaleboat across Long Island Sound on smuggling and military missions. She did this by hanging a black petticoat on her clothesline at Strong Point in Setauket, which was easily visible from a boat in the Sound, and also by fellow spy Abraham Woodhull from his nearby farm.
She would add a number of handkerchiefs for one of six coves, where the courier, Caleb Brewster, would bring his boat and Woodhull would meet him.
Brewster would then take his boat across the Long Island Sound where couriers would take the message to Benjamin Tallmadge (leader of the Culper Ring). Tallmadge would then pass the message to George Washington’s headquarters in New Jersey.

Lydia Barrington Darragh

1729 (Dublin, Ireland) – 1789 (Philadelphia, PA)

Quaker Spy

Lydia Barrington Darragh was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1729. She was married to family tutor William Darragh in 1753 at Friends’ Meeting House in Dublin. They had nine children, four of whom died in infancy.

Ann, their daughter, described her mother as being “as of fair complexion, light hair, blue eyes, very delicate in appearance, and extremely neat; conforming in her dress to the rules of the Society of Friends”. Other sources describe her as “a small weakly woman”.

In 1777, Lydia was about 48 or 49 years old. William was about 56 years old. Their children were aged from 9 years old to 22 years old. The oldest, Charles, was in the American army. They resided in a frame building known as the Loxley House on Second Street in Philadelphia.

Almost directly across the street stood the home of American General Cadwalader. It had been taken over by the British. General Howe used this house as his headquarters.

The Darraghs were able to observe the comings and goings of the British from across the street. William would take this information and write it in shorthand or secret code on small slips of paper. Lydia would then hide the papers under the covers of cloth covered buttons.

The buttons were covered with cloth that matched her son, 14-year-old John’s, coat. John would then walk to the American camp where his brother Charles was stationed. Charles deciphered the information and delivered the messages to George Washington.

The British also often commandeered the use of a large room in the house. The house may have been a tavern at one time, so this room was larger than the rest of the rooms in the house. The youngest Darragh children had been sent to live with family members who lived in the country.

On December 2, 1777 an officer came to the door and told Lydia to have all her family in bed at an early hour. The British wished to use the large room that night free from interruption. Lydia did as she was told, and when all were quiet, she lay down in bed as well.

She could not sleep, and silently walked downstairs to a closet/butler’s pantry next to the room. She overheard the British discussing the troops marching out on the evening of December 4. She returned to bed, and when an officer knocked to wake her up so she could lock up the house after the British left, she didn’t answer him until his third try.

The next day, she made a plan. She told her husband that she was going to Frankford Mill to purchase flour the next morning. Lydia walked and walked and came near the American camp. She saw an American officer, Colonel Thomas Craig, whom she knew. She told Col. Craig the important information she knew and immediately rode with it to headquarters. Before he left, he took her to a nearby house and directed a female there to give her some food.

Lydia then set off for home, but made a stop at the Rising Sun Tavern. She spotted Colonel Elias Boudinot, manager of the Intelligence of the Army, and handed him a “dirty old needlebook”.

In Buodinot’s journal, he says this, “After dinner a little poor looking insignificant old woman came in and put into my hands a dirty old needlebook with various small pockets in it. Upon opening it I could not find anything until I got to the last pocket, where I found a piece of paper rolled up in the form of a pipe shank – on unrolling it I found information that General Howe was coming out the next morning with 5,000 men, 13 pieces of cannon, baggage wagons, and 11 boats on wagon wheels.” Buodinot immediately rode to headquarters with this information.

The next day, at dusk, a British soldier knocked at the door. He took her into the meeting room the British had occupied and questioned her. He began questioning her, asking if any of her family had been awake the night before. She told him that her family had been in bed and asleep.
Then he said, “I need not ask you, for we had great difficulty in waking you to fasten the door after us. But one thing is certain, the enemy had notice of our coming, were prepared for us, and we marched back like a parcel of damned fools. The walls must have ears.”

After the War

Lydia was a Quaker and was disowned by Philadelphia Monthly Meeting for her involvement with the Revolutionary army during the American Revolution. She joined a group of separated Quakers known as the Free Quakers. Lydia, William, and their son Charles were expelled from the Quaker Meeting for participating in actions of a “war-like” nature and she for poor attendance.

Lydia and William were permitted to be buried in a Quaker cemetery at Friends’ Burial Ground at 4th and Arch Streets in Philadelphia. There is no longer a burial ground there. When a new meeting house was built in 1804, the burial ground was paved over. Notes from that event state that “it was necessary to invade the domain of the dead” probably meaning the remains were not moved before construction. Even Arch Street itself was built over part of the burial ground and as early as 1850 trench diggers unearthed a skull and bones.

Lydia’s son, John, moved to New Castle, DE as an adult.