Robert Townsend (25 November 1753 – 7 March 1838) was a member of the Culper Ring in New York City. His first encounter with Abraham Woodhull was on bad terms, as he destroyed some of Woodhull's messages written on hard-boiled eggs while Woodhull was staying in his boarding house in York City. However, John Graves Simcoe's quartering in his house resulted in the harassment of his family, so he went on to become a spy for the Continental Army, being very secretive; not even George Washington knew his true identity.
Biography[]
Robert Townsend was born on 25 November 1753, the third of eight children born into a family of Quakers in Oyster Bay, New York. Townsend worked with soldiers in the "Holy Ground" red light district of New York while apprenticing with Templeton & Stewart, a merchant firm. When the American Revolutionary War broke out, Townsend shirked from war, as his Quaker beliefs led him to agreeing with pacifism. In October 1776, when the spy Abraham Woodhull stayed at Townsend's tavern - which was frequented by British Army troops - Townsend was asked by him to make a dozen hard-boiled eggs for him each day. Eventually, Townsend noticed that he was writing messages in the eggs using invisible ink, and Townsend stole the two brown hard-boiled eggs (brown eggs signified eggs with messages) from Woodhull's basket as he added bread to it before Woodhull left the boarding house. Only just before Woodhull was about to leave New York did Woodhull realize that his eggs had been stolen, and he returned to the tavern. Townsend told him that he had warned Woodhull to mind his porridge and not nose around, and he told him that he could have given the eggs to the British officers; Townsend told him not to visit him again.
However, things changed when Captain John Graves Simcoe of the Queen's Rangers was stationed in Oyster Bay in the winter of 1778, and on 19 November 1778 the British tore down his father's prized apple orchard before forcing the Townsends to swear loyalty oaths to King George III of Britain or go to jail. Townsend grew tired of his family's harassment at the hands of the British, and he agreed to join Woodhull's "Culper Ring" in June 1779. While Townsend spied on the British in New York, Woodhull spied on the British in Long Island, and Townsend gave valuable information to General George Washington and the Continental Army under the alias of "Samuel Culper, Jr.". Townsend discovered a 1780 counterfeiting plot by the British to devalue Continental currency, warned his superiors of loyalist spies in New York, gave the British disinformation that the French Navy of the Comte d'Estaing was going to attack Long Island instead of Newport, Rhode Island, and that a fleet of British ships was headed to Cape Fundy to transport loyalist refugees there. Having aroused suspicion, the Culper Ring became less significant in the last years of the war, and Townsend died at the age of 84 in 1838.